October 31, 2002

by James Darcy
PUBLIC AFFAIRS

The presence of a 200-foot airship around the station the past two weeks has spawned several odd rumors here and in the community, not least of which is that NAVAIR planned to use the aircraft to hunt the snipers who terrorized the region for much of the past month.

The rumor, it turns out, is true. The airship was brought here on Oct. 15 for several days of familiarization rides in conjunction with an exploratory project that NAVAIR is managing for the Office of Naval Research. The aircraft was held over, however, when one NAVAIR employee saw an opportunity to help out with the sniper search and prove a few concepts for the Navy along the way.

Rear Adm. Tim Heely, NAWCAD commander, takes a turn piloting the Skyship 600 blimp as it approaches Point Patience on the Patuxent River, just north of the Thomas Johnson Bridge to Solomons. At the left is Capt. Brent Van Beest of Airship Management Services, the company that owns and operates a fleet of airships that includes the Fuji film blimp often seen at major sports events. Heely is one of dozens of NAS Pax River employees who have taken familiarization rides in the airship in the past two weeks.

"Airships are ideal surveillance platforms," said Steve Huett, NAVAIR's program manager for an ONR initiative called Littoral Airborne Sensor Hyperspectral Airship. The goal of the LASH Airship program is to demonstrate the utility of airships for maritime surveillance missions, particularly with next-generation sensor systems. The model Huett brought here is an Airship 600 owned and operated by Airship Management Services, Inc., under contract to ONR. When it arrived, it had no sensors or military equipment aboard. When the Department of Defense began authorizing use of DoD surveillance aircraft in the sniper hunt, however, Huett quickly formed a plan for modifying the airship to suit the same purpose. He received permission on Oct. 18, and within a few days teams from NAVAIR, ONR, AMS and the Naval Research Lab had equipped the airship with a long-range camera, navigation and communication systems, and a counter-sniper sensor package.

Though the Oct. 24 arrest of sniper suspects John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo precluded the need, the modified version of the airship was ready and waiting to be called into action the next time officials had a lead on the killers' whereabouts.

"It goes to show you when the chips are down how fast we can pull together and respond," Huett said of the conversion effort. Inside and out of NAVAIR, Huett found people falling all over themselves to help.

The high magnification camera, with infrared and laser tracking capabilities, was contributed for free by manufacturer Wescam.

"We were reading street signs with it from a couple miles away," Huett said.

The counter-sniper sensor system, known as VIPER, was contributed by NRL, which sent an installation team down to an AMS facility in Elizabeth City, N.C., where the installations were performed. Details of the system are classified, said NRL spokesman Dick Thompson.

For communications and navigation, Huett turned to the Air Vehicle Design and Integration division at NAVAIR Pax River. Design engineers Steve Brown and Kent Broecker surveyed the airship, then started calling on anyone they thought could contribute useful gear.

"They told us they needed a portable, multi-band radio system that would communicate with the whole range of law enforcement," said Alvin Frazier, an electronics technician with the Test and Evaluation Department's Communications, Data Links and Antenna Branch. Frazier supplied them with a suitcase system built around an ARC-210 aircraft radio, which was pulled from an HX-21 helicopter undergoing maintenance and inspection.

Brown and Broecker had a digital moving map system that the airship pilot could strap on like a military knee board, but they had no way to mount its GPS antenna to the outside of the airship. Brown made a late-day trip to the sheet metal shop for Titan Systems Corp. in Lexington Park, and sketched out what he needed on a chalkboard. They fabricated the part overnight and at no charge. The parts needed airworthiness modifications the next day, so Brown carried them to the aircraft sheet metal shop at Test Article Preparation, where the project went to the top of the priority list.

When all the pieces were ready, Brown and Broecker traveled to Elizabeth City to do the installation work.

"We've done things in a fast manner before, but it was amazing how many people on the base pitched in and the degree of cooperation we had, from anybody that we asked for anything," Brown said.

When the sniper suspects were captured before the airship was called into action, Huett began looking for other uses for the reconfigured aircraft. Before the retrofits were removed, he approached the Marine Corps about providing security coverage for last weekend's Marine Corps Marathon in Virginia and Washington, D.C. Although airspace restrictions over parts of the course prevented the airship from flying directly overhead, Marine Corps force protection officials did ride on the airship during the marathon, Huett said, and had the ship at their disposal.

Mobilizing for the counter-sniper and force protection missions illustrated many of the reasons that the Navy has a renewed interest in airships as maritime surveillance platforms.

Airships are highly customizable and can carry almost any type of airborne sensor equipment, from long-range air-to-air radar to the hyperspectral cameras that are the focus of LASH Airship, Huett said. Hyperspectral sensors can "see" colors so accurately that they can detect submerged submarines or camouflaged objects not visible by other means.

Chief among an airship's virtues is its ability to loiter. On a mission where a helicopter could hover above a location for a couple hours, an airship might be able to spend a couple of days, Huett said. Operating costs per flight hour run about one third that of heavier-than-air fixed wing aircraft, he added, due in part to much lower fuel consumption.

Though no one is advocating airships be used as combat aircraft, they are surprisingly durable, Huett said. Because the helium in the envelope, or balloon portion of the airship, is not highly pressurized, gunshots won't "pop" an airship; they can actually remain buoyant for hours after suffering such a puncture. Additionally, in spite of their tremendous size, airships have relatively low infrared and radar cross sections, he said. The envelope portion of a non-rigid airship is mostly fabric, and is not radar reflective.

Airships are also extremely stable and produce relatively little noise or vibration, he said, providing ideal operating conditions for both sensors and their operators. Potential applications for airships equipped with hyperspectral sensors include anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures work, and even certifying that fleet training areas are free of whales prior to operations.

"One of the purposes of the demonstrations [at NAVAIR Pax River] was to show today's leadership that this relatively old technology could be married with new technology to meet today's needs and today's threats," said Naval Reserve Capt. Bill Armstrong, vice president for communications for AMS. The company has long promoted the security and surveillance possibilities for its airships. During the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta police used a specially equipped AMS airship to watch over the games from start to finish.

In May, AMS donated the services of their well-known Fuji Film USA airship-essentially the sistership to the Airship 600 now here ? as a force protection asset during the Navy's Fleet Week 2002 in New York City. During the Parade of Ships into New York harbor, a camera operator on the blimp located and tracked a small private airplane that was flying toward the ships and not responding to air traffic control calls, Armstrong said. Live footage was beamed to the security command center on the ground while Navy and police helicopters were vectored in and turned the aircraft away.

Such episodes speak to the range of potential applications for airships, Armstrong said. "The limits are only the limits of the imagination."

The Airship 600 will be here at least through the end of the week, as Huett continues to arrange familiarization rides for NAVAIR leaders and technicians. Though the Navy retired its last airships in 1962, they may ultimately find a place alongside the Joint Strike Fighter and Super Hornet as the latest and greatest in naval aviation.