Military Has High Hopes For New Eye in the Sky
By Steve Vogel
A blue-and-white blimp floated a thousand feet above farms and fields, its sophisticated sensors scanning the ground, on the hunt for a mock terrorist camp.
Nothing of the sort was visible. Inside the airship's gondola, a monitor instead showed a close-up view of a chestnut horse munching hay about a mile away, near Manassas.
Long associated with providing television shots at football games and selling tires, blimps could play a key role in homeland security, say military researchers, who envision dirigibles hovering over Washington, protecting the region. During last fall's sniper crisis, in fact, the military tried to deploy a blimp with sensors capable of spotting a flash from a firearm's muzzle.
This week, during a demonstration of blimps armed with cutting-edge sensor technology, a 260-foot airship drifted over the woods near Manassas, where a set of blue tarps was strung across the ground to represent a terrorist encampment.
The color-sensitive sensors aboard the blimp easily detected the tarps despite a thick canopy of trees. The location was outlined in red on a monitor. Inside a gray turret attached to the gondola's outer frame, a high-resolution camera turned its lens toward the terrain in question, verifying the find.
The Office of Naval Research, based in Arlington, is advocating the use of sensor-equipped airships for various missions, including detecting chemical attacks, tracking submarines or other underwater threats, identifying military targets for attack, aiding in search-and-rescue operations and finding drug laboratories.
The new vision for blimps was on display during the multiple-day demonstration for government agencies and the media that started Tuesday in Manassas, which kicked off a four-month, cross-country test using the sensors.
After a noisy and steep 30-degree climb, the airship quickly leveled off. The ride was smooth and quiet, particularly as the blimp hovered above the "terrorist camp."
"It's very monotonous," said Stephen Huett, airship program manager for the Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in St. Mary's County. "It's like sitting in a French cafe."
That is the virtue of a blimp, he said. "For homeland security, if you want persistent surveillance, you want to lazily hover," Huett said.
Airplanes must keep circling to stay atop a target area, and hovering in a helicopter is a bone-shaking, fuel-consuming ordeal. Blimps can loiter with little noise and vibration -- conditions ideal for sensors -- and cost much less to operate than planes and helicopters.
The demonstration featured the Littoral Airborne Sensor Hyperspectral (LASH) system, a sensor that detects minute color shifts that the human eye cannot see.
This year, a LASH-equipped blimp was able to track 30 North Atlantic right whales off the northeast coast of Florida, providing scientists with valuable data about the highly endangered species, said Gregory Plumb, airship operations manager for Science & Technology International, the Honolulu company that developed the system.
Last October, Navy teams outfitted a blimp with a sniper-detection system known as VIPER to help find the shooters terrorizing the Washington area. "We were doing the initial checkouts when they caught the guys," Huett said.
Equipped with LASH, radar and other sensors, two or three blimps could provide constant surveillance over the Washington area, Huett said.
The U.S. military has no airships in its inventory, and a commercial blimp normally used for advertising had to be leased for the demonstration.
That was not always the case. The Navy developed airships for military use in the 1920s and flew them during World War II on anti-submarine patrols and other missions. Eventually, the blimps were seen as relics, and the last one was retired from service in 1962. Huett advocates the development of a new airship -- one much larger and more technologically advanced than the commercial blimps -- that could host a range of sensors and serve as an airborne command and control center.
The Army reportedly is interested in a huge blimp capable of carrying 500 tons and moving a brigade's equipment anywhere in the world in 96 hours. The Missile Defense Agency is considering developing a blimp that could be stationed in position for a month at 70,000 feet, able to monitor large areas.
Blimps are not the easy target they might intuitively seem to be, Huett said. Since most of their surface consists of lightweight fabric, blimps put out a limited "signature" and are difficult to detect with radar.
Airships are inflated with helium, a stable and nonflammable gas. (The Hindenburg -- which crashed in 1937, killing 35 people -- used highly flammable hydrogen.) Because it is not highly pressurized, a blimp won't pop if hit by bullets or even a rocket-propelled grenade, Huett said, and descends slowly if punctured.
"With an airship, you put a big hole in it, it kind of looks at you funny," Huett said. "It doesn't crash and burn."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company