1st NAVY blimp in 44 years - Lakehurst NJ

After 44 years, Lakehurst back in lighter-than-air flight research
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 05/9/06

BY KIRK MOORE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU

LAKEHURST — It's been more than 43 years since the last military airship made touchdown here, but the Navy is now back into the business of lighter-than-air flight.

The first Navy-owned airship to fly since 1962 is undergoing trials at Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Station, where officials say the 178-foot craft will be used for research and development projects, including sensors for future manned and unmanned lighter-than-air vehicles.

The Naval Air Systems Command is operating the airship from Hangar 6, one of several massive buildings that supported the Navy's early airship program starting in the 1920s and the large blimp fleet that hunted enemy submarines offshore during World War II.

At a cost of $3.5 million, the American Blimp Corp. A-170 airship contract is small potatoes in the world of military aviation. But it's already generating a buzz in the lighter-than-air community, after the plain white airship made its first flights in recent days.

"In this case, history repeating itself is a good thing," said Capt. L. Bret Gordon, the commanding officer at Lakehurst.

Funding for the airship comes from the Office of Naval Research and congressional additions to the Navy budget, said Tom Worsdale, a Lakehurst spokesman. The A-170 will be a flying research platform to test sensors and the use of lighter-than-air vehicles for protecting military forces at sea, he said.

There are no plans to deploy the airship overseas, but Wors-dale said it will be used to test technology for unmanned aerial vehicles in wide use among front-line military units.

A couple generations of Navy pilots have never set foot in a blimp. Lakehurst's executive officer, Capt. Phillip Beachy, said he was impressed when he flew on the acceptance flight to put the A-170 through its paces.

"I was surprised by the nimbleness of the aircraft near the Earth," said Beachy, who has flown mostly helicopters and jets during his career. The airship could climb and descend at up to a 30 percent angle, "which is significant for any aircraft . . . in a helicopter, I could do that, if I had to," he said.

Inside the cockpit, the control pedals and panel are comparable to a helicopter's, but "beyond that, not much," he said.

Instead of a control stick, he said, the A-170 pilot's main control is a large wheel used to change altitude, speed and the angle of the airship.

For decades Lakehurst has been the Navy's center for building and testing catapults and other aircraft launch and recovery equipment for its aircraft carrier fleet. Enormous hangars dotting the 7,400-acre base hark back to its earlier days as an airship base.

"You'd see five or six blimps a day. They'd always come over Toms River," recalled Robert Buchanan, 86, of Tuckerton, who was in civilian landing crews when the German airship Hindenburg arrived May 6, 1937.

Buchanan barely escaped the fire that day that killed 36 and destroyed civilian airship travel. But within a few years, the Navy had a successful blimp program that during World War II helped protect ocean convoys from German submarines; airship partisans like to say that Navy blimps never lost a ship under their protection.

Nevertheless, during the Cold War, the Navy bought supersonic jets and phased out airships. Historian William Althoff says the last Navy blimp flight ended at Lakehurst Aug. 31, 1962, after a summer when beachgoers saw low-flying, 403-foot-long ZPG-3 airships darken the sky for the last time.