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Giant Firefighting Blimp
bgood writes: "MSNBC has an article about a California firm's plans for building a firefighting airship. Wetzone Engineering is working on a prototype and hopes to have a production craft in use within three years." Looks like a great way to water the lawn, too.
CowBoiKneel?
-- Linus Torvalds
it'll not be able to float over fires - it'll rise up with all the hot air.
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
Learn to Play Go
It had better not be filled with hydrogen.
A blimp is a nonrigid airship. This would be a semirigid airship.
Nobody's used hydrogen in airships since the Hindenburg disaster. Even the Hindenburg was designed to use helium, and would have if it weren't for export restrictions. Helium is too noble to burst into flame.
Okay, so this blimp also has a hole in the top for aeroplanes to drop water into?
a. balloons with holes in didn't work last time I checked.
b. How can a plane drop water that precisely?
Sounds like a hoax to me.
But hot air rises, right? So this thing goes over a fire to put it out, and then...FWOOM...it's in orbit!
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Well, the fact that the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen is not what made it explode. What made it explode was the fact that it's skin was literally pained with rocket fuel (This was before they knew what it was, of course. It just looked pretty to them I guess). Do a little googling and you'll see.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
A fire wouldn't just generate an updraft, but would cause air from all around to flow towards the fire to feed the updraft. Controlling an airship around a fire sounds like hell. I'll wait until there are some full-scale trials before i get my hopes up.
Cause then they go BOOM!
The article says that traditional firefighting aircraft must fly "dangerously low". This implies that this airship is going to be designed to drop the water from higher up. Depending how high up, the effect of the updraft would be lessened.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
This "aluminum paint over iron oxide primer" theory seems like something out of "McGyver". That's a potentially explosive mix, but the active chemical components were just thin layers, dilluted in dried paint oils. Not by far as flammable as the big hydrogen filled balloons inside.
From time to time a story on lighter-than-air craft gets published. Let's face it, blimps and airships are less reliable than heavier-than-air craft. Every single airship that was built in the 1930's crashed or burned. Air has a very low density, being less dense than air means a very fragile construction. Big size + skimpy design == torn apart by winds.
Was in a science fiction short, "Bringing down the Iron" or something like that from Analog a few years ago as a way of getting asteroid materials back to the earth's surface
1) Get a Large Nickle/Ferrous Asteroid
2) Make a *really* big hollow sphere out of the mined products. Better make it nice and accurate to avoid stress issues
3) Make it vacuumtite
4) Get it LEO with reaction jets and begin re-entry
5) Slowly let air into the sphere to provide a small amount of degree of the rate of descent vs the outside atmosphere density
Sure, it's made of iron, but a big sphere enclosing a vacuum is a lot lighter as a whole, so it will float.
All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson is a pretty good book, and contains an appearance by a firefighting / water-carrying airship.
... they'll be filled with Hydrogen.
"And like that
Setting aside the fact that it would be an incredibaly fragile piece of aircraft (blimps are really only used for those crappy aireal shots of sporting events inside or out---can you say stupid?---right now) for a moment, how much water would they be able to carry? Considering the number of passengers, cargo, and extra utilities that were carried by them in the pre-1940s, the weight isn't that much in comparison to the amount of water that would be needed to fight the fire.
Even if you could get enough water in the holding tank of the blimp, who's to say that you could easily fill it? From what I've heard and seen about blimps, they aren't the fastest or most manuverable things floating around the sky. In my eyes, the only way they could be effective in fighting fires would be if the fire was VERY close to a river or lake.
Lastly (bringing the structure of the blimp back into view), if a blimp is highly flamable, and all Blimps built in the 1930s or earlier crashed and burned (as one poster stated earlier), where is the sense in using a blimp to fight the very thing that caused its demise? Ok, ok, I know the materials that make up the structure of the blimp have changed (from wood and canvas to probably steel and a plastic covering), but that still doesn't mean it is immune to fire: the very thing it'd be floating over. Now while it probably wouldn't come into contact with the flame, you have to remember that all of the heat being put off by the fire would be rising rapidly right upto the blimp. Not safe at all in my eyes.
Just a few things to think about.
Sounds dangerous.
Just following up on the discussion on bad programming is this headline:
Californian Blimp makers fill balloon with Hydrogen instead of Helium. It is believed the mistake was due to a programming error.
mmm... Hydrogen firefighting balloon
Related to this issue is how manoeuverable this baby is in windy conditions at low altitudes. Fires happen on windy days, and if this baby can't manoeuver into position quickly and safely on a windy day it's going to be useless.
Their aerial reloading scheme sounds ridiculous. Whilst I have no doubt it can be made to work, technically, it makes no sense to have aircraft that could be dumping water directly on the fire refilling this beastie. The only systems that make sense are either a) hover and suck water out of a lake or river, or b) land and reload.
Both schemes have their problems - chiefly, how long it takes to descend and climb, which IIRC is really slow compared to other flying machines, and thus increasing the cycle time of the system. For the hover-reload system, you also need to adjust the lift really quickly to compensate for all that mass, which may well be the limiting factor on how fast the system can reload this way. Landing this beast won't be a quick process, either.
Finally, even given the vastly increased water-carrying capacity of this system, just dumping water in the general direction of fires isn't generally how they get put out. The water needs to be directed precisely. If they have to operate at high altitude, I can't see them being able to direct it precisely enough.
