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New Aircraft is Part Blimp and Part Airplane
An anonymous reader writes "Canton Rep has an interesting article on Ohio entrepreneurs who hope to get their business 'off the ground'. Brian Martin and Robert Rist think they are close to testing a prototype of their patented Dynalifter hybrid. They announced last week that their airship -- part blimp and part airplane -- has been completed, and they hope to conduct a test flight this spring. Martin and Rist hope the Dynalifter will help bring in a new transportation era. They see it as a way to move materials at a lower cost than jets and at a higher speed than ships. From the article: 'They think it could be used in emergency situations, such as Hurricane Katrina, to transport supplies. It might have military uses, such as delivering equipment and supplies to sites that might not be easily reachable.'"
The idea of hybrid lighter than air lifting and an aerodynamic hull has been around for a while. In his 1963 book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed essayist and journalist John McPhee covers the story the the Aereon, which was an early avitar of the dynalifter. There was a brief resurgence of interest in this aircraft design during the oil crisis in the 1970s. It now seems to be back once again now that oil has risen in price.
One of the things that those pushing this design may not be mentioning is that increasinly helium is both scarse and a strategic resource. Helium is actually "mined" from underground domes where it has been trapped (I assume formed from radioactive decay). If fleets of airships were helilum based, the price of helium would seen rise to the point where the airships were no longer cost effective. The alternative is hydrogen, but as the Hindenburg demonstrated, hydrogen has its own problems. These issues could be the reason that after over three decades this idea has not caught on.
in a brilliant book called "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed." He writes about an extraordinary variety of subjects, from rustlers to growing orange trees in Florida, although much of his work is about geology. But TDPS was/is entirely about this airframe and its evolution through the '60's and '70's, and includes some great material about flight into known icing conditions, the stuff that dooms small aircraft. blimps and dirigibles can often accumulate eight inches of ice and keep flying. (A small Cessna is screwed if you put on 1/2" of ice, and a jetliner isn't much better.) McPhee also wrote a lot about the quarter-scale and tenth-scale flying models of the hybrid lifting body. It's a fantastic book, and as is usual with McPhee, turns into a book about obsession and human devotion to ideas, rather than just being about the ideas themselves.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
The lifting body and wings allow the craft to operate under a much wider envelope of loads and bouyant lifts. A huge problem with airships is maintaining desired buoyancy despite variations in temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, fuel expenditure, and condensation or icing loading - helium is too expensive to vent when the airship is light and cannot be generated in filght as can hydrogen, hot air or steam*. Being able to descend or ascend without losing ballast or lift gas and to operate without massive ground crews and facilities should significantly reduce the operating expense associated with helium airships. The Ohio Airships people have gotten an amazing amount done with very little money, and they seem to be selling their idea effectively to US government buyers, so it seems possible that this design will avoid the fate of all the other large airship projects of the past 60 years.
The main innovation in the Ohio Airships design is in the novel rigid internal structure which uses a keel beam supported by stays (cables) from a tower in the manner of a suspension bridge. This should allow greater loads relative to the airframe mass, including positive or negative loads from the wings.
*Steam is potentially the most economical lift gas since it gives 60% of helium lift or 200% of hot air lift, is essentially free if generated as a by-product of a steam engine, and the airship envelope acts as a condenser for the engine, reducing weight. This makes both the lift gas and propulsion much more efficiently produced than helium bags or IC engines See www.flyingkettle.com for more details.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
2001:
CargoLifter AG based to the South of Berlin in Germany is developing "Lighter-than-Air" systems for logistics and other applications. The Company's first product, the CL 75 AC balloon based system has been in prototype flight test since October 2001.
2002:
For reasons of insolvency the CargoLifter AG Board of Managing Directors today filed an application for the opening of insolvency proceedings on the assets of CargoLifter AG at the Cottbus District Court.
I'm not saying it can't, or shouldn't be done, it makes sense on some levels, i.e. not having to ship your tons of goods via truck->rail->boat->rail->truck, but I remember reading about the operation mentioned above a few years back. It was no garage business, they had a wealthy shipping magnate with a lot of vertical expertise, a slew of aerospace engineers, and a ton of capital.
The problem, IIRC, was that the infrastructure to handle these things (big hangars) are gone, and real estate is too valuable to go around scooping it up near transportation hubs, where they could be integrated into existing systems. I think they went broke, not because the airships were too costly to build, but there weren't any other facilities to land/unload/service the things, and they had to build those too. The problem is easy to spot when you look at their plans.
Helium is just a place-holder. You make some ships and prove that they work and are cheap, then you replace the helium with hydrogen. It can even be generated from the ship's fuel if there are slow leaks. The hindenberg's shell burned, not the hydrogen. Hydrogen can plenty safe in airships with the right designs... far safer than using thousands of gallons of jet fuel. You aren't going to shoot a hydrogen airship with a handgun (or a rocket for that matter) and have it explode.