Northrop Grumman's unmanned airship program completes critical design review

Posted by John McHaleMELBOURNE, Fla., 3 Feb. 2011. Northrop Grumman's (NYSE:NOC) Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) completed its critical design review (CDR) only six months after signing the agreement with the U.S. Army to build three airships with 21-day persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capability.Under the agreement, awarded by the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command, Northrop Grumman will design, develop, and test a long-duration hybrid airship system all within an 18-month time period."The power of the LEMV system is that its persistent surveillance capability is built around Northrop Grumman's open architecture design, which provides plug-and-play payload capability to the warfighter and room for mission growth," says Alan Metzger, Northrop Grumman vice president and integrated program team leader of LEMV and airship programs. "The system rapidly accommodates next-generation sensors as emerging field requirements dictate and will provide increased operational utility to battlefield commanders. Today, our system readily integrates into the Army's existing Universal Ground Control Station and Deployable Common Ground System command centers and ground troops in forward operating bases.

"Beyond the value of seamless interoperability, the LEMV system provides a high level of fuel efficiency to the user community -- a crucial part of life cycle logistics and support in theatre," he continues. While LEMV is longer than a football field and taller than a seven-story building, it utilizes approximately 3,500 gallons of fuel for the air vehicle to remain aloft for a 21-day period of service, that's approximately $11,000 at commercial prices."

Critical design review is the fourth major milestone achieved by the program since contract award.

"The entire U.S. Army/Northrop Grumman LEMV industry team has done an outstanding job working through a very aggressive development schedule to achieve all of these important milestones," Metzger says. "The CDR provided an in-depth review of the complete system design of the program giving us the opportunity to assess where we are in our development and air vehicle production. It went very well. The entire team has been collaborating and remains very focused on meeting our objective of delivering this powerful capability into the hands of our combat commanders as soon as possible.

"There are three upcoming major milestones in the next 10 months," he continues, "We'll have hull inflation in the spring and first flight of the airship test article by mid-to-late summer. Upon completion of the development ground and flight testing phase, we expect to transition to a government facility and conduct our final acceptance long endurance flight just before year's end. In early 2012, LEMV will participate in an Army Joint Military Utility Assessment in an operational environment."

Northrop Grumman's industry team includes Hybrid Air Vehicles, Ltd. of the England, Warwick Mills, ILC Dover, AAI Corp., SAIC, and a team of organizations from 18 U.S. states and three countries. In addition to leading the program, Northrop Grumman leads the system integration, and flight and ground control operations for the unmanned vehicle to safely take off and land in worldwide operations.