TCOM Blimp Test and Development Site, North Carolina

This is one of the few places in the nation still dedicated to blimp R&D work. It started out as Naval Station Weeksville, 40 miles south of Norfolk, Virginia, one of eight new blimp bases established during WWII. Construction started on the first of two hangars at Weeksville in 1941, before the US officially entered the war. Made of steel, it has a design similar to the few hangars built for earlier rigid airships, like the Goodyear Airdock at Akron, Ohio, with clamshell doors that opened on curved tracks around the end of the building. The second hangar was built after the war started, and so was made of wood, to conserve steel for the war effort. After the Naval Air Station was decommissioned in 1957, the base was used for aerospace research by NASA and others, including testing of one of the first communications satellites, NASA’s Project Echo, a reflective metallic sphere, 100 feet in diameter, which was inflated in a hangar in 1959, and, again, in space in 1960. In 1995, with the site used primarily by Westinghouse, a welder’s torch started a fire in the wooden hangar, burning it to the ground, and destroying the Sentinel 1000, a Westinghouse airship, and other surveillance blimps that were stored inside the hanger. After the fire, Westinghouse sold its airship and surveillance divisions. In 1996, the aerospace contractor TCOM moved into the steel hangar to develop small blimps and aerostats for the government, used primarily as radar platforms. Today TCOM still operates the site as a manufacturing, production, and testing location for airborne persistent surveillance solutions, including the TARS tethered aerostats flown along the US/Mexico border.