"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
dakotatelephone...
Something like this has been done before; the Navy's biggest blimp, the
ZPG-3W, had a large (42 foot) rotating radar antenna inside of its gasbag.
Four of these were built in the late 1950's.

I found a reference that puts the weight of that radar at 12,000 lbs!
According to a friend of mine who was a Navy blimp crewman his younger days,
at least one of those radars came lose and crashed through the gondola,
smashing the operator. (a quick Google search did not yield a reference to
that accident)

To me, the LTA displays are some of the more fascinating artifacts at the
National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola FL.

Vaughn