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Anonymous ID: 7340e8 Feb. 5, 2023, 6:56 p.m. No.18292421   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>2430

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-02-27-fi-1420-story.html

 

Next Secret Weapon: The Stealth Blimp : Aerospace: Low cost, unmanned and invisible to radar, it is being developed under an Army contract for guerrilla surveillance.

BY JOHN MEDEARIS

FEB. 27, 1990

Anonymous ID: 7340e8 Feb. 5, 2023, 6:58 p.m. No.18292430   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>18292421

>Next Secret Weapon: The Stealth Blimp :

Most people thinking of stealth aircraft probably think about the B-2 Stealth bomber: invisible to radar, fast, sleek, with an estimated price tag of $500 million or more.

 

Not Carter Ward. When his thoughts turn to stealth aircraft, Ward thinks about something stubby, with a top speed of 28 m.p.h. and costing only about $195,000. The stealth blimp.

 

For three years, Ward, a civilian engineer for the Navy in Port Hueneme, has been working on a 69-foot prototype of a stealth blimpmeant to be unmanned, radio-controlled and invisible to radarthat has so far received about $700,000 in funding from the Army.

 

The armed forces aren’t exactly sure how or if they will use the stealth blimp. But the Army agency that is paying for Ward’s blimp project thinks that it could be an “advantageous tool” to add “to its bag of tricks,” says Charles Browne, an engineer with the Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Center in Virginia, which is evaluating the blimp. Browne says the stealth blimp would be great for finding guerrilla base camps or investigating ships suspected of smuggling drugs.

 

Expensive mega-projects with familiar and frightening doomsday missions, like the B-2, seem inevitable for the military. But the stealth blimp is an unlikely tale of a comparatively cheap aircraft intended mostly for reconnaissance missions.

 

The melon-shaped stealth blimp also inspires jokes. Says Ward: “When the idea is that you’re sneaking in, a blimp just sounds funny.”

 

Ward’s plan is for a blimp that would be controlled by radio, so no pilots would be at peril from enemy bullets. It would be controlled from as far as 100 miles away, and would send back pictures through a fiber-optic strand strung from the blimp to the control station attached to a series of beach-ball-sized balloons.

 

The current prototype, about a third the size of the Goodyear blimp, is being tested at a private blimp airfield in Elizabeth City, N.C., after earlier checks in Camarillo and at Vandenberg Air Force Base essentially proved that the craft could fly as planned. The tests will help determine whether a final version of the stealth blimp will be built for use by the military. It’s hard to say how much more funding the blimp will get, Browne concedes, because its current budget is so small that it doesn’t appear on most budget plans.

 

Bill Watson, a model maker who is working on the stealth blimp, long ago learned about the surveillance possibilities. A few years ago, he tested a bicycle-powered mini-blimp near Palm Springs. Watson says he flew around unnoticed by people below: “We’d fly 10 feet over their heads and ring the bicycle bell and they’d start looking around on the ground for us.”

 

That may not persuade military planners, but, Ward says, with a little explaining the logic of the stealth blimp becomes obvious. He points out that blimps are naturally quiet. And because they are mostly made of a fabric bag, they don’t tend to reflect radar waves much, anyway. The prototype that he has built includes radar-absorbing materials to make it more stealth-like. Plus a blimp can be made inexpensively for perhaps as little as $50,000, Ward says.