All in all, I don't see this idea being particularly useful for firefighting, unless it's a heck of a lot faster than what we generally envisiage airships to be.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Flammability: Modern airships use non-flammable helium (the manufacturers don't appear to state what they plan to use in this case). The Hindenberg only burned strongly because of the flammable metals in her skin; the hydrogen vanished, literally, in a flash. Even then, more than half of the passangers and crew survived:
http://www.dwv-info.de/pm/hindbg/hbe.htm
Speed: Airships can manage up to 80 knots
http://www.airship.demon.co.uk/whatis.html
Weight / lift capability: 'just under' 1 million litres of water weighs 'just under' 1 thousand tonnes. Guess what? The air-buoyancy of a helium airship this size is 'just under' 1 thousand tonnes (I won't bore you all with the math).
The only scary thing about this airship is the fact of 1000 tonnes of *anything* flying around overhead (Although a fully laden Boeing 747 has a max take-off weight up to 400 tonnes:7 ).
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/jetliner/b74
If it did crash, however, it'd be the world's biggest water baloon.
As it said in the article you obviously didn't read:
- this blimp will be able to hold just under a million litres of water, compared to 13000 litres for the largest aircraft currently in use for firefighting.
- It can drop the water from a much greater height than current aircraft.
- It holds enough water to keep raining for 5 hours, and could be refilled from other aircraft, so it doesn't need to keep flying backwards and forwards to a lake.
As for blimps being flammable, why does everyone seem to forget a convential aircraft contains several tonnes of fuel wrapped in a *very* thin aluminium (which also burns incidentally) skin?More detail, plus replies to specific objections raised here, at NewScientist.
9 99 92425
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns
Not true
the hindenburge II
and the
Graf Zeppelin
was scraped for its aluminum during world war 2 and the never crashed. The Graf Zeppelin few longer and farther than any other zeppelin in history even in dangerous places like the arctic
Such an airship is nearly impossible to build.
In Germany the company Cargolifter tried to build an simmilar airship - now they are blanc.
Some Problems:
- If they stand in air with 1000000 litres of water, they will rocket upwards after they have deployed all their water. Same problem at refill.
- If they use helium, the airship had to be larger than 300metres. Cargolifter (260metres) shouldt only carry 160tons. If they use hydrogen, they would not get al lizense to fly such a beast.
Maybe it's possible if they spend $1000000000 over 5-10 years of development.
have to get drunk before piloting it? *ducks*
That's my purse! I don't know you! -- Bobby Hill
Wm. Gibson had this bright idea in All Tomorrow's Parties, but it's a fairly obvious application. This would have been an invaluable thing to have in NYC on 9/11. Bet they could prototype a model with sideways waterjets without too much trouble.
Unfortunately, there are more problems than the obvious (and easily addressed) "weight changes and hydrogen burns" problems.
Earlier, convection was brought up, with a heat rising, Zeppelin rising scenerio. The whole deal with convection isn't that hotter air will sweep things up with it, but that the hydrogen (or more likely helium) will be cooler than the rising hot air and... the airship will drop, into the flames, like a proverbial rock. Eckener, the famed Zeppelin pilot, when passing over a large desert in his famous trip around the world, had a similiar problem ; The rising hot air threatened to sink him. Truly, this may be the largest hurdle that Yoyodine Airship Co. will need to scramble over.
On a postitive note, not every Zeppelin went up in a ball of flame. Dozens were used to bomb britain in WWI, and the Graf Zeppelin used for the first around the world trip by air, had made 590 flights (144 across the ocean) and spent 17,177 hours (about 2 years) in the air, and no-one had been hurt in it. Only a handful of the rigid-body dirigibles (out of an admitted few), crashed in a horrendous and messy ink-black and halloween orange gout of fiery plasma, so everyone better lay off the airships, alright?
For more information about Eckener and the Zeppelins, take a look at "Dr. Eckeners Dream Machine" by Douglas Botting. Exciting stuff, especially if you have a penchant for airships (as I do). Thanks for watching Reading Rainbow.
-Avery
Duh, do some research, or at least spend a bit of time watching "The History Channel". The only dirigible that crashed and burned was the Hindenburg (of the modern ships, correct me if I'm wrong).
t s/ USHPK2001-Palilonis.htm
t s/ USHPK2001-Palilonis.htm
There were others that crashed, but these were filled with helium so there was no fire. BTW, The U.S. has quite a history of airship disasters. No fires that I'm aware of, but plenty of crashes.
That's not to say that the U.S. couldn't build/fly airships, check out:
http://www.peddie.org/princip/USHPK-2001/studen
Check out the report of a German sub shooting down an American airship.
And I'm intentionally limiting myself to post-WWI airships, prior to that were the German airships of WWI that bombed London.
German Zeppelins (blimp-like aircraft) left Germany at dusk and arrived in London in the middle of the night. They dropped their payloads and returned to Germany before dawn, completing their whole mission under the cover of night. Over the course of the war it is "estimated that Britain alone had 196 tons of bombs dropped upon it from German airships." (7) The Allies responded by attacking German Zeppelin Sheds and dropping 20-lb Hales bombs.
http://www.peddie.org/princip/USHPK-2001/studen
These were filled with hydrogen and burned very prettily...
I'm not going to take you to task for your other inane comments, the other poster already did an admirable job of that.