DARPA FINANCES AIRSHIP RESEARCH.

Byline: Jim Skeen Staff Writer

PALMDALE - Lockheed Martin and a Tarzana company have been hired by the Pentagon to study possible designs for a giant airship capable of transporting soldiers and gear around the world to battle areas.

Code-named ``Walrus,'' this wouldn't be your great-grandfather's zeppelin.

``In distinct contrast to earlier-generation airships, the Walrus aircraft will be a heavier-than-air vehicle and will generate lift through a combination of aerodynamics, thrust vectoring and gas-buoyancy generation and management,'' the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said in a statement announcing the contract awards.

DARPA, the Pentagon agency that financed the early development of the stealth fighter, awarded a $2.9 million contract to Lockheed Martin in Palmdale and a $3.2 million contract to Aeros Aeronautical Systems Corp. of Tarzana for the first phase of work on Walrus.

Airships have a military history dating back more than two centuries.

Hot-air balloons were used to watch enemy forces for Napoleon's armies and served both the North and the South during the U.S. Civil War. Germany sent airships with rigid frames - the zeppelins - to bomb London and Paris during World War I.

The United States had rigid-frame airships after World War I, but they crashed and burned. During World War II, the U.S. Navy hunted Nazi submarines with frameless blimps. Through the first years of the Cold War, blimps with radar watched for Soviet bombers.

The new type of operational airship is envisioned to be capable of carrying more than 500 tons of personnel and equipment around the world to battle areas. Able to travel nearly 14,000 miles in seven days, the airship would also be able to operate from unimproved landing areas and with little in the way of support equipment or facilities, DARPA said.

Aeros, based in Tarzana, has done work in Palmdale recently. The company conducted flight tests and pilot training for one of its airships out of the former B-1B bomber assembly site during the spring.

Aeros officials said the Palmdale site would be an ideal location to conduct flights with a Walrus technology demonstrator airship.

Lockheed Martin said the contract award will not result in any perceptible change in employment numbers at the company's Palmdale plant.

During the program's first phase, the two teams will look at design concepts and come with a technology development plan to reduce technical risks.

DARPA will then select one contractor to continue the program's research, which will include building a technology demonstrator airship.

Jim Skeen, [phone]

james.skeen(at)dailynews.com