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250-Foot Hybrid Airship To Spy Over Afghanistan
Toe, The writes "Gizmodo details the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) (based on the P-791), a spyship from US Army's Space and Missile Defense Command capable of hovering at 20,000 feet. Planned for deployment in Afghanistan, the ship can float for three weeks and carry well over a ton of payload, apparently surveillance equipment. The video on Gizmodo of the P-791 shows that these ships are a hybrid not only of both buoyancy and propulsive lift, but also of both awe and hilarity."
Seems like this kind of airship would be extremely vulnerable flying over hostile territory.
Exactly. I'm not exactly sure what weaponry would be able to hit a target at 20,000 feet but it's a big, slow-moving target.
On the other hand, I love the whole idea of gasbags as a means of transport, and would really like to see them come back for civilian use. I can see their time coming again as fuel bills rise or the carbon emissions of winged craft become too scary.
Airships got a bad rap as a result of some messy crashes, but by of perspective, even with the Hindenburg crash 63% of the passengers survived. Whereas if you're in a plane when it crashes, you can usually guarantee that you're toast.
This kind of airship will, once at operating altitude, be essentially be impossible to shoot down unless the enemy has a true SAM based defense (e.g. SA-11). SAM would have no problems locking on, as they tend to be driven by an active radar on the ground - I doubt you could hide something that big from radar in any useful way (although, I wonder if making it extra radar reflective might not actually work better since it would give the missile to large an area to aim for?). Stingers have a useful ceiling of around 15,000 feet, and they're driven by infra-red, which means you probably wouldn't get a lock on.* The only other thing that would work would be a proper flak gun at around 88mm. While there's a lot of those lying around Afghanistan, getting them in working order, manning them, and providing reliable ammo would all be very problematic. Remember that flak is only really useful if someone is manning it 24/7 - the ceiling might be enough, but the range is terrible. * Of course, the problem with all this is that given the MOUNTAINS in Afghanistan, I wonder if there isn't a shoulder fired active radar missile available. The ceiling wouldn't have to be 20,000 feet, but rather 20,000 feet - the height of the mountain the defender is standing on. Also, it looks gay.
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The spire of the Empire State Building in NYC originally contained an airship docking port on the 102nd floor.
Although this idea sounds awesome in theory, it was incredibly dangerous in practice, and no airships ever managed to safely dock with the building due to severe winds and updrafts.
The idea was eventually scrapped, and the spire was converted for use as a transmission aerial, which is still in operation today. The building still retains several peculiarities relating to the unused airship terminal.
Coincidentally, a few years later the building would later survive a direct hit from a B-25 relatively unscathed. The idea of a rooftop air terminal was later resurrected with the construction of a helipad on top of the nearby Pan-Am building, which also proved to be extremely dangerous, and was permanently closed after an accident in the 1970s.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The problem isn't necessarily reaching an altitude of 20,000 feet. A commercial airliner routinely flies over 30,000 feet high. If this is in their airspace and they can detect/find it, you can be sure they'll find a way to get to the altitude. The problem comes in when you actually try to hit it. As others have pointed out, this thing most likely has a very tiny radar signature, meaning you need good resolution radar to detect and lock onto it. Once you've overcome the challenge of finding and locking onto it, you have to overcome any countermeasure systems this is sure to be loaded with. Then you actually have to hit it. A fire-and-forget method, such as the boys did with their space camera, would have virtually no chance of hitting something at 20,000 feet. It's a very, very big sky and an airship like this isn't simply sitting stationary, it'll be flying a station keeping pattern which will probably be varied to prevent its route from being too predictable.
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