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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.

16 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. A slight problem... by funkhauser · · Score: 2, Troll
    So what happens when one of these babies crashes in a huge ball of fire? Kinda defeats the whole purpose of the thing, don't ya think?

    --
    Learn to Play Go
  2. All I can say, is, by Tom7 · · Score: 2

    It had better not be filled with hydrogen.

  3. First Pick! (Nitpick that is.) by fm6 · · Score: 3, Informative

    A blimp is a nonrigid airship. This would be a semirigid airship.

  4. Hello! Helium! by fm6 · · Score: 2

    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.

  5. But...hot air... by Dimwit · · Score: 2

    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...
  6. Rocket Fuel by gnovos · · Score: 2

    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!"
  7. urban legend? by mangu · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:urban legend? by mangu · · Score: 2

      Yes, I know that Iron Oxide (III) and aluminum powder burns extremely hot, but my point was that, in paint, those two components are dilluted in dried oils and in very thin layers. It takes a certain concentrated mass of iron oxide and aluminum powder to reach those high temperatures. In thin layers of paint, the energy from burning would radiate away before reaching a very high temperature. An electric spark, either from defective wires or static discharge, igniting escaped hydrogen gas is, IMHO, a much more likely explanation for the Hindenburg disaster.

      (BTW, an interesting story about the effects of mixing reactive chemicals in paint layers can be found in Martin Cruz Smith's novel "Red Square")

    2. 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.
  8. Why this love with airships? by mangu · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Why this love with airships? by Martin+Blank · · Score: 3, Informative

      Airships can stay up for far longer periods of time than can a heavier-than-air vehicle. Consider that the Hindenburg took three *days* to cross from Berlin to New Jersey. Airships can also hover, and are very stable. There are few limits on size (Hindenburg was 804 feet in length), and can keep sufficient supplies on board for a small crew for days or longer.

      Because they can stay longer than fixed-wing and have more room and carrying capacity than helicopters, they can mount water cannon allowing for more directed targeting.

      As for your assertion on the reliability of the technology, aircraft technology in general was very undeveloped then, and several countries (and even companies) around the world use airships that have been around for a very long time with a very high safety record.

      --
      You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
  9. And the best part is... by tswinzig · · Score: 2

    ... they'll be filled with Hydrogen.

    --

    "And like that ... he's gone."
  10. Total Load, Accessability, and the Heat Issue... by Twintop · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  11. Problems by Goonie · · Score: 2
    The key question with this device is: how fast can this thing move? IIRC, current airships really struggle on windy days to get *anywhere*. Funnily enough, major fires almost always occur on windy days. On the same note, if it's as slow as I'm expecting here, it's like to take hours and hours to get these things to a fire. The beauty of fixed-wing aircraft and even firefighting choppersis that you can have one base and have them fighting a fire hundreds of kilometres away in an hour.

    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?)
  12. 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.

  13. 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