Slashdot Mirror
Zeppelin Flies Again
rakerman writes "The Globe and Mail reports Japanese firm buys first new-look Zeppelin.
"Makers of the revived Zeppelin airship delivered their first helium-filled craft to a commercial user Saturday, a Japanese company that plans to use the 12-seat craft for sightseeing trips and advertising." They call themselves Zeppelin-NT, or as the Germans say "Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH"."
This is a terrible day! What a tragedy! Oh, my God! Those poor people!
- Can I get one made of lead
- How long until someone names their Zepplin, "Led."
Zeppelin NT came to Istanbul for a private BMW meeting I guess. Thing looks damn cool and huge :)
The Zeppelin NT has been around for at least 10 years! I've seen photos of it in Popular Science, Discover, et al.
They should upgrade to Zep 2000 (based on NT technology.)
Sounds like those are going to have to be some very pricey tickets. They'd have to be with only 12 passengers for each flight.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWZeppelin-NT: its hardly new technology is it?
"their first helium-filled craft" ;)
What ever happened to the hydrogen economy?
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
" The new craft designed by Germany's Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik -- named Zeppelin NT for "New Technology" -- is filled with helium rather than the intensely flammable hydrogen that fuelled the earlier generation of airships. " The earlier generation of airships was also designed to be filled with Helium, not Hydrogen. Short supply forced them to use Hydrogen.
I'm not sure naming it Zeppelin NT is such a wise move. Would you get on an aircraft with a namesake that's prone to crash? Oh, the humanity!
Mirror here. This would seem like a no-brainer for the editors. But they couldn't care less, it seems.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
You lost a great opportunity to be quiet. Don't let those pass you again.
Sincerely,
Mr Blinky
This story is so old! They've already released Zeppelin 2000 and Zeppelin XP since then!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You'd think that they would have learned their lesson from Lynyrd Skynyrd...
If you don't get it, you need to stop listening to Top 40.
Maybe I got something wrong but,
i on .htm
"Today, the Zeppelins have returned. In 1997, the Zepplin Luftschifftechnik built a new airship -- the LZ NT. The ship is certified. Commercial passenger flights began 15 August 2001."
http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/introduct
Does that mean BSOD = Blimp Screen of Death?
(and as long as I have you here...)
I know a Zeppelin has to have a Captain, but will it have a Kernel as well?
ba-dum-DUM!
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal!
Ever since the Hindenburg accident the technology has been nearly dead, just as if we had stopped building ships after the Titanic sank.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The amount of time between now and the day Jimmy Page and Microsoft sue for trademark infringement. -B
60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
Gives new meaning to BSOD (Blue Sky of Death).
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Check out www.21stcenturyairships.com
This guy made spherical airships despite everyone telling him it would never work.
Personally, I find this much more interesting than the Zeppelin "comeback".
It is a reference to the famous Hindenburg accident, not flamebait!
When traveling west on I90 (NY state thruway) towards Rochester I saw a giant white blimp that looked a lot like this. It was south of the interstate and seemed to be moving with a nice amount of speed. I think they were playing with it because the nose kept dipping then going back up. This was on June 4th. I don't remember but I think it was before Syracuse. Did anyone in the area see this? Was it just a regular blimp? I remember it looking like these photos.
Dude, Zep's playing again?
Where can I get tickets?
Kiss my bass.
I've seen it fly out of Friedricshafen, Germany, and I even managed to buy a plastic model kit for it (made by Revell, curiously) in a hobby shop in Friedrichshafen. It's a neat looking machine, and I hope the firm succeeds in doing interesting things with them. There's certainly room for zeppelins in the world of aviation.
BTW, I also visited the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen; they have a 1:1 mockup of the boarding gangway, some passenger cabins and a dining area from the Hindenburg. That was an awesome experience, and I recommend it if you ever go to the Bodensee region of Germany.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I though maybe John Bonham (deceased Zeppelin drummer) had been cloned or something.
Only in the sense of the Hindenburg going up in flames.
What are they teaching moderators these days? The reference is not *that* obscure, is it? Or was the moderator trying to be funny?
emt 377 emt 4
Guess the one that told the people to not call
blimps zepelins made his job to good, now zepelins are also called blimps.
FYI: This is not a cigar-formed ballon, it
has a aluminium sceleton and the helium is in
large cases under this. So it is a zepelin, not
a blimp...
