Airship Industry Prepares for Liftoff

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959704575453391253582542.html

The turning point has been the U.S. Army's award earlier this year of a contract to Northrop Grumman Corp. to design and build as many as three football-field-size airships that will sit high over Afghanistan, monitoring everything that moves over hundreds of square miles.

The military already uses unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance, intelligence and combat operations. Now, the coming unmanned long-endurance multi- intelligence vehicle, or LEMV, will patrol for three weeks at time, sending a constant stream of data to operators below, at a fraction of the operating cost of current unmanned aerial vehicles.

The Army's sudden interest in the technology that it pioneered in its basic form as the spotter balloon is, in part, related to the need to step up surveillance and intelligence to help compensate for the drop in troop numbers. "We're exchanging technology for people," says Alan Metzger, head of Northrop's LEMV program.