Giant Blimp, Deflated
No! Nooooo! Say it ain't so, Darpa! The Walrus program -- the fringe-science agency's awesomely, almost insanely, ambitious plan to build an aircraft carrier-sized blimp -- is over, Defense Technology International discovers.
Congress had always been skeptical about the idea of an airship that could schlep 500-1000 tons halfway around the world. (After all, the Pentagon's current go-to airborne hauler, the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, holds about 22 tons.) But blimp-lovers had pushed the "tri-phibian" (air, land, sea) Walrus as a way to make American forces less reliant on deep-water ports, foreign bases, and billion-dollar airports to wage war.
But it wasn't meant to be. Darpa took away the fiscal year 2006 funding for the Walrus. And the agency's 2007 budget request calls for "termination of the Walrus effort."
Now, the Army's Surface Deployment and Distribution Command had its own plans for a heavy-hauling airship, too. I'm checking to see if they're still interested. Keep your fingers crossed.
UPDATE 9:46 AM: Don't get too bummed, blimp fans. Darpa's plan for an all-seeing airship that tracks an entire battlefield at once is still intact.
"and yes, any one of a dozen airplanes are already sufficient."
How so? No existing airplanes can even come close to a 500 ton lifting capacity. One of the biggest obstacles to rapid deployment of our military is that the M1 Abrams weighs so much that even our largest aircraft can only carry a single tank. If this Walrus were made to work as intended, it could carry 7 such tanks. Even with the vehicle flying more slowly than a C-5 Galaxy, that would still allow for far more rapid deployment of armored units (which regardless of Rumsfeld's inane "Transformation" pipedream remain essential to winning against any remotely formidable enemy) than is currently possible.
Posted by: Shinimegami at July 23, 2006 3:31 PM