The Spy Blimp That “Never Was” (Wink Wink)
So the Air Force built this giant spy blimp. After bragging about how awesome it is they now “plan” on “pulling the plug” on this “project”
I bet if you live in Afghanistan you can still catch a glimps of this mega-blimp spy ship that “never left the ground”
from wired.com
After spending more than $140 million, the Air Force is poised to pull the plug on its ambitious project to send a king-sized, all-seeing spy blimp to Afghanistan. Which is a bit of a strange move: Not only is the scheduled first flight of the 370-foot-long “Blue Devil Block 2” airship less than six weeks away, but just yesterday, a top Air Force official bragged to Congress about the blimp’s predecessor, the “Blue Devil Block 1″ program. In other words, the Air Force is set to ground its mega-blimp spy ship before it even gets off the ground — literally.
Not long ago, Blue Devil and its kind were being pushed as the future of aerial surveillance. Instead of a drone’s single sensor, Blue Devil would employ an array of cameras and eavesdropping gear to keep tabs on entire villages for days at a time. And with so much space aboard the airship, racks and racks of processors could process the data generated by those sensors in the sky, easing the burden on intelligence analysts currently overloaded by drones’ video feeds.
Now, that lighter-than-air future could be in jeopardy, thanks to a series of schedule delays, technical complications and, above all, inflated costs. But it’s not just Blue Devil that’s in trouble. The Navy justdeflated its MZ-3A blimp. The Army’s Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle airship, which was supposed to be in Afghanistan by now, has run into significant development roadblocks as well. Blimps’ status as the Next Big Thing in high-flying spycraft is in jeopardy.
catch the rest of the story over here
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