Slashdot Mirror
New Type of Hot Air Blimp
An anonymous reader writes to let un know about a story up on the Experimental Aircraft Association site about a new kind of blimp. From the article: "Alberto, whose name pays homage to Brazilian aviation pioneer, Alberto Santos-Dumont, is 102 feet long with a 70-foot diameter and uses hot air rather than helium for lift. Its innovative foldable frame (much like an giant umbrella) creates structural support of its hot-air envelope, and it has a fly-by-wire vectored thrust steering system. Alberto is a hybrid; a hot-air balloon with aluminum ribs that looks more like a blimp, but with a tail propeller that gives it directional control." The home site of the blimp's developers has a timeline, photos, and a video of the blimp in flight.
Seeing how helium is actually quite expensive (paid $70 for 300 cu ft. at a local welding supply if memory serves) it's interesting that this contraption uses hot air. I wonder what the economics of hot air look like; i.e. cost of fuel to maintain lift, etc.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
There are solar heated hot air balloons...
e.g.
http://perso.orange.fr/ballonsolaire/en-index.htm
Deleted
A term of some use here is "dirigible", i.e. "something that can be directed". Term for lighter-than-air airships of the past was dirigible balloon, shortened to "dirigible" in common use.
As a young lad I read Doc Smith's stories (before learning that) and had this terrible image of his dirigible torpedoes being these explosive little balloons running around in outer space...
Oh, and the term "blimp", like "jeep", was a military term shortened in general use -- originally it was a "Type B-Limp Balloon"
There, I have just elocuted you.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
blimp: a term coined in 1915 as a friendly synonym for a pressure airship. The word is said to have mimicked the sound made when a man snapped his thumb on the airship's gas-filled envelope. It is not derived from the description of an apocryphal type of World War I British airship, the "Balloon, Type B, limp." There was never a "Type B" nor a designation "limp" applied to a British airship before, during or after WW I. The term most likely originated with Lieutenant (later Air Commodore) A. D. Cunningham of the Royal Naval Air Service, commanding officer of the British airship station at Capel in December 1915. During a weekly inspection, Lt. Cunningham visited an aircraft hangar to examine a "Submarine Scout" pressure airship, His Majesty's Airship SS-12. Cunningham broke the solemnity of the occasion by playfully flipping his thumb at the gasbag and was rewarded with an odd noise that echoed off the taut fabric. Cunningham imitated this sound by uttering: "Blimp!" A young midshipman, who later became known as Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, repeated the tale of this humorous inspection to his fellow officers in the mess hall before lunch the same day. It is believed that by this route the word came into common usage.
clarification.
If at first you don't feel good.... suffer like the rest of us.