Does anyone else here find the idea of using an airship for surveillance ridiculous?
It is very hard for me to countenance any military use for a giant, slow, fragile aircraft in the era of microsatellites and UAVs. The risk / reward for both engineering and personal seems way too high.
Personally, I'd love to use this to tour around the rocky mountains, but it seems more of a novelty.
I don't find it ridiculous, but recognize that the military chose a different direction (hence this became an orphan project).
Airships are very well suited for surveillance over uncontested and nominally "friendly" skies. Places like cities and towns at home. The DARPA (now unfortunately named) "ISIS" project was just that. Persistent long duration surveillance allows you to identify changes in a neighborhood or area which are nominally invisible without a history of the place. It works like this, you record the ingress and egress of people from a common place, over time you have people who are there again and again, and people who are "new". The longer you do that the more you can see which people are there for the first time and which people have been there before. Now when an "event" happens somewhere, you can identify the "new" people who aren't regular users of say, the train station, and focus your attention on them, perhaps quickly identifying fleeing perpetrators.
The overall scheme is called the "mosaic effect" according to someone in the intelligence community that attended a MacAfee hosted briefing I attended. By eliminating the periodic things that are always there, the outliers stand out.
Most US military campaigns these days are against guerrilla insurgencies, so uncontested skies. I posted this article in response to the parent article, which describes the use of aerostats in Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan during the height of the US presence there:
Well, particularly with aerostats (tethered to the ground) you really need to be on the ground, not just engaged in an aerial bombing campaign like in Syria. Though I am surprised the Syrian government doesn't use these - I suspect the electronics and software might be a limiting factor.
Airships are deceptively tough. They don't move very fast and it takes a long time for the lifting gas to leak out unless they've taken catastrophic damage. In WW I the German airship L-33 was hit by an anti-aircraft shell that exploded inside the envelope during a bombing raid on London, was attacked by an airplane as it descended, and still the crew walked away.
Of course they were lucky because the lifting gas they were using was hydrogen, something we wouldn't use today. But they took damage that would easily have destroyed a plane, and the airship was in good enough shape upon landing the captain felt the need to set it alight with flare guns.
A modern air-to-air missile, with its 25 pound warhead and assuming it could lock on at all, probably wouldn't do much to an airship. SAMs are a different story, of course, but you wouldn't take something like this near a SAM site.
I would feel much safer in an airship than, say, a cargo plane.
One of the lessons from this is that if you want to be able to do damage to a target with a directed energy weapon (and ballistic and explosive projectiles are forms of same), you've got to be able to _interact_ with the target.
It's a general problem of energy interactions -- if an energy form and material don't interact, it's as if the energy wasn't there. Glass and visible light (to a close approximation), neutrinos and matter, magnetism and non-ferro- or -para-magnetic substances. Cannonballs and tissuepaper.
At a biological level, transmitters and receptors, which generally require specific molecular properties to interact -- this is how transmitter blockers work, but stopping up the receptors. Carbon monoxide, similarly, binds strongly to hemoglobin and doesn't let go, preventing oxygen and CO2 transport.
Punching holes through an airship canopy ... makes it settle faster. The airframe itself is sufficiently large that terminal velocity is pretty slow as well -- large surface area, small mass.
You'd need either very-well-timed explosive charges, or cutter-type materials, or a thermal weapon which could melt the envelope -- the Airlander looks as if it would probably melt with sufficient applied heat.
Yeah, that might do it. Probably have to design the guidance system specifically for that kind of target, though.
Also, I wonder what kind of radar return you get off of mylar. You might have trouble hitting it if they put some effort into minimizing the return from the gondola.
It depends a lot on whether or not it's aluminised. I suspect not much though -- looks a lot like fog or something.
Which would limit a lot of missile targeting systems, though heat-seekers might still find the powerplants.
From images shown, the gondola itself might well be largely non-metallic. If that were made of composites, including framing, it should also have a pretty small radar signal.
Lidar, properly tuned, could probably pick up something.
There are quite a few jobs where you need someone close by, but don't expect them to be in direct danger. Watching swaths of coastline for smuggling and other illegal activity, helping rebuild communications and handling logistics after a natural disaster, etc. Having a loiter time of days means that you can keep eyes on post a lot easier than traditional aircraft which tend to only be able to loiter for several hours at most.
Both the US and Israel uses surveillance blimps all the time, these aren't used over battlefields they are used to collect intelligence over the border or over the horizon (they can reach pretty high altitudes).
Unlike drones they do not require fuel, and they can stay in the air for weeks and even months if they are tethered to the ground as you can easily provide power (and a secure uplink/downlink which cannot be intercepted).
And even untethered ones can operate for weeks especially in on demand visual surveillance and passive SIGINT collection modes since you do not need to spend power to keep them in the air and lithium batteries can provide enough power to sensors for a very long time.
