THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512310084
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
When a predawn fire last August leveled the huge wooden hangar south of here, where blimp-like aerostats were built, there was concern whether the manufacturer would ever rise out of the ashes.
But unlike Phoenix, a mythical bird that waited 600 years to shake off the soot, it took but a few months for TCOM to get an aerostat back in the air.
And the Columbia, Md., company's bird started its flight this time from a vacant Kmart store in Elizabeth City.
Aerostats look like World War II barrage balloons, helium-filled sausages that are tethered to 15,000-foot umbilical cables. The aerostats carry radio communications equipment, including TV, as well as long-range radar search gear much favored by Near Eastern countries that like to keep an eye on their neighbors.
U.S. drug enforcement agencies have been using aerostats for several years to keep far-seeing radar eyes on smugglers trying to bring narcotics by land or by sea into the United States.
The inch-thick umbilical cable that tethers the aerostat to its ground control station can carry 30 kilowatts of power for communication or radar equipment mounted inside the balloon. At 15,000 feet, the aerostat radar equipment can spot aircraft or the masts of surface ships nearly 200 miles away.
After the fire at Weeksville, just south of the Elizabeth City Coast Guard Air Base, TCOM had to make a bold decision.
The company had a backlog of aerostat orders and no intention of sinking into its own ashes. Instead, TCOM moved its aerostat operation into the vacant department store building at Halstead Boulevard and Ehringhaus Street in one of the busiest sections of Elizabeth City.
``We've been running two 10-hour shifts a day since we came downtown, and we've already completed two aerostats here,'' said Robert K. Herring, the 45-year-old manufacturing manager for TCOM in Elizabeth City.
It's an unlikely place to build lighter-than-air ships and not for the faint-hearted seamstress. The building is only about 200 feet wide and 200 feet deep when fully stripped of everything but the pillars needed to hold up the roof.
For Herring and TCOM's busy airship builders, those pillars turned out to be a pain in the gas bag.
``The 71-meter aerostat that we build here is 233-feet long and 75-feet high when completed and inflated,'' said Herring. ``Because of the nature of this work, the entire room has to be almost surgically clean, and everybody wears booties over their shoes.''
Not even Herring's skilled workers can fit a 233-foot aerostat into a 200-foot room, so the fabrication of one of the balloons involves a lot of crawling around on the immaculate floor, piecing together the intricate laminated panels and tail fins of each aerostat.
Specially designed gluing machines use heat to ``weld'' the sections of laminated mylar film, dacron polyester and Tedlar fabric that make up the aerostat envelope. Once completed, the gas bag can hold 590,000 cubic feet of helium.
``We ground test the aerostats right here before shipping them off for inflation elsewhere,'' said Herring. TCOM workers partially blow up the bags with air to allow quality control checkers to walk around inside the envelopes during inspections.
TCOM is currently using leased facilities in other parts of the country for the flight testing.
``Eventually we hope to find a location in this area to move to so we'll be able to test the aerostats where we build them, the way we did at the hangar before the fire,'' Herring said.
Herring is a Dillon, S.C., native who came to TCOM from a Coast Guard electrician's berth 20 years ago and worked his way up to top management.
``Nearly all of our workers are from around here,'' Dillon said.
Some of the 70 TCOM workers seem to hold an unspoken nostalgia for the huge old wooden hangar where so many of them started out in the strange business of building aerostats.
``That hangar brought a lot to the party,'' said Herring. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot
Aerostat technicians Anthony Carver and Cathy Buchanan bring two
large panels together to be heat-sealed on an aerostat under
construction at TCOM's temporary quarters at the old Kmart site in
Elizabeth City.
August 1995
BILL TIERNAN/The Virginian-Pilot file
A predawn fire destroyed the huge wooden hangar in Weeksville that
was used by Maryland-based TCOM for building and flight testing
blimp-like aerostats.
by CNB