THE AIRSHIP TAKES OFF

Noel Malcolm considers

some new uses for one of the most civilised forms of transport

THE Iraqi missile which struck the USS Stark last month may have achieved one unlikely result: securing the future of the airship. When the attack happened the British firm, Airship Industries, and its Partner, Westinghouse, were in the final stages of negotiating with the US Navy to supply a prototype airship for use as a surveillance craft and radar platform. Early this month it was announced that they had won the contract, and that if trials were successful the Americans would place an order for a fleet of up to 50 airships. To some defence planners, the very notion of giving a military role to airships seems like an absurd step back into the distant past; but in fact the US Navy kept a fleet of them on active service until 1960, and in recent years changes in naval strategy have sug- gested a new and important place for them.

As the Falklands campaign demons- trated, the greatest threat to a surface vessel now is the missile which can travel so far (30 miles or more) that the aeroplane launching it is hidden from the ship's own radar by the curvature of the earth. An observation platform several thousand feet above the sea removes this problem, and gives the balance of advantage back to the surface fleet. Of course an airship would also be a target; but anti-missile systems are now so sophisticated that the targets really do have the advantage, provided they get sufficient warning of what is heading towards them. Giving this sort of warning is what Awacs aircraft were de- signed for. Unlike an Awacs, however, an airship can be carried by a surface vessel; it can stay in the air ten times longer at a stretch; and it costs a fiftieth of the price.

For years now, the airship has seemed to have a large number of points in its favour, counterbalanced by only one major draw- back: nobody wanted it. Using its fuel mainly for horizontal motion, not for lift, an airship uses 15 times less than an aeroplane. It is a gracefully quiet way to travel; Londoners may have become irri- tated during the last year by the sound of the Airship Industries Skyship 500 hum- ming over their heads, but all they have been hearing is the sound of two Porsche car engines from an unfamiliar direction.

And airships are, by their very nature, immensely safe: they travel slowly (80 knots is the usual maximum), and cannot crash catastrophically in the way that aero- planes do. Even with a major loss of gas they will simply sink gently to earth in what is known to airshipmen as a 'balloon descent'; their inertia is so small that the

impact is perfectly survivable. When the giant American airship Shenandoah broke up in mid-air in 1925, crew members from both halves of the ship were able to jump out safely when their sections hit the ground. Sixty-two out of 97 people on board the Hindenburg survived its destruc- tion, and what killed the unlucky 35 was the fire, not the impact. The Hindenburg had in fact been designed, like all modern airships, to carry non-flammable helium. It was filled with hydrogen only because the Americans regarded helium as a war mate- rial and, as sole producers, banned its export to Germany.

The airship's immunity from catas- trophic impact was the main reason behind a design, developed in all seriousness at Boston University in 1954, for a nuclear- powered airship. This vessel would have been bigger than the QE2; but then, the Hindenburg, designed 20 years earlier, had already been bigger than the Queen Mary. Other post-war plans for giant airships have envisaged payloads of up to 100 tons, aiming to solve the problems of transport- ing huge indivisible loads such as power station turbines. Roger Munk, the chief designer at Airship Industries, was em- ployed briefly by Shell in the 19.70s to draw up plans for a natural gas transporter which would have been three times larger than the Hindenburg.

It was the sheer size of the inter-war giants, darkening the sky as they sailed regally across it, that made the sight of them so strangely moving; but it is not an experience we are ever likely to regain. Although modern technology has made great advances in materials and navigation- al aids, it has not removed the intrinsic awkwardness of these huge, wind-sensitive structures at the critical moments when they are close to the ground, during launching, mooring or loading. When the

R100 or the R101 (each more than 700 feet long) came in to moor at Cardington,

hundreds of men had to be brought in from the local barracks to hold the mooring- ropes. This seemed labour-intensive even in 1930.

The true future of the airship seems to lie in smaller vessels. The limitation of speed rules out long-distance passenger flights, but pleasure cruises and short hops remain possible. Even at 80 knots, a flight from the centre of London to the centre of Paris could compete with the overall time of travel via the major airports. The tops of some skyscrapers, including the Empire State Building, were designed as mooring- masts; and the sight of an airship mooring

in central Paris might remind Parisians of their eccentric Franco-Brazilian pioneer, Santos-Dumont, who used to travel in his one-man dirigeable over the roof-tops from his apartment to his club.

But up till now Airship Industries has concentrated on commercial uses, such as photography, surveying and coastguard work, which exploit the airship's staying power and its famous ability to hover without vibration. (The first celebration of

Mass in the air was performed on the Hindenburg; papal permission was refused

at first, for fear that some of the wine might be spilt, but the Pope relented after witnesses had testified that a pencil placed on its end on a dining-room table remained upright for half an hour.) All the major advances in aviation this century have been pushed through, or at least accelerated, by the pressure of milit- ary requirements. If the future of the airship is now secured by the US Navy, the rest of us may eventually regain the chance to use one of the most graceful and civilised means of transport ever devised.

And it will be fitting if it is the Americans who give it a new military role, since they were by far the most inventive developers of the airship in its heyday.

In 1931 the Akron, a US Navy airship, perfected a system for hooking up small

aeroplanes in mid-air, hauling them into its hull (there was room for five) and re- launching them. The Americans used over 100 small airships for submarine-spotting in the second world war; by the end of the war these blimps had escorted more than 89,000 ships. And in the 1950s they were using airships for their 'early warning' radar system, having found that they could stay up in weather conditions which grounded all aeroplanes.

The prospect of an airships arms race is intriguing, especially since the Russians have revealed so little about their own development plans. The Airship Associa- tion, which circulates details of British research work, includes among its paid-up members the Russian Air Attaché in Lon- don; but he disclaims all knowledge of Russian programmes. A report from Mos- cow in 1985, however, listed several large- scale projects with commercial applica- tions: a prototype at Sverdlovsk for an airship composed of multiple independent modules, a plan at Leningrad for an all-metal craft with a payload of 100 tons, a design at Novosibirsk for a natural gas carrier (shades of Shell), and one being designed at Kiev to carry 1,000 passengers. Perhaps if they stationed a small airship over Moscow they would also be able to detect incoming light aircraft.