What would you pick as the worst form of air travel for anything? Bi-planes? Those Da Vinci corkscrew helicopters? Maybe the Coyote launched from a catapult? Don't worry, the Federal Government knows how to pick. How about a military blimp?!
Yes, I typed "military blimp" and no, this isn't the early 1900's. The Pentagon has been using these blimps for some kind of bloated, military-industrial complex clusterf*ck just east of Baltimore. $2.7 billion dollars (with a "B") is the price tag. Ironically, the entire City of Baltimore's budget is only $2.66 billion, but I'm sure the city which was the setting for "The Wire", couldn't possibly use the extra money. I'm sure the streets are a drug-free utopia where old people walk confidently at night and the schools crank out nothing but fully employed college students.
The blimp had to be monitored by two F-16 fighter jets, the fuel and flight time of which I'm sure were paid for out of the pocket of the generals responsible for this mess. NORAD worked with the FAA to ensure planes didn't blunder into the untethered blimp or that World War 3 didn't start. So far, so good, but the blimp dragged it's cable tether across powerlines near Bloomsburg, PA.
The blimp is part of JLENS, which allegedly provides radar surveillance and fire control quality data on Army and Joint networks. Supposedly it would protect us from both manned and unmanned aircraft, cruise missiles and swarming boats and tanks. You know, all the things that ISIS is probably preparing to launch against Baltimore.
But an investigation by the Baltimore Sun showed that the blimps were a "failure" and that after 17 years the blimps were "hobbled by defective software, vulnerability to bad weather and poor reliability."
If you bought a defective car or a computer, do you think it would take you 17 years to figure out that it's not working? But hey, I guess if you were getting a slice of the $2.7 billion profit, you probably wouldn't care.
And who does care? Will anyone in Congress? After 17 years (that's since the late previous century) it's probably just another slice of pork for the Maryland politicians. "I bring you jobs! I bring you money! I bring you out of control blimps!"
Maybe we should just build a wall of actual stacks of dollar bills. At least a money wall would keep something protected and it would probably be cheaper. Plus it wouldn't blow away. Although judging by the way the military treats its expensive toys, it probably would.