Lockheed Martin's unmanned blimp crashes during maiden voyage

The impressive-looking HALE-D airship is a joint project between the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and Lockheed Martin




Lockheed Martin's unmanned blimp crashes during maiden voyage



AKRON, Ohio The High Altitude Airship prototype's maiden voyage Wednesday morning did not end well.

The expensive, high-tech and fortunately unmanned airship crashed in a controlled descent in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania when something went awry a couple of hours after it took off from Akron.

Lockheed Martin's High Altitude Long Endurance Demonstrator, which took flight at 5:47 a.m. EDT from its Akron Airdock base, went down in a heavily wooded area in rural Gilmore Township, Greene County, Pa., a nearly two-hour drive south of Pittsburgh. Company officials said it is too soon to speculate on what the crash means for the Akron airship program.


No one was hurt on the ground, officials said. The airship, which also goes by the acronym HALE-D, was filled with nonflammable helium.

The silvery aircraft resembled a giant Jiffy Pop container as it deflated on top of trees. Television video showed one of the propellers still moving.

New Freeport Volunteer Fire Department Chief Allan Shipman said Lockheed Martin representatives were discussing using a helicopter to lift the airship off the trees and move it to another location about 500 yards away where it could be dismantled and brought back to Akron.




"It's an extreme rural area," Shipman said. "You can't drive to it. You have to walk and hike."

Even walking to the site is difficult, he said. "Every complication you can imagine" impedes access to the airship, including a beaver dam, he said.

Shipman and others from the volunteer fire department were the first ones called to the site Wednesday morning and were asked to secure the area until state police arrived. Shipman said he could hear machinery humming on the airship.

"It was just sort of hanging there," Shipman said.

Gilmore Township officials said the airship went down on state game lands. The 21.7-square-mile township has about 260 to 270 full-time residents.

A lot of people in the area saw the airship come down, Shipman said. "I was just hoping nobody was hurt. It worked out pretty well."


The U.S. Army, which funded the airship program, will handle the investigation into what went wrong, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The remote-controlled airship flew as high as 32,000 feet - a bit more than 6 miles - when the decision was made to bring it down.

"We had some anomaly," said John Cummings, Army spokesman. "We were supposed to get up to 60,000 feet."

Colleen Arthur, general manager of Lockheed Martin's Akron facility, said when the airship reached 32,000 feet, something went wrong with its helium levels that prevented it from flying higher. As of late Wednesday, the company did not know what caused the malfunction, she said.

"We chose the location for the descent," Arthur said. Contingency plans included bringing the airship down in a remote area where it would not hurt people or damage property, she said. She described it as a "soft landing" with a rate of descent of 20 feet per second, slower than a typical parachutist.

The flight was intended to last for days with the airship returning to Akron in the same type of controlled descent, she said.

The demonstrator was only going to fly this one time, she said. "It was never to be reused or reflown at the end of the flight."

While Lockheed Martin is disappointed with what happened, the short flight did successfully demonstrate such things as the solar and remote control technologies the company developed, Arthur said.

"We were pushing aviation history this morning," she said. "A lot of the technologies we proved today will pave the way for future high altitude airships."


It's too soon to say what this means for the Lockheed Martin airship program, said Graham Warwick, senior technology editor at Aviation Week.

"The fundamental concept remains valid," he said. The military wants what it calls "persistence," where vehicles can stay aloft for extended periods of time with minimal human interaction.

If the vehicle is significantly damaged or there are fundamental flaws, "you have to wonder if the money will be there in the current environment," Warwick said.

It's likely that what caused the problem that brought down the airship will turn out to be a trivial technical matter unrelated to the new technologies Lockheed Martin wanted to demonstrate, he said.

"The trouble these days is there's very little tolerance if things go wrong," Warwick said. "It can put a program at risk to have a technical failure."


The U.S. Army did not give advance notice of the flight.

The untethered, solar-powered airship was designed to hover over one spot for weeks at a height of 60,000 feet, well above where commercial jets fly. If the concept proves itself, Lockheed Martin wants to build full-size unmanned airships that would be 400 feet long - more than twice the length of the 192-foot-long Goodyear blimp