These would be excellent (and much safer) for small regional transportation instead of the puddle jumpers and small jets that exist now. Since the US is never going to adopt high speed rail this looks like a good alternative.
it's a blimp people, it just has a different name - whoop de do
/ http://suffocate.us
/ http://johngrayson.com
The Zeppelin NT was flying near Frankfurt in Germany last year using a base in a field on the edge of a small town called Bad Homburg situated about 15Km outside Frankfurt. They ran short tours around the centre of the city. Being rather larger than the average blimp it is impressive to watch and relatively slow and quiet compared to conventional aircraft.
See my journal, I write things there
If only they were personally available.
I'd buy a blimp instead of a winnebago any day. Imagine that!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
You'll go over like a Lead Zeppelin.
Keith Moon to Robert Plant prior to going on stage. Renamed to Led Zeppelin....
This should be extremely useful for the various governmental and private groups needing to monitor Godzilla.
Watch out for Rodan and Jet Jaguar, though. Their jetwash can do some serious damage!
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
I know it's like INC but in german but everytime I see it I think it's some slang name for a street drug.
"a Japanese company that plans to use the 12-seat craft for (...) advertising."
If they put light-emitting diodes on the sides for an electronic billboard, would that make it a LED Zeppelin?
'Luftschifftechnik' is a stretch (luft-shiff-tech-nick)
But for the life of me I don't know how to pronounce 'GmbH'. I think they made that part up.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
This is a zeppelin, dude. Not a Blimp.
And it is personally available, just carry
9 million EUR to Friedrichshaven and wait
a year and you will be handed one.
From their website:
Fare per Person: EUR 335,00 Monday to Friday; EUR 370,00 on weekends and holidays.
Please visit www.zeppelinflug.de for booking.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Now with less crashes!
What went bankrupt was the Cargolifter AG, which
tried to build and sell extremly large Zeppelins
capable of transporting heavy goods. (Like engines for plants and the like).
This company is well, builds small ships and
has already 3 in use for torist trips in southern
Germany.
Personally I'll never understand marketing folks. =)
Paul Lenhart writes words!
...is now a niche market, I can't wait until these monsters really begin to get into the heavy lift market. Imagine loads that now have to be transported by freighter in multi-week voyages being transported by blimps in days?
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
that'll go over like a lead.. uh, um, nevermind
Actually, it isn't a blimp, it's a proper Zeppelin. The difference? A Zeppelin has a rigid frame, a blimp does not.
Did you know that the US Navy built a few Zeppelin Aircraft Carriers in the 1930s? That's right - Zeppelins that could carry, launch and recover fighter aircraft. Fighteres were carried in a compartment in the body of the airship and were launched and recovered from a "trapeze". Link with pictures.
Zeppelins are cool. I wish they'd become more widely adopted. Stoopid Hindenburg painted with Stoopid rocket fuel...
"the total mixture might well serve as a respectable rocket propellant"
The direction and color of the flame supports this theory. Hydrogen burns with a colorless flame and would burn upwards (being lighter than air). The actual flame burned downwards and looked like a "fireworks display".
See: http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
It's short for Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung. (association with limited liabilty).
That's a quite common form for buisiness in Germany. The limited liabilty means the
owners are only liable with everything in the company and only little with private money).
It's pronounced Ge Em Be Ha.
(where a is pronounced between but and car,
the e a bit like in yelow.)
...actually comes from a previous version of the Zepplin developed by a competitor, called AMS (a is for Airship in this case).
See, they hired the guy who was the chief architect for the AMS, and they just changed the letters to ZNT, and came up with the 'New Technology' thing to cover themselves from lawsuits.
Hmmmm... this all sounds vaguely familiar.
When will there be a Zeppelin XP? or a GNU/Zeppelin Linux?
From the zeppelin-nt website - Website optimized for 1.024 x 768 resolution and Internet Explorer 4.x
Will the zeppelin-xp website be optimized for Internet Explorer 6.x?
The engines are flat 4 piston engines rather than turbines which reduces servicing costs and it doesn't have to burn fuel to sit stationary in the air. The Zeppelin is also designed specifically to require a minimal ground crew.
At the moment, the development costs still have to be paid and pilots earn a bundle because there aren't very many certified but in the long term the running costs should be lower than a helicopter with a similar carrying capacity. The thing cost around $9 million including ground infrastructure items like mast and refuelling vehicle.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
stairway to heaven
I wonder what Microsoft will have to say about this...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...advertising air ships just like in Blade Runner. Bio-manufactured organs are comming next.
>> Practice Safe Hex
After reading the headline, I thought the story was about a Led Zeppelin reunion. Oh well.
Not to worry, the US military now has SZDI (Strategic Zeppelin Defense Initiative) in place. It consists of a giant thumbtack being fired at the Zeppelin.
