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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"."
Zeppelin NT came to Istanbul for a private BMW meeting I guess. Thing looks damn cool and huge :)
" 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.
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 ?
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".
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."
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.
I was in Friedrichshafen last year. (also visited the Zeppelin museum. Pretty cool.) We watched the Zepplins fly back and forth over the Bodensee with tourists.
I seem to recall that it was 200-300 euros for a few hours aloft. The flight attendents would take a vote asking the passengers which direction over the lake they wanted to fly.
On top of that, I looked at their website and it appears that the new blimps they're selling aren't even Zeppelins: they aren't rigid airships and they aren't filled with hydrogen.
I was hoping that somebody had gotten over the bad rap that hydrogen got after the Hindenburg accident, considering it really was the highly flammable skin of the Hindenburg that ignited.
If they used hydrogen, the blimp would be able to carry more than just 12 people.
If I wanted a soft, helium-filled airship that could only hold ten passengers, I could have just gotten one of these.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
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
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
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?
I'm sure the weight of the structure we'd need to contain the vacuum would far exceed the air it would displace. Maybe it could be possible with some radical design made out of carbon fibre, but for today it isn't practical.
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.
There is not freighter in use today that could not run rings around a LTA craft. In addition to being faster, the freighter can haul more cargo and it can do so through weather that will turn your LTA aircraft into a twisted lump of plastic and carbon fiber sitting on the bottom of the ocean. The amount of volume needed to turn any of these things into a "heavy lift" vehicle also makes them pretty much useless for that task.
Compared to ships there is almost nothing an LTA aircraft can do that a ship cannnot do better, safer, and cheaper. Compared to other aircraft there are only a few things that an LTA can do that a HTA can't; the big advantages of LTA aircraft are loiter time and almost silent operation. The only real use cases for these things are as high-altitude communication relays, long-loiter reconnaisance, and sightseeing.
I hear ya. Even though I'd pay whatever they were charging to go see them....I know it couldn't possibly live up to the legendary performances of their heyday.
I often think, while watching the latest Led Zeppelin DVD set of their concert days and watching Bonzo beat the living hell out of the drums, Robert singing his ass off, Jonesy playing all types of things,and Jimmy smoking on guitar...I think "Wow...THIS is what a rock and roll band is supposed to be.....
I HOPE that some younger kids today get ahold and watch this and get some inspiration that I frankly think is lost in today's music. You don't need 2 tons of electronic trickery that fixes bad vocals and bad instrument performances.........IF the group is even playing for real and not lip sync'ing.
I miss seeing people playing the guitar at a million notes a minute....mixing in great riffs.....dancing around the stage and putting on a performace, that was based less on special effects and light shows, than musicianship and performance skills
Pink Floyd being the exception to this...great show backed up by fantastic music and performances...but, not much movement...hahaha.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Would YOU fly in an airship product named NT? If only they had chosen a better name! But, I beat you to it by a few years (that was my first comment when I heard about the project back in 2000).
Actually I have been following the Zeppelin NT for a few years and have wanted to take the Lake Constance tours which have been offered for at least the last 2 years.
The Zeppelin is actually quite interesting, being very slightly heavier than air so that it coast down without any power. I hope someday to ride in one of them.
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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
If the dirigible is made with multiple self-sealing gas cells filled with helium, it is not at all very susceptible to anything short of major explosives, such as surface-to-air missiles. An RPG-7 (such as was used to take down two UH-60 helicopters in Mogadishu back in those recent troubles) might also make a dent and deflate a single cell, slowly - but the remaining cells should be enough to ensure at least a slow descent. If, however the terrorists shoot up a significant number of gas cellls, yes, that will possibly be a problem. The factors will be getting a high enough rate of deflation to actually make it drop at a significant rate, a rate high enough to cause damage.
At any rate, a dirigible is much less vulnerable to attack than, say, a pasenger airplane.