Radio-Controlled Blimp Uses Stealth Technology at 28 M.P.H.

Most people thinking of stealth aircraft probably think about the B-2 stealth bomber: invisible to radar, fast, sleek, with an estimated price tag of $500 million or more.

Not Carter Ward. When his thoughts turn to stealth aircraft, Ward thinks about something stubby, with a top speed of 28 m.p.h. and costing only about $195,000. The stealth blimp.

For three years, Ward, a civilian engineer for the Navy in Port Hueneme, has been working on a 69-foot prototype of a stealth blimp--meant to be unmanned, radio-controlled, and invisible to radar--that has so far received about $700,000 in funding from the Army.

The armed forces aren’t exactly sure how or if they will use the stealth blimp. But the head of the Army agency that is paying for Ward’s blimp project thinks the blimp could be an “advantageous tool” to add “to its bag of tricks,” says Charles Browne, an engineer with the Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Center in Virginia, which is evaluating the blimp. Browne says the stealth blimp would be great for finding guerrilla base camps or investigating ships that are suspected of smuggling drugs.

Expensive mega-projects such as the B-2, with familiar and frightening doomsday missions, seem inevitable for the military. But the stealth blimp is an unlikely tale of a comparatively cheap aircraft intended mostly for reconnaissance missions.

The melon-shaped stealth blimp also inspires jokes. Says Ward: “When the idea is that you’re sneaking in, a blimp just sounds funny.”

Ward’s plan is for a blimp that would be controlled by radio, so a pilot would not be at peril from enemy bullets. The craft could be controlled from as far away as 100 miles, and would send back pictures through a fiber-optic strand strung from the blimp to the control station and attached to a series of beachball-sized balloons.

The current prototype is now being tested at a private blimp airfield in Elizabeth City, N.C., after earlier checks in Camarillo and at Vandenberg Air Force Base essentially proved that the craft could fly. The tests will help determine whether a final version of the stealth blimp will be built for military use. It’s hard to say how much more funding the blimp will get, Browne concedes, because its current budget is so small that it doesn’t appear on most budget plans.

But Bill Watson, a model maker who is working on the stealth blimp, long ago learned about such a craft’s surveillance possibilities. A few years ago he tested a pedal-powered mini-blimp near Palm Springs. Watson says he flew around, unnoticed by people below: “We’d fly 10 feet over their heads and ring the bicycle bell and they’d start looking around on the ground for us.”

That story may not convince military planners, but Ward says that with a little explaining, the logic of the stealth blimp becomes obvious. He points out that blimps are naturally quiet. And because they are constructed mostly of fabric, they don’t tend to reflect radar waves much. The prototype he’s built includes radar-absorbing materials to make it more stealth-like. And a blimp can be made very cheaply, for perhaps as little as $50,000, Ward says.

Strange though it sounds, Ward says it would be hard to knock a stealth blimp out of the sky. It’s not that you couldn’t shoot it as it floated along at top speed. But Ward says bullets would only start a slow leak of helium that wouldn’t down the blimp until it had had plenty of time to return to base.

Ward thought up the stealth blimp about five years ago. A research mechanical engineer, Ward works at the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory, where his job has been to help the armed forces prepare for military construction projects such as building an airfield on a newly seized piece of land during a battle.

That sort of building has to be precisely planned, but surveying can be dangerous in war conditions because of enemy troops and land mines. So Ward came up with the idea of a radar-invisible, remote-controlled blimp that could fly over the land, take pictures and scan the terrain with a laser and send back important surveying information for planners.

But the Navy thought the idea was “rather humorous,” Ward says, so he took his idea shopping. He didn’t find anyone to pay for development of the blimp until 1987, when he found a customer in the Army’s now-defunct Project Office for Low Intensity Conflict. The office thought it might use the blimp for what it called “counterinfiltration,” namely, spying on guerrilla wars.

Ward got $150,000 from the Army that year for development. His mandate--build a cheap stealth blimp. “We just wanted to dance it before radar and see if it would show up,” Ward says.

Cheapness was the mother of innovation. Ward eventually paid about $1,300 for a radio-control device used for model airplanes and modified it. With the help of Navy consultant Atilla Taluy, he hired Watson--a Simi Valley model maker who’d built props for movies and for the comedian Gallagher--to help him put together the first stealth blimp.

Earlier in his career Watson helped build and fly the Gossamer Condor, one of the first human-powered aircraft in the world, and the Gossamer Albatross, which set the distance record for a human-powered aircraft in 1979 when it flew across the English Channel.

But it wasn’t Watson’s work on the Gossamer craft that caught Taluy’s attention--it was his creation of a bicycle-powered blimp for Gallagher, who is known for his use of giant couches and other such props. In a 1984 videotape, “Over Your Head,” Gallagher pedaled the blimp while singing, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

In 1987, Watson started work on a stealth blimp for Ward, and soon after he decided to stop free-lancing and began working for AeroVironment, a Monrovia company. Watson brought the blimp-building contract to AeroVironment, which became the contractor assembling the aircraft.

While the contractors changed, so did the military agency paying for the stealth blimp research. In 1988 Ward was forced to find a new “sponsor” for his research when the first sponsor was disbanded. He then found some financial support from Browne’s Army agency, the Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Center.

Browne is hoping to find more sponsors to help pay for the development of the blimp into a version ready to spot guerrillas or smugglers.

New sponsors could take the project in different directions: some might want a blimp that’s fast but not stealthy. One of Ward’s more interesting ideas for a final version of the blimp is a craft without rudders and stabilizers that wiggles and twists through the air as a fish does through water. But Ward also has to contend with more mundane problems such as finding a better blimp engine.

Meanwhile, some Army units have expressed interest in the blimp, Browne says. “But they haven’t signed up to say, ‘We want that one that’s painted blue.’ ”