U.S. Army Wants to Send 250 Foot Long Surveillance Airship to Afghanistan
September 24th, 2009Via: Aviation Week:
The plan to deploy an autonomous, free-flying, surveillance airship to Afghanistan is gaining, er, buoyancy. A consortium led by the US Army’s Space & Missile Defense Command is scheduled to be established by October 1 and a contract awarded for the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) demonstration by the end of December.
unless this is something new (which maybe the tech attached to the ‘airship’ is…), I was in Afg and Iraq and they had these aerial blimps at every base I was on with surveillance equipment (who knows what; I was a lowly civilian doing base camp maintenance; don’t know anything abt mil snoop tech…) slung onto the blimp…I do know we civilians were told the blimps surveilled the perimeter and surrounding areas for ‘suspicious’ activity, as well as kept an ‘eye in the sky’ on all us folks inside, so if we were doing anything sketchy, drinkin’, smokin’ an whatnot, do it out of line of sight of the blimp…..I am sure the tech part now is light years from 2003-2006…still, the ‘locals’ liked to take shots at the blimps and supposedly used them for targetting inbound mortars and such since the blimps were anchored to the ground inside the base….
If you click through, you’ll see that this thing is much different than those fixed-to-the-ground dirigibles. It’s the same basic concept, though.