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October 16, 2006

Lofty goal | The Telford Group pursues military aircraft projects

By Chris Churchill
Blimps seem like the Rodney Dangerfield of aircraft. Slow and lumbering, they don't zip gloriously across the sky. They don't hurry jet-setting passengers to glamorous destinations. In fact, they're typically treated as just floating billboards, useful for little more than displaying a gigantic corporate logo to crowds below.

But there was a time when blimps ˆ— or airships, as they're more officially called ˆ— were the latest in military technology: They played, for example, a significant role in World War I for both Britain and Germany, and were used extensively for coastline surveillance by the U.S. Navy in World War II. In subsequent years, though, their military prominence faded as their advertising uses grew.

A Bangor-based company, the Telford Group, is aiming to bring the airship back to military glory ˆ— and has received significant funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to help it do so. Telford is developing an unmanned, remote-controlled blimp the military apparently believes could be useful for terrorism surveillance and patrolling borders.

In Aroostook County, at the former Loring Air Force base in Limestone, Telford is developing a prototype ˆ— and hopes to soon be manufacturing airships there. "We think there is a real future for airships, because they are very energy efficient," says Bob Ziegelaar, Telford's president. "You don't need to use all that energy to keep it airborne. The hydrogen will keep it airborne."

Telford is now retrofitting an existing government-owned airship. When and if the company demonstrates its model will work, Telford intends to begin working on the design and development of a much larger and more modern airship that could eventually, the company hopes, bring a significant number of new jobs to Aroostook County. "It's an important project," says Telford Allen III, the company's chairman. "And it's an important project that we're doing in Maine, which is important to me."

Telford is receiving technological support for the project from Per Lindstrand, an aeronautical engineer known for trans-Atlantic hot-air balloon flights and for attempting to balloon around the Earth with British entrepreneur Richard Branson. And Telford is receiving significant financial support from the U.S. government, which recently announced that the program would receive $1.5 million in funding for 2007, the third year in a row it has received that amount.

Telford officials say the blimp work is just a small part of what the company does for the U.S. military. Telford says much of the company's military work occurs at a facility it has in Alabama, and that the company is involved in intelligence gathering activities in locations such as South American and Korea. "Unfortunately, I can't talk a lot about it," Allen says, citing security restrictions imposed by the government. "It's tough to talk about a lot of what we do."

Flying the crowded skies
While some of what Telford does is kept intentionally murky to outsiders, it's clear, at least, that the company has come a long way from its start in 1982 as a small, Waterville charter business that moved passengers and cargo around the state, including loads for United Parcel Service.

In 2000, after a dispute with officials in Waterville, Telford moved its headquarters to Bangor, and soon after the business started to dramatically change. The company began to focus instead on airplane maintenance and repair, the sale of aircraft parts, and supplying repair and other services to the government. In 2003, Telford sold the cargo and charter divisions of its business. "We really exited the businesses by which the company grew up," Ziegelaar says. "The Telford family has been pretty adventurous. They have not hesitated to explore new horizons."

Today, according to Ziegelaar, Telford is a $50 million to $60 million company employing 85 workers in Maine. And about half of the company's business involves supplying services to the federal government and military. "We've made an effort to go after that in the last few years," Ziegelaar says. "It's a relatively new development for the company."

Richard Huber Jr., president of the Akron, Ohio-based Lighter than Air Society, an airship fan club that claims 700 members in 14 states, says Telford is hardly the only company attempting to develop newly relevant airships. While conceding that the vast majority of airships are used as floating billboards, Huber says recent years have brought an upswing in interest in blimp-related technology. "I have followed it up and down for 40 years," he says. "But I've never seen this kind of emphasis."

Huber says there are projects underway to develop high-altitude blimps useful in missile-defense systems and brawny blimps capable of hauling military machinery. Huber, thrilled by the resurgence, says the benefits of the blimp are clear, particularly for surveillance work. "Lighter-than-air is a niche technology that thrives on the fact that it is always the lowest cost ˆ— sometimes by a degree of magnitude ˆ— way to do a particular job," he says. "It also has the ability to stay in one spot for a very long time. With the airplane, everyone just waits for it to go away before resuming whatever it was they were doing."

So like the fabled tortoise competing with the speedy hare, the airship may not be out of the game ˆ— and may earn some newfound respect. Officials at Telford believe in the blimp's potential. "I think it has a good future," Allen says. "I see it as an opportunity for us. It may turn into something."

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