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