It seems things are going well in the airship world. LEMV is scheduled for first flight on the 5th or 7th of June. After that it will fly to Florida to pick up it's surveillance gondola and then head out to some Theater after that (hopefully not Occupy.) Blue Devil is close to completion and it's first flight will probably take place around the same time. In a recent
blog post the head of Mav6 vented his frustration with the Airforce on the continual snowballing of the Blue Devil Block 2 program and their resilience despite said fact. It appears that Blue Devil has come in about 40 million under budget, which when we take into consideration that most military contractors never live up to their promises and almost always go over budget, is no small feat.
Aeros is also getting Congressional funding and plans to have their prototype ML866 Aeroscraft ready by December. As you can see from the picture above they are on their way to reaching that goal.
If this pace keeps up Airships will be here sooner rather then later. Lets hope for the best!
What a great picture of the Aeroscraft ML866. I'm something of an airship enthusiast, so I'm sure that we'll both be anxious fonder th historic first flight of the LEMV in a few days.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised I didn't find this pleasant little blog sooner. Well done.