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Zeppelin Flies Again

Posted by Hemos on from the taking-to-the-air dept.

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"."

11 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. It is over me currently by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Zeppelin NT came to Istanbul for a private BMW meeting I guess. Thing looks damn cool and huge :)

  2. Article has errors by BeeRockxs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    " 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.

  3. It's about time by Jesrad · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ?
  4. Touting the Canadian Horn here by WormholeFiend · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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".

  5. I've seen it... by OmniGeek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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."
  6. Hopefully these come to the US! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:12 Passengers? by markball · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  8. Other German Zeppelin Startup.. by matt4077 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  9. Helium Supply by lcars1701z · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  10. using up the planet's supply of helium? by pomakis · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Helium is a very useful substance to use for this sort of thing, but I think we have to be careful how much of it we waste. Let me explain. Helium is a fairly rare element on the planet. Up until sometime in the 1940s or thereabouts, it was thought that helium was pretty much nonexistant on the planet. It doesn't exist in the atmosphere because any helium that's floating around in the atmosphere eventually leaks out into space because it's so light. Also, it can't be part of any heavier molecule because it's an inert gas. Any helium that escapes into the air will eventually leak out into space and be lost forever. I believe that this property is unique to helium. Anyways, it was eventually discovered that helium is trapped in certain kinds of sand, and so the helium-mining industry was founded. I guess there's a lot of it, but unlike every other element in existance, once helium is leaked, it's gone from the planet forever. Sure, we're depleting the planet of a lot of things, such as fossil fuels, etc., but at least the individual atoms of these substances stick around, so we still have the fundamental building blocks for these things, etc. But once the helium is gone, it's gone! There's no way we can make more short of building nuclear fusion plants to build new helium atoms from hydrogen. Yet I've never seen this matter even briefly discussed anywhere. Am I missing something, or is this actually going to be a problem in the future? I can't help but think that in a couple of hundred years, we'll be smacking ourselves in the head for wasting all of the planet's precious helium on children's balloons, etc.

    1. Re:using up the planet's supply of helium? by fnj · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Are there many industrial processes that use Helium that can't use something else besides making us talk funny?

      Ignoring the "many" part, which seems pointless ... let's see ...
      1) Supercooling, as in superconductivity. Nothing else will allow cooling as near to absolute zero.
      2) Breathing mixture for very deep diving.
      3) Lifting balloons and airships without extreme peril from fire.

      Do you really need more examples of irreplaceability? I'd say a single significant example is enough.

      That said, there's no difference whether we extract the helium, or leave it mixed in, when we extract all the natural gas in the planet and burn it up (as we are feverishly doing). Either way, the helium is gone. Might as well use it for something if the natural gas is to be expended anyway.