Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Giant Firefighting Blimp

Posted by timothy on from the sploosh dept.

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.

3 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Re:urban legend? by Martin+Blank · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  2. More practical than you'd think by Wechsler · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Convection: if hot air made things rise as fast as most posters seem to think, slashdot would have reached low earth orbit by now. Airships aren't hot air balloons, they do have active altitude control.

    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:
    http://www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/jetliner/b747 ).

    If it did crash, however, it'd be the world's biggest water baloon.

  3. Not True :Re:Why this love with airships? by Big+Torque · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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