This is just a fancy balloon. The Zeppelins
were Dirigibles with a rigid body structure
to hold the hydrogen cells. They were far
more advanced than these.
Why not get maximum lift and just use a vacuum rather than a lighter-than-air gas?
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
I also think it would be good for those sight-seeing flights over national parks.
It moves more slowly than a helicopter or airplane, so it would be over the park longer; but it's also quieter than both of the others.
I, for one, would also not mind multi-day trips to farther destinations aboard an airship. Some people find romance in riding the rails; but I think waking up in the morning to a view from above the clouds would be spectacular. Imagine the sunsets and sunrises.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
There was another German Zeppelin Startup called the Cargolifter. Their business plan sounded a lot more exiting. They were going to develop a Zeppelin for Heavy Duty lifting, like bringing Turbine Parts to remote areas in India. Basically all the stuff thats too big for normal trucks.
Unfortunately, the managers were rather low on some vital brain functions and they had a few hundred engineers working on rather useless side-projects before their burn rate caught up with their Venture Capital
They did, however, built the biggest self-supported manufacturing hall worldwide. Some Japanese investors are planting a rainforest in it now.
Fleur de Sel
I haven't seen anyone mention this, but what I think is the most interesting part of this is that this thing is actualy not a lighter than air vehicle. It is, in fact, heavier than air (at least at takeoff), and therefore "flies" rather than being supported on buoyancy: Link to FAQ about airship here
This is not a real Zeppelin - A dirigible airship with a rigid hull and gas balloons inside. No its a Blimp - an inflatable non-rigid airship. There are lots of these around I have seen them flying over the skies of both England and Canada quite often. Years ago one of them (a Skyship 2000) would often follow me down the street on my walk home in London - they navigated by following street and my street was one of those it used in flying tourists over the city. This annoyed Prince Carles as they would deliberately fly over his garden in Kensington Palace so the tourists could look inside.
Here in Toronto we see Blimps often enough whenever there is a big sports event. The first time I saw one was 35 years ago whwn I was a student I had finished my first year exams and was reading Michael Moorcock's science fiction novel "Warlord of the air" about an alternative unvierse where airships dominate. I just finished it and looked out of my college room window towards Canterbury Cathedral there flying in front of the Cathedral is an airship! Am I halucinating no! I can see water ballast being dropped by the airship and it starting to ascend. I recognized it as the Goodyear Blimp.
Balloons is for kiddie-winkies. Now I'll have to throw you overboard. Soon you will be made into a list.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
Even though it's the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen, helium is fairly scarce on earth. The majority that we get comes from extraction from natural gas. Ambient air extraction is not economically feasible due to the low concentration (1 part per 200,000). I've heard that demand will outstrip supply by 2010 and the $19.95 Party Balloon kits at Costco will be a bit more costly. What is the future of lighter-than air transport with the "lighter" part being costly in the near future?
It's pretty common in gas balloons in Europe and the gas balloon race that is flown during the Albuquerque balloon festival permits hydrogen balloons.
Ask me about my vow of silence!
What about terrorism concerns? How susceptible are blimps and zeppelins to cheap, crude missiles (i.e. guns) fired from the ground? They fly at relatively low altitudes so they would be an easy target. The FAQ lists the following for the hull construction: 1. Tedlar (PVF) layer which acts as a gas seal 2. Polyester mesh layer which strengthens the hull 3. Heat-sealable Polyurethane layer, which enables joining of the individual hull strips. Do other ships use similar materials? Are they more or less susceptible to damage?
Iron oxide and powdered aluminum? Holy crap, there's some brilliant engineering for you.
"Hmmm... this hydrogen-filled airship is flammable... but couldn't we make it MORE flammable?"
"I know! Let's dope it with thermite!"
I knew that Page and Plant could raise Bonham from the dead and reunite to rock the world once again.
crank up "the immigrant song" and scare the heck out of those japanese scientists
This is Slashdot... its impossible to know you're not an ignorant high school student (I started commenting on Slashdot back in 10th grade *points to user number*). Comedy of that sort doesn't work well written down regardles.
For example, consider this sentence. . .
Quote: The new craft designed by Germany's Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik -- named Zeppelin NT for "New Technology" -- is filled with helium rather than the intensely flammable hydrogen that fuelled the earlier generation of airships.
