Unfortunately the military seems to be in a sad state these days. Military contractors always do one of two things, they overstate the capabilities and expected delivery of their product or they undercut the projected costs to fractions of the real costs that ultimately the taxpayer ends up paying. Everything is made by the contractor that overstates their product's capabilities and flat out lies about the costs to the point of fraud. It would seem telling the truth about your product's capabilities and real costs to develop said capabilities is a type of ritual suicide in the defense world, and thus never happens.
LEMV now unfortunately appears to be one such endeavor. MAV6 had posted a scientific study about the likelihood that LEMV would be able to stay in the air for 21 days on their blog. The study concluded that LEMV was unlikely to stay in the air even 5 days and that the Blue Devil 2 was more likely to achieve it's projected 6 to 7 days because it was a traditional LTA craft. It did state that Hybrid Airships would still be undoubtedly better at cargo operations then LTA airships but the stated 21 day surveillance was highly questionable because there would never be enough fuel to carry the fuel needed to stay in the air for 21 days.
Well, now LEMV is apparently 6 tons overweight, and somehow, as if by magic, this changes it's projected operational duration from 21 days to 3 or 4 days (Source: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/blimp/)
This seems to be rather convenient, especially when we consider that the real projections done by a scientist concluded that the 21 day endurance was probably the result of inflating the blimp with super-powered-ego-particals created by Northrup broad members. This indicates to me that Northrup lied to get the contract in the first place.
This is a clear and present danger to the United States Of America. We now live in a country where government contractors who lie are rewarded for their lies and government contractors who tell the truth are shown the door. When do the higher ups in the military plan to correct this problem? Shouldn't there be some type of good conduct initiative? Where contractors who live up to their contracts are rewarded with more contracts and contractors who don't are penalized by not participating in the next set of contracts?
I have been critical of the military for picking the Grumman/HAV team over the Lockheed team because Lockheed already had a working prototype that was much bigger then the Grummen/HAV team. They also showed a great amount of initiative by building the prototype P-791 on their own dime. Realisticly the Army should have picked Lockheed, but because Grummen had overinflated their projections to something beyond reality, Grumman won the contract. And now we are paying the price.
The Army is thinking of flying LEMV at 16,000ft where it might be able to stay up for 16 days. But I would not count on the 16KW of electrical power for that whole time, something tells me they probably got that one wrong too.
Fortunately this is not a deathblow for the airship program as a whole. Hybrid airships are still the most efficient option for transporting air-cargo, they just aren't as good at surveillance as the military had hoped for. And when we consider the ever growing police state we now live in, that might not be a bad thing.
