Airship is training Navy pilots, not covering sports

Highlands County residents may have wondered if there was big sporting event going on with the recent batch of blimp sightings.

Turns out it's a U.S. Navy blimp, though, and a Maryland-based company is using it to train U.S. Navy pilots to fly the airship.

The 178-foot long, 55-foot high and 45-foot wide airship, temporarily housed at the Avon Park Executive Airport, is hard to miss.

The Navy has found a lot of uses for the airships and they are trying to bring them back into service, said Jonathan Perry, assistant crew manager with Integrated Systems Solutions Inc.

"Most of us have come from the commercial world where we did sporting events in the air with the same type of airships," he said. "We are refamiliarizing them [Navy] with the knowledge to operate them and use them, and training their pilots because our pilots are trained and have many, many years of flight hours."

The U.S. Army and U.S. Navy used blimps for coastal patrol and to escort coastal convoys during World War II. Military use of blimps ceased in 1962, but new designs and new surveillance technology has renewed interest in the airships.

The Navy airship flew three days to Avon Park, making three stops, from the Naval Air Engineering Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

With its two turbo-propeller 280 horsepower engines, the airship has a cruising speed of 30 knots and typically flies at 1,500 feet, according to Perry.

The airship is non-rigid with no framework like the old zeppelins. Its envelope, which is a type of Kevlar, is filled with helium not hydrogen, he noted.

A crew of 17 followed the airship and its two pilots by road in a caravan of vehicles including: a fuel truck, lift mast truck, an SUV, a van and three trailers.

When they left New Jersey on Dec. 19, it was 17 degrees with 12 inches of snow on the ground, Perry noted.

A fixed-wing pilot usually needs nine to 12 months of flight training in an airship, which is operated with cables and pulleys and no hydraulics, Perry said. "It's a workout; it's a job flying that thing; you go up there for three or four hours and you are ready to stop."

Landing is the most challenging part of flight, Perry said.

The ground crew lines up in a V with four men grabbing each of two ropes that hang from the front of the aircraft. A man on each side of the gondola (pilots' cockpit) holds onto a rail.

With the engines still running, they walk it toward a mast on which a man has climb who secures a nipple on the front of the ship with locks on the mast.

Lead bags are used to ballast the ship depending on the temperature and how many people are on board.

About every two months the airship may need some helium, which is released in measured amounts when the envelope expands due to changes in the weather, Perry said. A tanker truck is called in to resupply the lighter-than-air gas.

The airship is scheduled to take off today at 1:30 p.m. for a two-hour flight, Perry said. The blimp will be in Avon Park for another month.

"The government is starting to see there are a lot of useful things for airships," Perry said. "I think we will see airships back in the flow of things."