1. Flammable is a non-word. (Re: The Elements of Style) The word they were grasping for is "inflammable".
2. Airships were never "fueled" by hydrogen or helium. It provides buoyant lift, it's not burned for energy.
3. The first generation of Zeppelins were made to use helium, not hydrogen. The Germans only switched to hydrogen after the USA embargoed them and cut off their supply of helium.
Furthermore, it irritates me that nobody can mention airships without harking back to the Hindenberg. It's as if every news story about a large oceangoing ship was compelled to recap the Titanic disaster.
Sie klettert das Treppenhaus zum Himmel.
Blame the fish if I screwed this up.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Looks like a Zeppelin to me.
-Brendan
Tirpitz: (to Zeppelin) Tell me, what is the principle of these balloons?
Zeppelin: It's not a balloon! You stupid little thick-headed Saxon git! It's not a balloon! Balloons is for kiddy-winkies. If you want to play with balloons, get outside.
Me too. Very disappointed that it just turned out to be about a big balloon.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
They really need to hook back up with Jonesy and go back out on tour. Even get Jasen Bonham to do the drumming as he's a hell of a drummer in his own right.
But perhaps they should just let it alone, so there are no "reunion tours" that distill the myth and wonder of what a great band they were...unlike other older bands.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
What's the top speed on these things? I don't want to take a 3 day flight from LA to NY.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Is it over the hills and far away? Couldn't resist......corny Led Zeppelin joke...
It's going to go over like a LEAD BALLOON!
(sorry, but somebody was gonna say it)
Sadly, it isn't shaped like the USS Enterprise. Nothing to see here...
Hydrogen would have burned almost instantaneously. There was nothing keeping the hydrogen under pressure, so there would be no explosion -- just the bags popping off one at a time. If the gas bags and outer skin were both fireproof, I suspect the Hindenburg would have crash-landed with most people surviving even if the hydrogen burned.
A man clad in fine raiment?
FFS, Poorly Written Article? Er, isn't this, like, slashdot or something?
Bag-o-Helium eh?
Sorry - just can't stop thinking about Kirk's helium distorted voice shouting: "Scotty! We need MORE power"!
Medication... Need more medication,
T_O_M
Even the briefest glance on their homepage tells me that:
- Zeppelin NT is the airship
- Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH is the company
Slashdot editors, you suck. But that's not a big surprise, now is it?
When will you start kicking out those loser geeks and hire some professionals?
Def Leppard was on hand for the launch of the radiation proof, lead covered zepplin.
...and the second one is bought by Max Zorin!
You must think in Russian.
A communication breakdown.
I always wondered, how do europeans tell decimal commas from number separating commas? In this list, for instance:
1,2,334,5,663,1,323,1,44,11
is it
1.2 334 5.663 1 323 1.44 11
or
1 2.334 5 663.1 323.1 44.11
Surely, you can't use periods to separate your list elements.
The tech of blimps is not compareable. blimps
are better ballon. This is a airship, a zeppelin.
I'll add another item to the "Old Band Reunites and They're Actually Still Good" List: Fleetwood Mac. When I heard they were reuniting in the early 90's, I groaned in disgust, figuring they'd just be a buncha burnouts needing more money. Well, turned out they're better than ever. "The Dance" is one of my all-time favorite albums.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Pilot: "Ah, look how nice and blue the sky is up here!"
Co-Pilot: "Actually we're still in clouds. That's a blue screen."
Pilot: "Hold me."
Forgot to ask: which Led Zeppelin DVD are you referring to?
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Actually it crash landed anyway, and most of the people on board (62 of 97) survived. Much better odds than an airplane crash!
Of course, there were plenty of _other_ disasters with Zeppelins. But the Hindenburg disaster is overplayed, IMO.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Iron oxide, cellulose acetate, and aluminum powder was used for the doping material.
"the total mixture might well serve as a respectable rocket propellant"
Lots of energy but not much outgassing - and that mostly from the cellulose acetate binder. Rotten rocket fuel. But a GREAT source of heat and hot particles.
Iron oxide and aluminum, once you finally get it lit (which is hard), burns to aluminum oxide and quite pure white-hot molten iron.
It has been used for such things as welding railroad rails (and by pranksters for welding trolley cars TO the rails while they're stopped to load/unload passengers). And of course for starting fires in a war setting.
Burning a thermite coating on a hydrogen-filled zepplin, in addition to removing the skin, would result in drops of molten iron falling THROUGH the internal structure, rupturing the gas bags, heating/weakening the structural members, and generally insuring that everything flammible was on fire in extremely short order.
But you've seen the film.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Back when I was a kid right before World War 2, I was riding on a Zeppelin when this strange guard was checking tickets. One of the passengers didn't have one, so he tossed him out the window.
