BLIMPBALL IN NAVY TESTS

They may look a litle silly — like giant vol­ley­balls, kinda. But the Navy thinks that big, round blimps may just be the key to spy­ing on ter­ror­ist camps, and com­mu­ni­cat­ing with its sailors.
As we’ve men­tioned before, the U.S. mil­i­tary has been on a bit of an air­ship kick, lately. That’s because the helium-​​filled, lighter-​​than-​​air craft can stay in the skies a whole lot longer than fuel-​​eating jets. And that means the blimps could work as float­ing cell tow­ers or obser­va­tion posts.
Round air­ships have some advan­tages over their cigar-​​shaped cousins, said Hokan Colting, who designed the SA-​​60 spher­i­cal blimp for the Navy.

“It’s more maneu­ver­able than a tra­di­tional air­ship,” Colting told Aerospace Daily. “It’s amphibi­ous, it can land and take off from water. And it can go to high alti­tudes. Traditional, cigar-​​shaped air­ships can go to 5,000–6,000 feet … We have been up to 22,000 feet with [a spher­i­cal] air­ship, and that’s the absolute world record in alti­tude for air­ships.“
The SA-​​60 can be trans­ported in a truck and set up by a small group of peo­ple in roughly 24 hours, accord­ing to the com­pa­nies. Although it requires a pilot, the com­pa­nies plan to make the air­ship unmanned to allow for longer flights…
The com­pa­nies are devel­op­ing a larger oper­a­tional ver­sion of the SA-​​60 that would have a diam­e­ter of 76 feet, an oper­a­tional ceil­ing of 16,000 feet, and a flight endurance of roughly two days. In 12 months, the com­pa­nies plan to build a 200-​​foot diam­e­ter ver­sion that would be capa­ble of wide-​​area sur­veil­lance or telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions relay at alti­tudes up to 65,000 feet.

But there are a whole lot of kinks to work out, first. When the SA-​​60 was tested recently by Naval Air Systems Command, the helium gas inside heated and expanded, mak­ing the vehi­cle extra buoy­ant and leav­ing it under­weight. That made it a bitch to bring the orb back to earth.
Aerospace Daily dryly noted, “During some aborted land­ing attempts, the air­ship briefly con­tacted the ground and bounced like an enor­mous beach ball.“
THERE’S MORE: “I know I’m nit­pick­ing here,” says Defense Tech reader GW, “but Hokan Colting needs to check his basic his­tory on air­ships. World War I German air­ships rou­tinely oper­ated at 22,000 ft, and that was in 1916.”

The only rea­son that American air­ships of the 20s and 30s oper­ated with lower max­i­mum ceil­ings was to con­serve helium, an extremely expen­sive gas back then. At one time the U.S. only had enough gas to oper­ate one of their 3 air­ships. German pas­sen­ger zep­pelins (which used cheap, plen­ti­ful hydro­gen) oper­ated at lower alti­tudes for the com­fort of their pas­sen­gers and for greater cargo lift capacity. 

AND MORE: GW “is flat-​​out wrong. According to the Balloon & Airship World Records Homepage, the alti­tude record for an air­ship is 6,234 m or 20,453 feet and was made in June of 2003,” says Defense Tech reader BP. “What GW may have been think­ing of was a bal­loon alti­tude. According to the same site, the cur­rent alti­tude record for a bal­loon is 34,668 m or 113,740 feet which was made in 1961.”

July 6th, 2004 | Planes, Copters, Blimps | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.