Ryan, others hail airship in Akron

By Jim Mackinnon

Beacon Journal business writer

AKRON

Lockheed Martin’s highfalutin’ High Altitude Airship prototype is floating.

Albeit, inside the Akron Airdock.

Company executives, at an event Monday afternoon in the Airdock to celebrate Lockheed Martin’s related military blimp program, say money is in place to launch a completed 500,000-cubic-foot, high-tech unmanned prototype next summer. The multimillion-dollar project, announced with great fanfare early in the decade, was postponed after running into federal funding delays in recent years.

‘’Will you hurry up and get that big boy out the door? Because we’re all going to be loving to see that,’’ Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic said as he finished addressing a crowd of about 300 Lockheed Martin employees in the Airdock. Plusquellic was looking out at the large, tethered silver prototype at the other end of the cavernous building.

The prototype, known as HALE-D (for High Altitude Long Endurance-Demonstrator), was not the day’s featured attraction. Instead, the event focused on celebrating Lockheed Martin’s Akron work force for building in record time 17 tethered blimps called aerostats needed by the military to provide surveillance in Afghanistan.

Speakers including Plusquellic and U.S. Reps Tim Ryan, D-Niles, and Betty Sutton, D-Copley Township, praised the employees. Three of the 74,000-cubic-foot, securely tied-down aerostats provided a floating backdrop inside the Summit County-owned hangar on the Lockheed Martin campus.

Ryan told the gathering that the Lockheed Martin facility develops critical technology that the nation needs and that the campus also is about putting people to work.

‘’Lockheed sees that this is a great place to get things done, where you can ramp up production immediately and hit your goals,’’ Ryan said. afterward. ‘’That doesn’t always happen in a lot of places around the country. But it happens in Akron.”