Even though it's the second most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen, helium is fairly scarce on earth. The majority that we get comes from extraction from natural gas.
And (at one point) from a set of wells in texas that produced nearly pure Helium. Helium concentration varies from deposit to deposit.
In the period between WW I and WW II, essentially the only sources of bulk helium were wells in the US south, plus a little in Russia. Due to its usefulness in barrage balloons during WW I, the US considered the supply a strategic weapons material and monopolized the US supply (under the administration of the Navy, which was also in charge of the US Zepplin program).
The US would not allow Germany to have any - which is why the Zepplins were hydrogen-filled. (Indeed, that policy was STILL in force during the '60s, which was the last time I looked. I think it got relaxed in the last decade or two.)
After the Hindenberg's flameoff was blamed on Hydrogen, with Helium unavailable, nobody was interested in paying for a flight in a Zepplin when there were perfectly good steamships.
So the industry went down, not JUST from the misattribution of the problem to Hydrogen, but ALSO to the US government's refusal to release Hydrogen for commercial air flight - even to US operators.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... I play like Lindsey Buckingham. How Rolling Stone left him completely off their "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" list is beyond me.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
You are referring to Addison Bain's misleading claims.
He is quite wrong about the skin in many different ways. It could not generate sparks in the ways he claimed, and if such sparks were applied to it they would not ignite it, and if someone did set the skin on fire it would not burn nearly as fast or energetically as he claimed, not by orders of magnitude. He compares the mix to "rocket fuel" but first of all this is false, it lacks the right components in the right proportions to burn as a rocket fuel. Actually solid fuel rocket fuel does not burn at the rapid rates he assumes either. But anyway the skin was not a uniform mix of all the chemical components (which he gets wrong) it was a layered composite, with the various chemicals separated.
Bain himself made a hash of his claims that the skin self-ignited and then burn furiously, so vigorously as to eclipse the heat of hydrogen combustion, when he took a piece of Hindenburg's own skin and tried to set it afire for cameras. He used an arc torch, making no attempt to demonstrate that static discharges alone could do the job, and even so it burnt very weakly.
Bain's real agenda is to prove that hydrogen is reasonably safe to use, mainly because he works with liquid hydrogen as a fuel. It is a bit silly to try to prove LH2 safe by claiming hydrogen was never at fault in the numerous cases of hydrogen-filled airships that went up in flames, since a huge bag of gaseous hydrogen separated from air by thin membranes is very different from a tank of cryogenic liquid inside thick insulation. Anyway lots of hydrogen airships of all types, using lots of different types of skin, burned spectacularly generally with great cost of lives and sometimes property damage. Some helium-filled airships have indeed burnt, but not easily and never with the kind of rapid chain reaction evident in the Hindenburg fire. Clearly most of the energy that consumed the ship in just seconds came from burning hydrogen; the bright visible light that Bain tries to claim proves it was some other materials (pure hydrogen flame is in UV and invisible to the human eye) comes from that hot fire setting the other materials afire and superheating them, just as the mantle on a gas lantern transforms the pale blue flame of propane into bright redder light.
It is quite true that the old Zeppeliners did their best to minimize the dangers of hydrogen and generally carried it off. It is false that helium is so much worse than hydrogen that using it spelled doom for airships. What spelled doom for airships IMHO was the determined opposition of many interests that preferred to develop airplanes and helicopters and regarded the market as too limited to support both HTA and LTA. Hydrogen fires, and the cost and limited supply of helium, were good excuses to divert development funds away from airships.
But it is ridiculous to suggest that the NT could carry a lot more pax if it used hydrogen! Maybe 3 or 4 more, at risk of their lives--a hydrogen _pressure ship_ is much more risky than a hydrogen rigid, which is bad enough.
A bigger airship could be made using helium that would work just fine. The second-largest rigids were made in the USA and were wonderful ships, the USS Akron and Macon.
With the world's billionaires in constant competition for the best toys, particularly huge yachts (saw a Discover channel show on the top ten private yachts in the world), I think that a cool billionaire would eschew yacht ownership for a private luxury zeppelin. At just about $11 million, this model's eminently affordable!
And, you wouldn't be limited to cruising just the oceans, which could get boring. Want to cruise Kansas City? Sure! Float over the Amazon for a few weeks? Of course! How about relaxing over the Sahara Desert or the Grand Canyon for a while. Yes! (And you could throw your foes into the sarlac pit... wait, different technology.)
