As you may or may not know, Airships are a highly durable platform on the battlefield. They can take a lot of bullets before they will lose any noticeable amount of helium. Hybrids are even more durable then that, because even if they lose a good amount of helium they can just point the nose higher to compensate for the loss of lift and keep flying.
I have pushed for the idea of the Government spending military funds on acquiring a Battle blimp in the past. But at the time, it was pointed out to me that the big problem would be in the maintenance costs of maintaining an envelope that keeps getting filled with holes on a regular basis.
No one questioned that it would be a good asset on the battlefield, but that it would be too costly to operate compared to an A-10C in the long run.
Well, as you may know from looking at my post about a week ago, Lockheed Martin has solved this issue with their spider repair bots. This make's me wonder, is the Hybrid Battle Airship feasible now?
I think the answer is, Yes!
These spider bots really open the door for allowing the envelopes of these blimps to take a beating and still grantee that a day or 2 later they will be back and ready to fight again with far cheaper maintenance costs.
This capability could allow the Military to transfer about 200 troops at a speed of 125 knots to an active war zone, maintain all the capabilities of an AC130 for CAS when they get there and, on top of that, it can have improved anti-air capabilities over the AC130 as it has more volume for defensive weapons compared to airplanes.
Combine this with it's extremely long loiter times and we are talking about a game changer in the way the a tactical battlefield is operated.
Plus operating costs are cheep, in the area of about $600-$2000 an hour to operate. Compare this to the $15,000 per hour cost of flying an A-10C and I think we can see why the Airship really is a game changer.
Right now the Air Force is talking about how they are going to replace the A-10c. In the game of close air support, it and the AC130 are sitting in the Kings Throne for keeping our solders alive when they are being suppressed by the enemy on the ground.
The Air Force has presented a plan of buying some A-29s for the short term and then building a whole new air frame or updating the A-10 or the OV-10 Branco. In fact the OV-10 has come out of retirement and been used in Afghanistan recently for CAS.
I do really like the idea of getting cheaper turboprop multi-role fighters like the A-29 or OV-10 with low operating costs to replace the A-10, but the Battle Blimp really represents a game changer and could make the whole process unnecessary if we invested in that over building a new air frame for CAS alone.
Still, I gotta admit, those A-29s look damn sexy to me:
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