N.C. ‘blimp barn’ continues to crank out aerostats

One of the contestants in the online contest offered by the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce to find the “coolest Thing Made in North Carolina” is TCOM, L.P.

 

It’s a surveillance aerostat manufacturer located at Weeksville in Pasquotank County (near Elizabeth City).

 

TCOM is a global leader in “lighter-than-air platforms,” providing a “full line of elevated awareness solutions.”

 

Locals still call the facility the old Navy “blimp barn,” a remnant of World War II.

 

The massive, corrugated, soft steel structure is 1,040 feet long, 150 feet high and 296 feet wide, according to Our State magazine correspondent Earl Swift.

 

“It’s big beyond sense: 20 stories high, humpbacked and futuristic,” he said. “A tractor-trailer becomes a toy on a floor the size of six football fields.”

 

“Designed to shelter six of the Navy’s patrol blimps, it actually accommodated nine, with room to spare,” Swift said. “The structure is a monolithic monument to the Navy blimps that helped defeat Nazi Germany’s infamous U-boats.”

 

The hangar was commissioned as Naval Air Station Weeksville LTA (lighter than air) more than 80 years ago on April 1, 1942.

 

Weeksville was viewed as “an ideal southern location” to house the Navy blimps, to complement New Jersey’s Lakehurst blimp base. Weeksville beat out 42 other sites that were considered by the Navy, Swift said.

 

The presence of the U.S. Coast Guard in Pasquotank County prior to World War II may have contributed to the attractiveness of the Weeksville site to the Navy. (Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City had opened in 1940.)

 

Blimps operating out of Weeksville were well-positioned to protect the North Carolina coast as well as the Navy’s important assets in the Hampton Roads area and Chesapeake Bay in Virginia.

 

A second blimp hangar was built at Weeksville and opened in 1943. Steel was in short supply during the war years, so the second hangar was built with wood. It measured 900 feet in length, practically doubling the station’s capacity. At maximum utilization, about 885 officers and enlisted personnel were assigned to NAS Weeksville.

 

Swift said “the best vehicle to detect German U-boats was the blimp. Blimps could fly slowly for extended periods, hover and carry the sensors and armament to protect the shipping lanes off the East Coast. From the gondola of a blimp, a U-boat at shallow depth was plain to see.”

 

“Once found, a U-boat was in trouble. Blimp crews could summon warships to the scene or tangle with the marauder themselves. Navy blimps were armed with depth charges and machine guns,” he wrote.

 

Local historian Stephen D. Chalker said the Weeksville blimps “were nonrigid airships with no internal frame, unlike dirigibles such as the Hindenburg. Each blimp was 252 feet long, and could carry a crew of up to 18. The ship had a cruising speed of 60 miles per hour and was capable of remaining aloft for more than 38 hours. Thus, its range of 2,280 miles made the blimp ideal for convoy escort duties.”

 

Swift wrote: “Once deployed on patrol runs and as convoy escorts, the blimps all but halted German sub attacks on Allied merchantmen. The blimps helped turn the Battle of the Atlantic.”

 

The Weeksville station was eventually decommissioned and sold. The facility has been owned and operated by TCOM, which is based in Columbia, Md., since 1996.

 

The company’s state-of-the-art manufacturing plant specializes in unmanned tethered aerostats that are deployed for defense operations requiring intelligence gathering, surveillance and aerial reconnaissance.

 

All that is pretty cool.