They can reach altitudes high enough that you can't see them with the naked eye, and even if they are visible so what? surveillance/observation towers and CCTV cameras are also usually visible but it doesn't make them any less viable.
The motivation is twofold. First, they don't require fuel to loiter - or, in the case of a hybrid like this, they only need to keep going at a very low speed to get enough lift to stay aloft.
Second, as long as the filler gas isn't flammable and you have a half-way-decent self-sealing liner, it's actually quite hard to bring one down - rifles and most cannons poke pretty small holes in a balloon, so the rate of loss of buoyant gas would be quite low, and a flexible balloon deals with the overpressure wave of high explosives better than a rigid structure. (See the last part of that news article, where they mention the balloons coming down for periodic servicing with hundreds of bullet holes in them, yet still perfectly functional.)
Lighter-than-air craft can linger over an area for long periods with very low fuel expenditure, can reach higher altitudes than are possible with heavier-than-air craft, and could in theory carry much heavier cargo. They are also quite hard to shoot down with guns, but that might not hold true with surface-to-air missiles.
It’s not that ridiculous. We had an airship in Athens during the 2004 summer Olympics [1] which was specifically used for surveillance reasons. Of course there were no UAVs back then.
Oh, there were - just not in the public consciousness. Rotomotion was selling them for one, and they led the Autopilot open source project to create a platform for single rotor craft.
I thought perhaps it would have superior cargo capacity, but at 10,000kg [1] it's just a bit over half of the lowest capacity listed on Wikipedia's page for cargo aircraft. [2] Currently available aircraft have 5, 10, or even 25 times the mass capacity for cargo.
I can't find data on volumetric cargo capacity, so I'm not sure how that compares.
Maybe the 5 days of continuous flight is a significant feature? Fuel cost savings?
The one feature is the lack of significant runway needed for landing. You can use this to bring equipment and supplies to remote areas of the world that don't have a runway to support a cargo plane.
It can take off from even shorter "runways" with the rocket boosters, and it doesn't even need a runway just a very small clearing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwSfD4Pnkd8).
You also don't need land at all, touchdown-takeoff payload delivery is a pretty common thing, you pretty much touch the ground release the cargo which rides on a drag chute sled and you take off again, the entire process takes only a few seconds.
Anyone who's ridden in something like an air balloon knows that the landing has a pretty big drift, any unpowered flight has a pretty long horizontal landing since you drift with the wind.
It's unlikely that the clearing needed for these blimps would be smaller than the dirt patch you need to land a C-130 in, based on it's size and just how much it can drift due to wind and the fact that it doesn't have enough trust to compensate for the drift it would probably be bigger.
I was going to say, "Yes, but can it take off in the same distance afterwards?" but then I saw the most terrifying aircraft video ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKCl3lfAx1Q
I said rocket boosters :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqAPRWMkuv8
takeoff is even shorter than landing unless its captured landing, the c130 landed on a carrier before :P
I hadn't considered that, but I can indeed see the potential huge benefits there. Especially considering that their next iteration is the Airlander 50, with a 50,000kg capacity, which would put it at a fair middle ground of current cargo plane mass capacities.
C-17 also supports a slightly longer runway than the C-130 at 3500 ft. Both capable aircraft, and you can add short-fire rockets as mentioned in the C-130 post.
Well things like the U-2 still exist because they can fly stupid far for a stupid long time at stupid high altitudes and can respond quickly, securely, and quietly to intelligence needs. It's hard to fly a UAV deep into enemy territory because they can be more easily seen, more easily shot out of the sky, and require potentially fragile uplinks to operate.
"Factors such as cost per flight hour (CPFH), information gathering rates, mission readiness, adverse weather operational capability, distance to targets, and onboard power still favored the U-2."
The U-2 apparently has a higher payload, higher service ceiling, higher mission success rate, and a lower cost per flight hour (maybe).
> It's hard to fly a UAV deep into enemy territory because they can be more easily seen, more easily shot out of the sky, and require potentially fragile uplinks to operate
What about an UAV inherently makes them not as good as a U2?
I'd wager nothing really... heck, I'm sure U2's have been flown remotely before.
You have a protest that goes for 10 hours how do you get a team with equipment directly above it for the entire time?
It seems perfect, absolutely perfect in fact.
Now, you could do a complex argument that hiring multiple teams of people and multiple sets of equipment on helicopters is cheaper and be right, but that's not 'ridiculous'
It is very hard for me to countenance any military use for a giant, slow, fragile aircraft in the era of microsatellites and UAVs. The risk / reward for both engineering and personal seems way too high.
Personally, I'd love to use this to tour around the rocky mountains, but it seems more of a novelty.