With the maiden flight of a 250-foot-long Army surveillance blimp slated for mid-December near Washington, officials overseeing the experiment are touting the system's safety features.
The reaction comes amid concern by some on Capitol Hill who have mused that flying two aerostats of the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Elevated Netted Sensor System class at 10,000 feet near a major metropolitan area during winter is asking for trouble.
U.S. Northern Command spokeswoman Maj. Beth Smith tells Inside the Army, however, that such concerns are unfounded.
"We do not expect to fly JLENS during severe weather where a break-away is possible, and have reinforced the air vehicle with stronger ground tackle and better safety procedures," she wrote in an email.
Smith said her command has taken "appropriate precautions" to avoid one of the aerostats breaking loose from its tether. The line connecting the air vehicle to its ground station is an inch thick and made of Vectran, which Smith said is stronger than Kevlar. There is also an "aluminum mylar wrapping and lightning braid" on the cord's exterior, she added.
The aerostats will be flown at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, 60 miles northeast of Washington and 20 miles outside of Baltimore. Because the installation's airspace is already restricted, "very little additional airspace" of a 1.5 mile buffer had to be coordinated with the Federal Aviation Administration. "There is little to zero impact to civil aviation routes," Smith said.
Equipped with sensors, the Army wants to test the system's utility in early warning for air and missile defense. Ground service officials originally wanted to buy 16 systems, each consisting of two aerostats. But the planned buy was later reduced to two -- one for testing and one to be kept in reserve.
Raytheon, which makes the system, has been singing the technology's praises despite the Army cuts. Company officials envision JLENS playing a key role in the suite of air and missile defense systems Raytheon hopes to sell to the government.
The system uses two radars, one mounted under each aerostat. One is a surveillance radar that can detect targets like missiles, aircraft, ground vehicles and boats as far away as 340 miles, according to Raytheon. The other is an X-band radar that tracks targets for potential interception (ITA, Sept. 29).
According to Smith, a new tether has a "200 percent margin of safety under the worst-case survival conditions, and an even larger margin of safety for the worst-case operating conditions." Toward the end of a tether's two-year life cycle, the margins are reduced to 28 percent, she said.
Raytheon program manager Doug Burgess said recently that JLENS reliability problems found by Pentagon testers last year at White Sands Missile Range, NM, were probably due to analysts hoisting the system up and down too often. "We're looking forward to the operational cadence that we know the system was built and designed for," he said of the upcoming operational test in a Sept. 12 interview with ITA. "That's up for 30 days, down for a short amount of time for some preventative maintenance and quick top-off of helium, and then back up." -- Sebastian Sprenger