The Edgefighter

M1400 airship tail fin

Jay Harrison — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:56:48 +0000

The M1400 airship is some 370+ feet long. And as one would expect, its tail fins are quite large. Following is a picture of one tail fin prior to final assembly. The fin structure consists of three components that, upon assembly, will reach to approximately 30-feet in height. The tail fin structure will be covered with a woven synthetic material prior to rigging on the M1400 hull. Also pictured is the leading edge of the M1400 tail fin. Unlike the main tail fin assemblies, the leading edge is composed of hardened carbon fiber, which provides enhanced structural support, aerodynamic efficiency, and strike protection for the tail fin.

M1400 tail fin components (base, leading edge, top section, and mid section) prior to final assembly

M1400 airship Thielert main drive engine testing

Jay Harrison — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:58:33 +0000

Following is a short video clip shot Friday 20 Jan 2012 of the M1400 airship Thielert main drive engine in action. The M1400 is equipped with three 4-liter, 310 HP, twin turbo diesels driving 11-foot props. One of the key innovations Mav6 developed for the M1400 propulsion system is a long-endurance, lightweight belt transmission. Early in the development of the M1400 prototype, our analysis indicated that the weight and mean time to failure of a conventional reduction gear was not optimum for the low-RPM operation of the airship prop. Based on this insight, we set about designing a novel belt drive transmission tailored to long-endurance airship operations. So far it’s working like a champ!

Enter Iran

Jay Harrison — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:55:31 +0000

It should come as no surprise that DoD is taking a hard look at Iranian adventurism in the Middle East and possible military contingencies. Following is a military scenario focusing on the strategic epicenter of a conflict with Iran: the Straights of Hormuz.

Map courtesy of Mark Thompson

One M1400 airship deployed over the UAE and equipped with SIGINT, EO/IR, and radar payloads can provide nearly continuous (9-days per mission), full-spectrum ISR coverage of the entire region of interest at a small fraction of the cost of alternate ISR platforms (e.g. BAMS, Reaper, AWACS, EP-3, LEMV, etc.). Check out the following graphic…

Choke points in the data supply chain

Jay Harrison — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:17:58 +0000

Data has no inherent value. To be useful, data must flow to agents who will ultimately process, analyze, and synthesize it to produce information that drives decisions. The recent conversation in DoD has focused on what is referred to as the “big data problem,” that is, since we don’t know what’s important in the data being collected, everything must be saved. But this is much harder than it sounds.

The problem can be summed up best with an example. One ARGUS wide-area EO sensor collects approximately 6 PB of data in a 24-hr period. The following graphic gives you an idea of how much data we are talking about.

How much data is a petabyte? (courtesy of Mozy.com)

Data is ubiquitous, storage is commoditized, comms are precious

As daunting as the data explosion might seem, it has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the supply of mass data storage solutions that leverage “cloud” architectures. The “big data problem” actually has less to do with data storage than it does with transporting the data, that is, moving data from the edge (where it’s collected) to the core (where it’s stored).

The key constraint in the data storage equation is comms. And comms doesn’t scale. To my knowledge, there are no near term, brute force solutions that alleviate this constraint. Wireless data links provide nowhere near the throughput required of today’s military data sources (e.g. ARGUS), and expeditionary operating environments don’t lend themselves to the installation of physical pipes.

Save all the data?

The current state of the art allows us to save all of the data (more or less), but it doesn’t allow us to move all of the data from the edge to the cloud. It’s clear that we need to start thinking about this problem in a different way…

Data is not important. It’s the information that can be gleaned from the data that matters. The old data paradigm emphasizes precision: save only what you consider to be relevant at the time the data is collected. This approach works only so long as you are dealing with a more or less static context where “relevance” can be readily established.

In the contemporary threat environment, operational context is constantly changing. Since relevance can’t be established a priori, the natural inclination is to save all of the data based on some indeterminate future value. But “data hoarding” only works so long as the means to aggregate massively distributed data actually exists.

Analytics at the edge

It may be within the realm of the possible to save all of the data, but it’s not possible to move all of that data around. This realization has led the community to consider approaches that aggregate metadata (i.e. data that describes the underlying data sets). Such approaches provide a valuable window into the distributed data inventory but fail to address the problem of leveraging the aggregate data to produce information.

A smarter solution is to process data at the edge to derive feature vectors that describe the information contained in the data. More processing (and not just static data storage) at the edge supports rapid indexing, correlation, and fusion of data to establish the rich contextual relationships between data sets along with the spatial, temporal, phenomenological derivatives that capture the underlying dynamics of the data. Rather than “storing everything,” such an approach enables the community to “exploit everything” and store only what is needed.

Processing at the point of collection is the key idea underwriting Mav6′s Service Oriented Horizontal Information Exchange (SOHIX), which is the computational backbone of the Blue Devil Block II Payload Integration Infrastructure (PII). Leveraging SOHIX and the parallelized SOHIX data processing architecture, we are turning raw sensor data into actionable information that can be disseminated and accessed over conventional air-to-ground data links.

M1400 airship hull inflation milestones

Jay Harrison — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:41:31 +0000

M1400 airship cars

Jay Harrison — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:06:02 +0000

We completed a successful test fit of the main propulsion engine on the M1400 airship power car yesterday (pictured in the foreground below), while main engine endurance testing continues… The M1400 payload car is pictured in the background.

M1400 airship power car (foreground) and payload car (background)

M1400 Airship Landing Gear Test Fit

Jay Harrison — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:45:27 +0000

Another productive day for the M1400 development effort. Engine testing is underway, and landing gear was successfully installed on the power car (see below).

M1400 landing gear pylon

M1400 Airship Engine Testing

Jay Harrison — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:46:18 +0000

M1400 airship main drive engine mounted on engine test stand

It’s a beautiful winter day in Elizabeth City, NC, and we’re gearing up for endurance testing of the M1400 airship main drive engines.

NATO and Smart Defense

Jay Harrison — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 14:49:09 +0000

We have been watching with some interest the emergence of a Smart Defense thrust within NATO. As best I can tell, the NATO idea involves – at least in part – specialization of certain participating countries armed forces to complement the overall NATO force structure. While such an approach raises interesting questions relative to national sovereignty, the underlying idea is fully consistent with our Smart Defense platform: more capability for less cost. Check out an interesting blog post from the Latvian Institute of International Affairs on this topic.

Expect Smart Defense to be a major topic of conversation at the upcoming May 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago.

Cool M1400 airship pics

Jay Harrison — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:42:37 +0000

Now that substantially all of the aircraft sub-systems and components have arrived, we are in the home stretch for delivering the prototype M1400 airship to the Air Force for the Blue Devil Block II program. I am headed down to Mav6′s Elizabeth City, NC facility – where we are developing the M1400 – for the next several weeks to oversee the final push.

Following are some (more or less) recent pics detailing M1400 systems.

M1400 propulsion test rig

Lateral Thruster System pylon installed on M1400 hull

Water/fuel tank racks installed on M1400 hull