All airships are/were heavier than air at takeoff, really - I mean, if they were actually trimmed to a negative total, they'd never come down - At least not without venting a nontrivial amount of fairly expensive helium.
Somebody finally noticed. It's amazing how many times I've read 'Rigid Airship' in this thread WRT the NT - It's SEMI rigid, folks, which is supposed to allow it to achieve reasonable speeds (unlike a nonrigid), but not to crack in half when you look at it funny (See: The Akron, The Macon, the Shenendoah etc, etc...)
I hope that Zeppelins make a comeback, too. Given that heavier-than-air travel is becoming so over-regulated and a pain-in-the-butt, perhaps for that reason alone we'll see Zeppelin stops all over the place.
Could be a good point that zeppelins could be better than puddle-jumpers for local travel. Plus, if I don't have to be strip-searched to board one, great!
"Anybody can change the world, but most people probably shouldn't." -- Marge Simpson
First of all the "total mixture" was not mixed, it was separate layers painted on separately.They could not seep into each other or anything. Even if the components were of the right nature and proportions to serve as a rocket fuel if mixed, they would need to be mixed and they were not. Second, it is not true that these materials were of a suitable mix, and if they were, solid rocket fuels actually burn rather slowly, much more slowly than the flames could be seen racing along the body of the stricken Zeppelin.
. ht m
The iron oxide is particularly interesting--it was painted only on the upper hull. If it played any major role in the conflagration surely the upper hull should have burnt much more rapidly than the lower! But it did not, the flames gave every appearance of being a blowtorch from _inside_ the hull.
Color is irrelevant when the hydrogen is contained inside other materials--burning hydrogen sets these afire and superheats them too, they glow in their characteristic frequencies and not hydrogen's even if the hydrogen is supplying the heat!
The fire "burned down" because it took time for the hydrogen to burn through and in that time (just seconds to be sure) the interior air/gas cell volume was heated to the flame point of many substances inside, including those below. And there was hydrogen at considerable distances down the hull, especially once its cells were heated and they expanded before bursting.
Once a huge hydrogen conflagration, very largely contained inside the hull, was under way of course just about everything else burned too. Even the skin.
But have you ever seen the pathetic demonstration of Addison Bain, author of this false theory, trying to set an alleged sample of Hindenburg skin afire? It would take something like a hydrogen fire to get it really going!
http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire
Whatever do you mean by "fireproof?" Airships are very diffuse, low-mass things, about 1/100 or so the density of a normal ship. Any materials enclosing big volumes like gas cells or the outer skin have to be thin stuff. It does not matter if they burn or not, the heat of a significant amount of loose hydrogen burning would _melt_ holes in anything that thin. Then there would be more hydrogen--and as you point out the cells would be expanding too. At not so much expansion, maybe 10 percent, they would valve more gas that would normally be vented up vents but in this case the vents would be hot--more flame. And the cells would burst or at least split seams if heated too fast--need I go on? What happened was not an "explosion" but a very rapid spreading gas fire--and all its heat was trapped inside the hull. It was a lot of heat; even if the surrounding materials did not burn somehow, they would glow. And melt; the gas would then quickly escape and the ship come crashing down just as it did. The long fire _after_ the crash was from flammible materials, mostly fuel, aboard. The crash, and the terrible burns some people suffered, were due to the immediate hydrogen fire. It would not matter to them whether the rest of the ship were made of asbestos or not.
It's simple to fireproof a hydrogen filled rigid.
There was a design at the end of WWI, L100 I think, with coaxial gas cells. Hydrogen surrounded by nitrogen.
This was designed to resist explosive and incendiary Brook and Pomeroy ammunition, not accidents.
It was never built due to its poor climbing ability. Lots more structural weight for the same amount of gas.
If you want more info, try The Zeppelin in Combat.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
And when was the last time you flew to a convention on a helicopter?
Kind of hard to believe that German engineers in the 1930s would be quite that stupid, isn't it? Let's suppose Nazism addled their brains. Even addled, German engineers came up with some pretty impressive technology across the board, they didn't miss many boats technically speaking and frankly were way ahead of the Allies in many important applications--getting their wonder weapons built in quantity was another story of course, what with the whole world being at war with them and denying them supplies and all, and bombing what they did make. Anyway Hugo Eckener, the brains behind Zeppelin at that point, was about as anti-Nazi as anyone could be in the Third Reich and survive. Quite a decent man really. No, we have to face the fact that German engineers were not idiots and would not compound their problems lightly.
