Balloon payment: CargoLifter's giant airships could boost the state's economy. But can they get aloft before the company runs out of cash?

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Feature

Fifteen miles east of Kinston, gulls flock behind huge John Deere tractors to pluck insects from freshly plowed fields that spread from one horizon to the other. This stretch along the county line, like the rest of Craven and Jones counties, is as flat as a griddle, but Jim Davis, Craven's economic developer, recently asked highway officials to build an overlook on U.S. 70. "Just like the ones they have on the Blue Ridge Parkway," he says.

Here's his thinking: In a few years on 5,800 acres near the crossroads of Cove City, a building as tall as any in Raleigh will rise. Periodically, its clamshell doors will yawn and an airship longer than the battleship USS North Carolina will float out. Davis worries that gawking drivers will crash.

His fear springs from what is yet little more than a concept. The German company behind it, CargoLifter AG, is scrambling to convince a skeptical world that its lighter-than-air cargo carriers can work before it runs out of money to build them -- and the Cove City hangar. Can a slow-moving relic of aviation's past play a significant role in its future?

Depends on whom you ask. John Spychalski, a professor of logistics at Penn State University's Smeal College of Business, says no. "The only viable market might be sightseeing tours. As far as point-to-point, systemic, routine transportation of freight, I just don't put much hope in it." Blimps are too slow and too vulnerable to bad weather, he says. But investors, most of them European, have said yes, to the tune of more than a quarter-billion dollars.

In Eastern North Carolina, the stakes are much higher than just creating the biggest roadside attraction north of South of the Border. Jones and Craven are in a region where hopes for economic development have been repeatedly dashed. Agriculture has been battered by global economics. The Global TransPark, a freight airport and manufacturing complex, has never taken off, despite millions in state and federal money. A bid for NASA to build a landing port for the space shuttle in Carteret or Hyde County didn't go anywhere. CargoLifter could be big here. Or another big bust.

The concept has come a long way since its birth six years ago in a classroom at UNC Chapel Hill. The company has raised $264 million, mostly from stock offerings, to design and build the CL 160, an airship that could tote 160-ton loads -- an oil rig or massive earthmover -- from Cary to Cairo, Egypt, without stopping. It has successfully tested a smaller prototype. In March, a Canadian company signed a contract -- CargoLifter's first -- for an unmanned, trucktowed balloon called the CL 75 Sky Crane. Heavy Lift Canada will use it in the Arctic to float oil-drilling equipment above ice roads too weak to support heavy loads. It has options to buy 25 of the $10 million blimps.

Even so, CargoLifter still has a long way to fly. When former Gov. Jim Hunt announced that the company had selected Cove City for its North American base, he predicted 200 to 300 jobs that average paying $50,000 a year would eventually be created. But in March, CargoLifter Inc., the company's Raleigh-based subsidiary, cut its staff from 12 to six. And the German parent reported an operating loss of $86.7 million in 2001. At the time, it only had enough money left to get through another month.

From his 11th-floor offices overlooking Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, Carl von Gablenz, CargoLifter's chairman and a...