DATE: Saturday, June 21, 1997               TAG: 9706210351

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY, N.C.              LENGTH:   72 lines

BLIMPS COMING BACK TO CAROLINA SKIES

For the first time in 40 years, the huge clamshell doors on the last remaining blimp hangar at a former U.S. Naval Air Station will soon be majestically opening and closing.

The 200-foot-high, 500-ton doors are being limbered up for a public performance at 10 a.m. Thursday when T-Com, a Maryland-based airship builder, ``rededicates'' the enormous hangar, a $7 million construction and repair facility that will bring blimps back into the skies over northeastern North Carolina.

In 1995, T-Com's original hangar, a wooden structure thought to be the largest in the world, was destroyed in a spectacular fire at the base, located near Weeksville, about 10 miles south of Elizabeth City. T-Com purchased and renovated another, slightly smaller structure, known as Air Dock No. One, on the base.

During World War II, gung-ho Navy blimp crews operating out of Elizabeth City developed the long-range antisubmarine strategy that helped win the critical Battle of the Atlantic against German submarines.

Today, much of T-Com's work involves building tethered sky-spies known as aerostats. The helium-filled aerostats look like barrage-balloons but they can lift sophisticated radar equipment thousands of feet into the sky, giving an aerostat a radar warning range of 200 miles or more.

It was an aerostat that gave Kuwait the first alert that Saddam Hussein's troops were preparing to invade, according to T-Com officials.

Each aerostat costs $25 million, including the ground control facility that is connected to the unpowered gas-bag by a 1-inch tether that contains the radar umbilical.

T-Com's aerostats are also popular with U.S. drug enforcement agencies. Quite a few of the balloons are on patrol along U.S. borders and in the Caribbean.

But first, T-Com had to open the stubborn doors of Air Dock No. One.

``Those doors on the Navy hangar known as Air Dock No. One were literally welded shut in the 1960s when a former tenant assumed they would never be opened again,'' said Eric Schwartz, a new-products manager at T-Com's headquarters in Columbia, Md.

``For a while we wondered if we'd have to get chains and tractors to pull the doors open again, but after maintenance and lubrication the doors are moving again.''

After the spectacular fire on Aug. 3, 1995, T-Com negotiated to buy Air Dock No. One from IXL, a Texas-based kitchen cabinet company that then occupied the structure.

Schwartz said T-Com has invested at least $7 million in the present operation of refurbishing Air Dock No. One as a permanent manufacturing center.

``It's been a lot of work for us to get back on our feet after the devastating loss of our old wooden hangar,'' said Dave Barlow, president and CEO of T-Com in Maryland.

``Without the dedication of our employees, and the willingness of the community to help us, those big doors on Air Dock No. One might have remained closed forever,'' Barlow said.

After the fire, the T-Com workforce moved its operation into an empty Kmart building in a downtown Elizabeth City mall.

``We kept going as best we could but our new facility in Air Dock No. One will get us back up to speed,'' said Schwartz.

T-Com officials said repair work on existing blimps and the building of new aerostats will more than justify the expensive refurbishing of Air Dock No. One.

``We've already figured out that we can get six or more of our various sizes of aerostats, fully inflated, into the hangar,'' said Schwartz. ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian Pilot

Employees at T-Com work around an uninflated aerostat on Thursday.

The company's enormous hangar will be ``rededicated'' next week. KEYWORDS: BLIMPS

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