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Zeppelins Over California
It seems that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow may not have been completely off the mark. According to Venture Beat, Airship Ventures has raised capital sufficient to build their first Zeppelin NT (Microsoft Windows reference purely coincidental). The airship will offer rides for up to 12 passengers out of the old Navy Blimp hangars at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley. Airship Ventures notes that airships are already flying safely in Japan and Germany, so now the US will have its chance. Rides will cost from $250 to $500 per person. Esther Dyson is one of the investors.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Does anyone else get as tired as I do of hearing about time and money wasting recreation for the wealthy? How can anyone really care about this who doesn't already have a house in Malibu?
... Couldn't resist :)
Failed Australian Entrepreneur Alan Bond had blimps used for joy rides in the 80s in Sydney. They were pretty noisy and slow. I think they got taken to the US and had goodyear painted on the side and hung out around sporting events as they were worth more as event billboards than joyride vessels. I wonder how this is different, IF it is different...
What? No jokes about crashing? (Apart from that one BSOD reference)
I would love to go on one of those flights with some nice photography equipment. You really couldn't ask for a better platform for aerial photography: slow, stable, and not too high. The fact that the city and the surrounding area are beautiful doesn't hurt either!
IF they actually build it (we've been hearing about the return of dirigibles to the US for years now) I would go for a ride next time I'm around San Fran.
Wait, what are we talking about?
The Zeppelin NT is purchased from "ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH" and the 4th they are building, see this link (german)
and want to flood the silicon valley to push the prices of computer chips.
it will crash and burn with a name like that
... it has been reported that a farmer has modified his cessna cropduster with machine guns. Something about "German Invasion"...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
so instead of the gangsters in oakland shooting their guns in the air for fun, they'll have a target. and fourth of july will come early if one of em hits it!
In which the boys investigates a series of murders at a new startup launching Lighter-than-air travel from New York. The company in that line however was seriously trying to recreate the commercial travel market that was destroyed by the Zeppelin disaster (unfairly I may add, if the Zeppelin had been running on Helium like it should have it would almost certainly have survived - greed is a terrible thing - quoth the book). :p
Anyway, I can't remember the specific title, but it was one of the better Hardy Boys books if I recall - man this takes me back many years. I remember the CEO of the startup in the booking quoting that lighter-than-air is safer, more comfortable and cheaper than airplanes could ever be - and were it not for the Zeppelin crash would almost certainly have ruled the market because even though it's slower, every working stiff could afford a ticket.
Far be it from me to question Franklin W. Dixon's research
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Remember this?:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/14/0219246
I hope they included the increasing price and decreasing availability of helium in their business plan. No wonder it's $250+ per flight.
of a blimp over the Golden Gate bridge reminds me of "A View to Kill" James Bond 007 the last part of the movie...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
...Who knows if there's any significant air transport market for airships to fill in this day-and-age, but I thinks it's interesting to speculate whether fixed-wing aircraft would be the dominant air transport technology that it is today had the Hindenburg not gone down. OTOH maybe airships would have been killed of by fixed-wings regardless.
==C:\WINDOWS\system32\lusrmgr.exe==
Always knew Page and co. were "Going to California".
I still remember the dream of thousand tonne capacity cargo airships that would revolutionise the transport of anything big and delicate. The only purpose this sky yacht can serve that I care about is as a small scale proof of expertise in the field to attract more investment. Things probably won't work that way unfortunately. What would interest me far more would be an attempt to make hydrogen airships once more. It is like any technology involving large amounts of energy, there are dangers but they only apply if you don't design your machine properly.
Apparently, one premium option is a flight that climbs, incrementally, for several hours at a time. They're calling it the "...stairway to heaven..."
"Airship Ventures notes that airships are already flying safely in Japan and Germany"
;) ? I'd hate to think Hindenburg was their idea of flying safely!
I take it they're not taking history into account with this comment
"Fire's high and the airbag's tight, ...we're low on cash but see another target."
Food's low but the skies are bright.
Props spinning all through the night,
Seems like the Airship Pirates from Abney Park finally get their chance, at last.
remains perhaps the most painful to watch movie that I have ever seen. Sure, other movies are worse, but Sky Captain was just so much of a letdown and mishmash of weird acting, awkward script, and uncomfortable direction that I couldn't watch it without thinking "Who likes this sort of strangeness?" Further complicating this, I couldn't conceive of what sort of demographic this movie could appeal to... older/younger, male/female, geek/mainstream, etc.
Article on industrial helium. Abundant in the universe, but only a few practical supply points on the globe. http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/10754.html
I live in Friedrichshafen, Germany where the Zeppelin NT was designed and built. They fly around here all the time. Japan is the only country that has bought some until now. Being originally from California, I find it very cool that they soon may be flying around the SF bay area.
Zeppelins are a very cool technology because (unlike a blimp) they are built with a skeleton. They retain their shape, even when there is no helium pumped into them. Since it has a skeleton, it means the engines are mounted far away from the cabin. So riding in one is very pleasant.
It is also neat to watch them fly around. They are quite fast and surprisingly maneuverable.
$250 for a ride over San Francisco in a zeppelin would be a bargain! I can remember paying $150 to fly under the Golden Gate bridge in a small, crammed, loud helicopter.
I hear that the mass-market passenger version that they're planning to build a few years later, Zeppelin Me! might be somewhat unreliable.
Best hold out for Zeppelin 2000 or Zeppelin XP.
Zeppelin Vista will be terrible as well, although the screening process will be so invasive and draconian, that you'll probably never actually make it onto the ship anyway...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So is this a rigid dirigible? or just another blimp.
The Original Zeppelins, right up to the Hindenburg, all had w rigid structure, not just pressurized with air and gas.
