Walrus/HULA Heavy-Lift Blimps Rise, Fall… Rise?

Latest updates[?]: Updates from 2011, including the unveiling of Aeros' Project Pelican hybrid airship, NTSB vindication, reports on the growth of the airship industry, and a major GAO report.

Goo goo g’joob!
By John MacNeill

The Walrus heavy-transport blimp (“heavy” as in “1-2 million pounds”) was among a range of projects on the drawing board in the mid ’00s. It offered the potential for a faster and more versatile sealift substitute. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded phase 1 contracts, but things seemed to end in 2006. Yet the imperatives driving the need for Walrus, or even for a much smaller version of it, remain. Is the Walrus dead? And could it, or a Hybrid Ultra Large Aircraft (HULA) like it, rise again?

Recent presentations and initiatives in several US armed services, and some commercial ventures, indicate that it might.

Rapid Fire March 6, 2013: Software Cost Challenges

• The US House of Representatives will vote on HR 933 today, a bill which would fund DoD through the end of the current fiscal year. The White House implies [PDF] that it will likely get signed.

• The US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee is holding posture hearings with military commanders this week.

• Program Management Aviation-272 (PMA-272) conducted competitive prototyping during the Technology Development (TD) phase of its Joint and Allied Threat Awareness System (JATAS–AN/AAR-59) program. Defense AT&L [PDF] looks at how that effort went. In the same issue, an article on how to deliver software affordably, as the software footprint of defense systems is exploding.

• The latest Crosstalk [PDF] covers Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM), a growing concern in the age of counterfeit electronics: