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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.
http://www.carolina.com/tech-ed/hydrogen.asp
The paint was mostly powdered aluminum, used because it allowed the zeppelin to be shiny and visible from a distance. The hydrogen was used up quickly, whereas the aluminum kept burning.
The link above says that they didn't know that powdered metals burned. This isn't quite correct. A researcher found a single memo tucked deep into the Nazi archives that acknowledged that the paint could burn. It was buried for presumably political reasons.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
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.
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