Humming low across the Australian outback, the giant craft touches down and before the week is out, a pop-up mining venture is in operation.
This is the vision of Lockheed Martin's famous "Skunk Works", a hybrid airship able to transport up to 20 tonnes of equipment far faster than going overland and vastly cheaper than by helicopter.
Lockheed has pitched this concept to miners in Australia and around the world, with considerable interest and has a letter of intent for the sale of the first dozen units to British firm Straightline Aviation. Each costs around $US40 million ($A52.03 million).
"This is not an airplane and it is not an airship or a helicopter. It is none of those," says Lockheed's Dr Bob Boyd.
As a hybrid, this craft gains 80 per cent of its lift from lighter-than-air helium, with the rest from its aerodynamic body shape.
It's powered by four automotive engines which give it a cruising speed of 60-70 knots and an unrefuelled range of more than 2000km.
So far just one exists, a 90-metre technology demonstrator produced in 13-months from go-ahead to first flight. The 20-tonne cargo version, called LMH-1, is ready for production but Lockheed won't be stopping there.
It has plans for a 90-tonne cargo capacity version, a craft the size of a sports stadium. That can carry large pieces of mining equipment, such as a complete Alberta module, used for separating oil sands.
It can also transport semi-processed ore, though in Australia's case, that wouldn't be iron ore, still most economically transported by rail.
But for setting up a mine in remote Africa or Australia, the economics appear appealing with a cargo cost per tonne at least a tenth that of using a helicopter.
"The hardest part of this whole thing is getting the market to accept it," Boyd said.
However, helicopters will remain preferred for the offshore oil and gas industry where platforms feature numerous sharp features and gas flares not conducive to operation of lighter than air craft.
The name LMH-1 isn't especially alluring for such a revolutionary craft and Boyd laments that all the really cool names have already been taken.
That includes the near-universal "Blimpie".
The Skunk Works was founded during WWII for rapid production of new and innovative aircraft designs.
Its name was inspired by the pong of some chemicals from a nearby plastics plant and derived from the popular hillbilly comic strip Li'l Abner, which features the malodorous Skonk Works factory.
The name stuck and is now trademarked. The Skunk Works symbol is a benign looking skunk. This being America, the site - a collection of grey aircraft hangar-like facilities surrounded by desert - offers its own merchandise range, including T-shirts, baseball caps, pens and coffee mugs.
Over the years, the Skunk Works has produced some of the world's most advanced and alluring aircraft, including the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, the F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber and prototypes of the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter.
This sort of work continues for the Skunk Works' main customer, the US military, and remains top secret and kept well away from visitors - especially a group of visiting Australian reporters.
However, Australia's well-regarded defence science community can see more and that includes Lockheed's new Australian research facility the Stelar lab. A recent visitor to the Skunk Works was Australia's chief defence scientist Dr Alex Zelinsky.
Lockheed's Craig Johnston says their job is to come up with solutions to urgent national needs. Despite the high cost of aviation programs, the initial work need not be that expensive.
"If you do things fast, you do not need big bags of money," he said.
The Skunk Works does do civil programs including the hybrid airships and one which could see the return of supersonic passenger flight, last seen in 2003 with the retirement of the Anglo-French Concord.
Concord's problem, according to Lockheed's Mike Buonanno, was that it could never operate economically.
Its routes were heavily restricted, because of its loud and objectionable sonic boom whenever it flew faster than the speed of sound.
In 1971, the US Congress banned supersonic flight over the continental US.
There are exemptions for the military but that had the effect of limiting Concord to New York at the end of a trans-Atlantic flight.
That ruled out the potentially lucrative cross-US route.
In order for that to happen, US legislators need to be convinced that supersonic flight is possible without the window-rattling constituent enraging sonic boom which comes even from aircraft flying at high altitude.
So NASA has commissioned the Skunk Works to do preliminary design work on the QueSST (quiet supersonic transport), an advanced single seat aircraft designed to minimise the sonic boom while maintaining essential aerodynamic qualities. First flight is scheduled for around 2019-20.
Buonanno says model testing in a wind tunnel gives them high confidence that this will work, with a dramatic decrease in noise.
With the US on board, supersonic flight would inevitably come to Australia.
Imagine flying Sydney to Perth in not much more than an hour.
