The World's Biggest Walrus
This Walrus is a new type of aircraft, half jumbo jet, half blimp, designed according to specifications from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This Walrus is intended to carry a payload of 500 to 1,000 tons up to 12,000 nautical miles, in less than than a week and at a competitive cost, according to Defense Industry Daily and Red Herring. Two contractors, Aeros and Lockheed Martin have recently received about $3 million each by DARPA to produce some designs for the Walrus zeppelin by mid-2006. While it seems possible to build such giants, which could measure up to 400 meters in length, perform vertical takeoffs and landings on both ground and sea, they should be seriously vulnerable in war zones.
Before going further, below is a picture of a Walrus prototype from Aeros (Credit: Aeros Corporation). Here is a link to larger version of this picture.
Lockheed Martin is even more discreet about its projects. If you want to look at its version of the Walrus, you'll have to look at its Corporate Overview 2005 (PDF format, 47 pages, 3.58 MB) and scroll to page 22 to see a small rendering of the future blimp.
Now, let's look at some details given by Defense Industry Daily.
The Walrus operational vehicle (OV) is intended to carry a payload of 500-1,000 tons (that's 1-2 million pounds) up to 12,000 nautical miles, in less than seven days and at a competitive cost. Given these enormous capacities, they would mostly be used to deploy full-scale fighting units (for example, the components of an Future Combat Systems Army Unit of Action) quickly, getting them to their site with a minimum of equipment reassembly work required. The ideal is that transported forces should fully ready to fight within six hours.
DARPA says that advances in envelope and hull materials, buoyancy and lift control, drag reduction and propulsion have combined to make this concept feasible. Technologies to be investigated in the initial study phase include vacuum/air buoyancy compensator tanks, which provide buoyancy control without ballast, and electrostatic atmospheric ion propulsion.
Curiously, Red Herring is more concerned than Defense Industry Daily by the security of such huge aircrafts.
Edward Pevzner, manager of business development for Aeros Aeronautical Systems, said that even a 1-foot-wide hole in the fabric of a 140-feet-long airship would not bring it down in less than an hour. That’s plenty of time for the pilot to land safely.
Would a surface-to-air missile pose a threat to the Walrus? Mr. Pevzner said he couldn’t discuss details about his company's plans for the Walrus' design, perhaps to keep good ideas out of the hands of rival Lockheed Martin.
This is true that both companies are quite secretive about their projects. But another contractor, Millenium Airship Inc., which was not selected by DARPA, has put online the specifications of its SkyFreighter project.
And its version of a Walrus carrying a payload of 500 tons would have measured 1,200' x 250' x 150' (about 360 meters in length, 75 meters in width and 45 meters in height). With such dimensions, it seems to me that the Walrus would face serious dangers if it existed today and was deployed in Iraq for example.
And I'll leave the conclusion to Red Herring, which thinks that there might be civilian usages for such monsters.
There has to be demand for an airship that could haul 500 tons directly from a Chinese factory to a Wal-Mart parking lot somewhere in the United States. And unless the Walrus is touching down at the peak of the Christmas shopping season, landing at Wal-Mart should be safer than Baghdad International Airport.
Anyway, don't expect a decision about deploying the Walrus before several years.
Sources: Defense Industry Daily, August 30, 2005; Red Herring, September 3, 2005; and various web sites
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