[Balloon-makers] the Ron Paul blimp banner story concludes

[Dan Nachbar]

I sent the following to an airship list.
I thought members of balloon-makers might be amused as well.

It is a short "trip report" of my excursion with Jon Radowski and
a third member of our ad-hoc blimp banner sewing crew, Michele Benoit.
We were delivering the second of two banners for the Ron Paul blimp to
Elizabeth City, NC from my shop in Amherst, MA.  The launch point was
at a field adjacent to the blimp hangar owned by T-Com, a company that
manufactures blimp envelopes and tethered observation aerostats.

Dan Nachbar
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First and foremost, I've put an unedited "dump" from my digital camera  
at
http://www.personalblimp.com/misc/ecity20071214.html

There are a quite a few photos of the Blackwater blimp, the Skyship, and
particularly of the Skyship banner and its attachment points.  No  
claims of artist
merit are made.  The page has thumbnails of every shot I took. Full- 
sized versions
can be downloaded by clicking on a given thumbnail. The full-sized  
versions
are high resolution (over 2 megs each) so people with slow connections
should click carefully.

The Skyship was scheduled to leave the Elizabeth City hangar around 7  
AM Friday.
The timing was dictated by the combination of the permissible winds
for the hangar doors to be open (something like 7 MPH) and the  
morning's forecast.
It takes several hours to get a banner properly secured.  So the second
banner needed to be delivered by 3 or 4 AM Friday morning in order to
get it installed in time for the expected roll-out weather window.

We finished the second banner on schedule (3 PM Thursday) but on-time  
delivery
was thwarted by a snow storm that brought both road and air travel in  
the
Northeastern part of the US to a halt.  Both AMS's chartered airplane
and our backup commercial flight were grounded.  As a last ditch effort,
I and two of my colleagues tried driving with the banner -- an 11-hour  
trip under
normal conditions.  But road closures (due to accidents) pushed our  
drive to 16+ hours.
As a result, the ship had to be brought out with only one banner in  
place.

The next forecast window for winds sufficiently calm to bring the ship  
back inside
for installation of the second banner is this Sunday.

As for the Blackwater blimp, despite the corporate name it hardly  
seems to be a
secretive (aka "black") project.  The ship was on the field very near  
the group of
reporters and onlookers for the Ron Paul launch.  There was plenty of  
room available
had the Blackwater folks wanted to have their ship attract less  
scrutiny.
My schedule/task precluded my walking over and asking to take a closer  
look.
But pictures from a few hundred meters seemed to be no issue at all.

I did get a few tidbits from talking to the folks on the scene. It  
appears that the
Blackwater team includes people with LTA experience but it is not  
clear that they
have much design experience.  The envelope is a custom design  
(presumably made by T-Com).
The FAA does not permit pilotless flight at the Elizabeth City  
location.  Those flights
are piloted.  In fact, I believe that all of the flights so far have  
been piloted and that
the current work is testing the remote/autonomous (I don't know which  
or both) systems.

I did not see the Blackwater ship fly.  The only "action" during my  
brief
time at the field (I had to get my colleagues to their commercial  
flights home.)
were on-the-ground engine tests.

Dan Nachbar