Nor did they in this case. It is just not true that the skin material burnt easily--if it did they'd have seen it go up the first time the engines made sparks. The diesel engines were very well-behaved but the skin material near the engine cars did have burns in it--they just didn't spread. Nor can anyone make a good case for the skin being a sparky material likely to set the hydrogen off.
I just figured out how much heat release potential the ship's hydrogen represented. Hydrogen is an excellent fuel on a weight basis all right, burning one kilogram of it would release more heat than burning over 2 1/2 kg of hydrocarbon fuel. And gaseous H2 is about 1/15 as dense as air which masses 1.225 kg/cubic meter under standard conditions at sea level, so given the ship's volume (about 220,000 cubic meters for lift gas) the hydrogen had about as much energy to release as would 50 tons of gasoline!
Maybe that does not sound like much but imagine it all burning up in 30 seconds or so. Let me help--the ship was 245 meters long (806 feet) so imagine a trough 800 feet long and about one and 1/2 feet deep and wide--full of gasoline from end to end. Every foot of it would be about 16 gallons or so, about like a very big car's fuel tank worth, only there are 800 of them. How close do you want to get to that trough, and how much assurance do you want that there are no sparks around if you have to come within 60 feet of it? And if someone did toss a match at it, how long do you think it would take the flames to get from one end to the other?And how much heat would the resulting conflagration release? How long would it take to burn to the bottom of the trough?
Now I don't have mass figures handy but I think the outer skin was about 10 tons in mass. For it to match the performance of this trough, it would have to release 5 times the heat per kilogram as gasoline does. You know, explosives don't contain more chemical energy than fuels do, they can just release what they have instantly. But if they were more energetic we'd use them for fuels instead of oil!
So I find it hard to believe that even if the skin were made of pure guncotton (as I myself have mistakenly compared the skin of these airships to in the past) it could possibly have contributed more than 1/10 or so of the total fire energy. And in fact I imagine gaseous hydrogen would burn up much more rapidly than merely volatile gasoline. The Hindenburg's diesel fuel burned for something close to 10 hours after the crash--but it was depleted by then; imagine 50 hours worth of diesel fires--released in one minute. That is what the hydrogen did; the skin did not do it.
So we might question their judgement in using hydrogen at all but once that decision was made, they having no useful alternatives but to give up airships completely, they did their best. The skin did not demonstrate any of the arcane and volatile properties some irresponsible people project on it today; it was chosen to minimize problems not create them.
Despite the risks he ran I envy Harold Dick's frequent flight's in the two grandest passenger airships ever made (or two of three, the last one LZ-130 was really something, and the Nazis commandeered it for th
I've read, or more accurately skimmed through, this book of Douglas Robinson's. Another very good book he co-authored with Harold Dick was about the latter's experiences as a de facto crewman (navigator, sometimes elevator man, and roving busybody) on both Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg--Dick worked for Goodyear-Zeppelin, the American sister company (sort of) to Luftschiftbau Zeppelin, and was one of their observers in Germany (and in the air, mostly going to South America). He was in a vey enviable position!
OK, serious plans for fireproof Zeppelins is something I would have paid close attention to. I know the British _thought_ the German must be jacketing their hydrogen cells in neutral gas (they assumed it was cooled engine exhaust which would be oxygen-depleted of course) since it proved remarkably difficult to ignite the Zeppelins with casual fire. Indeed many Zepps came home with holes in cells, very low on lift, sometimes entire cells shredded--but no fire, though they were leaking gas like colanders. Which shows one reason the Germans would not seriously plan to sacrifice huge amounts of lift to shield their cells--they had pretty good odds of surviving without it.
Now, what happens if you surround hydrogen cells with a blanket of nitrogen, and someone shoots holes in the whole arrangement? There is no fire right away true, but the hydrogen starts to diffuse into the nitrogen through the holes and vice versa--so you wind up after enough time with an outer jacket and inner cell that both have the same mix of a lot of hydrogen and a little nitrogen. At that point the nitrogen is doing no good, only costing some lift, the reduction in heating value of the mix it causes is negligible, the chain reaction we call fire will go forward without being impeded much with plenty of margin to spare if any of the mix comes into contact with air in the presence of a spark or enough heat. Long before it goes that far hydrogen diffusing into the nitrogen will render the latter flammible at least in patches near the holes.
Is this jacket of any use then? Well it buys you time, time to get away from the gunfire and to repair the outer layer--maybe someone can even reach in and fix the inner holes first. Clearly this time is dearly bought if the outer jacket is much more than a few percent the volume of the inner cell. How worthwhile it would be depends on whether you expect the cells to get holed often, how likely there would be a fire before someone can fix the holes in a simple hydrogen cell, and on the other hand whether there is some easier alternative available. The Zeppeliners were confident they could manage the risks of pure hydrogen cells, having learned a lot from long and sometimes bitter experience.
