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"."
The Zeppelin NT has been around for at least 10 years! I've seen photos of it in Popular Science, Discover, et al.
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.
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
From what I've heard the short supply was due to export restrictions on Helium (a strategic material) exports to Germany. Also, as it seems I was the last /.er to learn last time, the Hindenburg was caused by the doping material which was rocket fuel (and photo's of the time exaggerated the look of the explosion). Presumably, the new technology includes a new doping material.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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
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
GmbH is the German equivalent of, 'Inc'. or 'Ltd.'
It's short for 'Gesellschaft mit Beschränkter Haftung' (Corporation with Limited Liability).
Das ist alle für heute. Viel Spass.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
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.)
No, Cargolifter went bust.
Zeppelin have been making heavy construction equipment for years.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
The most famous exception to this, the Graf Zeppelin, was memorable mainly because it was able to operate so long without being lost in an accident.
The Hindenburg was really just the last straw. Not to mention that even in the 1930s airplanes could transport a similar number of passengers faster, with fewer crew, and without needing a vessel comparable in size to the Titanic.
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.
We have balloonfest going on in syracuse ny right now, it started the 6th so it may have been one of our hot air balloons as they all have funny shapes etc...there's even a Mr. Peanut balloon!
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.
Two big reasons.
first using a gas gives you a tension structure. Tension structures are easy to build light wieght and strong. Using vacume gives you a compression structure and compression structures are much harder to build light.
second Vacum isn't that much lighter than helium.
follow me on this. At STP (standard temperature and pressure) air has a weight of about 26g/mole while helium has a weight of about 4g/mole blimps run low pressure so this is about right. 1 mole is about 23 L of gas. so for 23L of heium I get 22g of lift for the same amount of vacume I get 26g of lift. So by using helium instead of vacume you only lose about 15% of te lifting capacity, but you greatly simplify construction and maintainance.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
The Zeppelin NT has a rigid spine, the cells are arranged round about the spine. It isn't a blimp.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Looks like a Zeppelin to me.
-Brendan
modern english recognizes "Flammable" as a word meaning the same thing as "inflammable". Pick any modern dictionary, you'll find it. I suppose crusty old english professors might shun it, and say it's not a word.. but let's face it, english evolves.
Flammable is actually preferred, as many people mistake the "in" for the negative latin prefix, when it is not. Using "Flammable" removes this ambiguity.
Every airship story goes back to the hindenberg because that's all most people know of airships. The airship age basically ended.
Bzzzzt. Thank you for playing.
1. Wrong. Flammable is a perfectly good word. Inflammable is a redundant and misleading word, since it means flammable, but looks like it means non-flammable.
2. Correct.
3. Wrong, wrong, wrong. No Zeppelin until the 1990s used helium. When the first Zeppelin flew in 1900, there was not enough helium in the world to come close to putting a visible bubble in even one of its 17 gas cells. In 1915, by which time dozens of Zeppelins had flown, a single cubic foot cost $2500, and the cost to fill a single Zeppelin, even if enough were available in the entire world (which was not nearly the case by orders of magnitude), would have been more than the gross national product of Germany for the year.
1 out of 3.
By the way, couldn't agree more with your concluding remark.
Your third point would seem to be directly in conflict with an article on the US Zepplin the Macon from 1933.
http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/macon.html
While it may have been expensive to gather that much helium, it doesn't seem to have stopped the US Navy - they had 2 of these ships (the other was called the Akron) - and they could even launch aircraft from them.
There was a game that came out a year or two ago along these lines - obviously this is the inspiration for the game's central theme of aircraft launched from a Dirigible/Zepplin type aircraft. Interesting to see that it had some basis at least...
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
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
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.
If they could demonstrate good saftey and decent operating costs they could start to displace airplanes. After all, airplanes are all about moving lots of people in a hurry...not really very FUN anymore. In the US the train system in in disarray and many people are tired of the rush of the airlines...it doesn't make much of a vacation to fly...note how many people elect to take boat cruises. Also, the newer model of airships are much safer for the public! They're not loaded up with tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel, they don't go very fast, and if they do loose power they're harder to crash and do a lot of damage to anything solid. Add to that the fact that they won't require huge airstrips to take off and land so they can visit many existing small airports that normal airlines would never think to service!
Nope, the skin was not "rocket fuel," if it were it would not have burned from stern to bow in less than a minute, it could not self-ignite nor is there reason to think it played a role in igniting the hydrogen either.
. ht m
Hindenburg burned because of the hydrogen, the paint did not even contribute much to the conflagration. How else could there be surviving pieces of the skin for revisionists to stage self-defeating, embarrassing demonstrations for cameras with?
http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire
Check it out. There are a thousand holes in the paint theory and related arguments (eg that hydrogen airships were perfectly safe) and this one nails four of them, each sufficient to put the false claims to rest.