Giant Blimp on the Rise
The idea is pretty wild, even for the dreamers at Darpa: build a giant blimp that can haul 1,800 soldiers and their gear 12,000 nautical miles, in less than a week.
But the Pentagon's research arm is serious enough about the project, code-named Walrus, to hand out more than $6 million to Lockheed Martin and Aeros Aeronautical Group to start designing the thing.
The Defense Department has renewed its interest in blimps in recent years; a pair of tethered airships kept watch over the giant American military complex near the Baghdad airport, when I was there. The "tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) Walrus is particularly intriguing because the Pentagon is trying to figure out ways to make American forces less reliant on deep-water ports, foreign bases, and billion-dollar airports to wage war. The Army's Surface Deployment and Distribution Command has its own plans for a such an airship.
Darpa hopes the designs they've just funded will lead to a small-scale Walrus, capable of carting 30 tons, by 2008, Defense Industry Daily notes. That's as much as today's C-130 transport planes. But it's only a fraction of the million pounds that the agency wants the Walrus will ultimately be able to lug around.
(Illustration by John MacNeill, used with premission.)
I worked on this project for one of these companies, of course Walrus was cancelled last month for lack of interest and therefore money in Congress. First of all this is a hybrid craft, it's not an airship or an airplane, it is heavier than air but gets partial lift from the Helium gas cells for Up/Down operations and gets the forward velocity from engines via dynamic lift(wing). The biggest problem with this whole concept is that people think it's crazy, I mean could you imagine something as big as an aircraft carrier or the Titanic flying through the air with 500 tonnes of men/equipment, it's a hard sell that didn't.
Posted by: Walrus Engineer at May 13, 2006 3:43 AM