Up, Up and Away
TCOM employees in Elizabeth City, N.C., work on a 71-meter aerostat destined for service in the Middle East.
Home of a major U.S. Coast Guard facility, Elizabeth City, N.C., is also the place where blimps are born.
Well, to be completely accurate, airship envelopes and tethered aerostats, or unmanned balloons, both products of TCOM, LP. The Maryland-headquartered firm employs about 50 people at two North Carolina sites where lighter-than-air craft are manufactured and repaired.
"It’s not exactly a business where people are beating down your door," admits TCOM’s Charles Knauss. But it’s a specialty with a niche all its own. TCOM annually manufactures three or four large tethered aerostats – aerodynamically shaped balloons 233 feet long, able to hold 520,000 cubic feet of helium – and several smaller models. The company also manufactures the tough Tedlar and Dacron skins, or envelopes, used on the large, manned airships hovering over football stadiums.
Their products are sold worldwide and have a variety of uses, among them border surveillance duties for the United States government. Kuwait also employed one of TCOM’s aerostats to keep an eye on its border with Iraq, says Knauss, which gave the Kuwaiti royal family ample warning that Saddam Hussein’s army was on its way at the start of the Gulf War. TCOM’s Elizabeth City base, a former U.S. Navy blimp base, is a "safe haven" for wounded and tired blimps too, says Knauss. Its huge hangar, built especially for airships, is 1,000 feet long, 300 feet wide and a towering 200 feet tall. It’s been temporary home to the Tommy Hilfiger blimp, the Met Life blimps and others.
Though he’s never piloted an airship, Knauss is one of those lucky people who have actually flown in a lighter-than-air ship, an experience, he says, like "a slow, smooth boat ride on a lazy day." |