OTOH I have just estimated that the heat energy the hydrogen in Hindenburg could release if burned was about the same as that that could be released by burning 50 tons of gasoline. That's comparable to the 50 tons of diesel fuel the ship topped off with before leaving on its transatlantic flights. Impeding the sudden release of that kind of energy, especially trying to contain a fire in one cell to that cell instead of letting it set off a chain reaction, seems like a good idea. But the best alternative is clearly to use some other gas that does not pose that risk. Only two I know of are helium and steam, and the latter has its own problems. If you have really good insulation that is very light (like an aerogel maybe) very hot air might do, though I think the clever thing would be to put some superheated steam in cells inside a thin jacket of hot air--you'd get the same overall lift at a lower temperature.
No fireproof hydrogen ships though, at best fire-resistant.
OK, you've got me there.
I was really trying to say that coaxial gas cells would work well in civilian ship. If someone really wants to kill you, they're going to do it anyway.
Peter Strasser probably thought that if they were going to build a ship that size they just make it climb so high that it would be invulnerable and forget the nitrogen. That would follow on from the X class ships like L71.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Kind of hard to believe that German engineers in the 1930s would be quite that stupid, isn't it?
When engineers (do it right) come up against marketing (make it look nice), who wins? Even German engineers.
we have helicopters too though I am nervous about their landing on top, and it is hard to see how to enable them to hook on from below.
I have come to a similar conclusion in that the design requirements for good cruising & long endurance (ie large & light), and the requirements for safe ground handling (small & strong) are in conflict. Therefore two separate vehicles may be called for.
My mental concept (I toy around with this in my head sometimes when I should be thinking of something else) is of a very large airship that flies in the stratoshpere (say, 80,000 ft) whose design would be optimized for cruising. For service & passenger/freight loading it would require a "skyport", some sort of bridge structure suspended near cruising altitude between stationary balloons. The "Very Large Airship" could alight onto the skyport in the weatherless air of the stratoshpere. For a vertical vehicle, a balloon could service the skyport, rather than a rigid ship, since the gas envelope will swell to 30x sea level volume. Imagine a scaled-up weather balloon carrying an oversized space capsule lifting up from NY harbor or Lake Constance.
The skyport would require thrusters to stay on position, but the lift baloons can be shaped with reflectors to generate solar power; every day is sunny when you are above the clouds! Passenger layovers in the skyport would have to be a couple hours so the vertical-travelling balloon can wait for a pause in the weather as needed. Pressure cabins on the cruisers/skyport/ascent balloon can be fitted with passive helicopter blades so that, in case of gas envelope failure, they can auto-copter down. One technical snag I can't find an elegant solution for is the transient dynamics of the ascent/descent. How to you stop a rapidly rising baloon? Drag a parachute underneath? A vertical jet engine? Landing on water might improve safety margins on the way down, though.
And, development-wise, how do you get there from here? Large airship designs have a big technical & investment hump to climb over before they become competitive. There aren't very many ways to mitigate risk by trying a smaller design first.
With airships what looks nice and what is right are often the same thing. The doping and painting of airship hulls was done pretty much the same way for the American Naval rigids. The dope is first of all to shrink the fabric so it is taut on the girders and wires that shape it, so it does not flutter which would tend to create drag and damage it. Then too it seals it and creates a surface that can be sanded smooth. The aluminum was added to make it reflective, to ward off damaging solar radiation from the fabric components below, including solar heat that would otherwise render the lift very unpredictable by superheating the lift gas. All this was necessary and much of it was normal for airplanes too, which were only beginning to be made all of metal in this period. This stuff was definitely the right paint and efforts were made specifically to minimize its flammibility.
Also--although the fabric panels were indeed separate patches, the German practice, followed also by Americans making our 3 homemade rigids, was to paint on all the dope and surface paint layers on the fully constructed airship. It was done in layers allowing weeks between them, which cost a lot of time but resulted in one smooth aerodynamic surface--and also one smooth electrical surface, though the notion that the skin sparked the fire demands that the separate panels developed potential differences. This was impossible for the German or American ships.
In the last 2 British ships, R100 and R101, they tried to simplify construction by pre-doping the panels off line and then installing them, hoping to tie them down and tension them afterward. For a variety of reasons this worked out very badly. In theory these panels could have developed potential differences but among all the other problems the R-ships had that one was not observed!