Another use for these airships is advertising, like the Goodyear blimps, only they could use modern Light Emitting Diode signs instead of incandescents. If I had one of those LED Zeppelins, I'd name it Stairway To Heaven.
Hydrogen is probably a net safety gain.
Rigid airships had a terrible safety record. They were large fragile ships, and even moderately bad weather could rip them apart, and did. Sometimes their massive cross sections caught the wind and tore them loose from their moorings.
Traveling on a 20th century zeppelin was like trusting your life to a soap bubble on a breezy day. Fire was a concern, but not the greatest danger.
Think of all the houses that are heated by gas; every year a house or two blows up -- usually empty houses where nobody was home to smell the gas. Gas leaks are much, much more common than house explosions. "Explosion" is just a term that means supersonic burning. In order to get a big gas explosion, you have to have a large cloud within which the gas and oxygen are mixed in the proper stoichiometric ratio. That's hard to do because natural gas is lighter than air, and diffuses rapidly. You need special conditions, and really bad luck to get a good sized explosion.
The same applies even more so to hydrogen. Considering that hydrogen allows you to have a ship that is smaller, stronger, or both, and both of these help avoid the most common failure mode of rigid airships, I'd speculate that hydrogen is a net win.
I think the most interesting designs being talked about are hybrid airships that are heavier than air -- but still gain a large fraction of lift from gas. With a combination of modern materials and weather forecasting, these vehicles might operate much like zeppelins in flight, but with far greater reliability.
Couldn't the cost of riding on these zeppelins be subsidized by selling 'airvertising' space on them? Also, they could be used as wi-fi stations which could help to get rural areas online.
Just for those of you that think this would be a great ride and enjoyable, I can speak on two aspects of this and why it won't be worth more than the rides at Great America right below your flight.
1) I've had a ride in the Goodyear blimp around the Bay Area. If was cool, but I'd never shell out $500 to poke around. Noisy as all get out too. Could hardly hear the person yelling next to you. Save your money for when the B-17 comes through and ride in the nose-cone. That is a cool ride!
2) The airspace over the Bay Area is CRAZY!! Not just San Jose and San Fran are there. This floating snail will have to go up and then back down. Forget taking a low and slow trip over the Gate.
I am a HUGE zeppelin enthusiast. I plan on building zeppelins myself eventually, or now if you have a venture capitalist with some vision.
Let's be clear: Zeppelins are MUCH safer than airplanes. They float, and are inherently safer by design. Even in the Hindenburg, arguably one of the worst zeppelin disasters in history, over 50% of the people on board survived. Hydrogen is safe, too, the only reason the Hindenburg went down is because it had been damaged by a Nazi party show boat, and was painted in (I'm not making this up) Aluminum, gunpowder, and rocket fuel, all of which are more than just a little bit flammable.
Zeppelins are much CHEAPER than airplanes. You only need to blow a fan for propulsion, and can do so at slower (safer) speeds, as the lift is all provided by helium or hydrogen. In fact, the typical zeppelin has a LOT of surface area, and with the new cheap CIGS solar panels, even propulsion could be largely free. Done properly, zeppelins could be cheaper to travel in than ANY OTHER VEHICLE.
Zeppelins can be spacious, comfortable, and luxurious. They offer spectacular views, speedy (as the bird flies) routes, and stunning panache.
With the technology we have now, you could have a GPS-guided, radar-auto-avoiding, wifi-other-zeppelin-communicating, self-propelled zeppelin made of carbon fiber, kevlar, and CIGS solar panels which is also a luxurious home complete with hot tub, shower, bed, kitchen, sun deck, and movie theater, able to travel essentially for free, after initial purchase price.
In fact, with mass production, there is no part of this design that is expensive AT ALL, and they could eventually be much cheaper than houses and change the way we live altogether.
You can laugh if you want, but we had designs vastly superior to any of our current vehicles in the TWENTIES!!!!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I didn't think I could shoot down a German plane, but last year I proved myself wrong!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Yes...but what color is the word "orange"?
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What really killed the airships wasn't the Hindenburg, though that certainly didn't help. It was the weather.
Airships have a HUGE sail (amount of surface the wind can push against) compared to their weight, and that puts them at the mercy of any sort of significant convective weather. Couple that with the pathetic state of weather forecasting during that period, and you have disasters like those that occurred to the U.S.S. Macon and the U.S.S. Akron. So, launching one of these ships in anything but ridiculously mild weather was out of the question. Couple that with the state of weather forecasting, and you had a business model that would make any sane businessman run for his life.
I'm still not sure that forecasting has matured to the point that you can take a significant number of these ships on, say, transcontinental or transatlantic runs, but perhaps the safety of shorter routes may have improved to the point that a banker won't laugh you out of his office. The majority of passenger traffic would be out, however; people want to get there NOW, not a week from now.
What may, however, bring at least a limited number of these lumbering beasts back is their cargo-carrying capacity. That, and their ability to hold said cargo motionless over a point (think bridge assembly, etc) makes for some interesting possibilities. I'd like to see what the station-holding technology that mobile oil-drilling platforms use could do when applied to this scenario.
Regards;
Whether parent post a troll be, matters not. Reply I shall</yodavoice>, as these points have yet to be addressed:
Dirigibles made with today's technology are an interesting concept, and could become an important part of the infrastructure in a few short years.
Dirigibles could provide manned, stratospheric bases that could replace cell phone towers and fiber optic cables (think point to point laser links operating above cloud cover over hundreds of miles). Such bases would be excellent command/control posts for forest fire management, local weather reports (including tracking individual tornadoes), crop assessments, border management, and so on. These bases are likely to evolve beyond the design limits of the dirigible fairly quickly, but dirigibles make sense as an interim stage, and probably as the escape vehicles and supply ships that these high outposts would always need.
Dirigibles make more economic sense than trucks in moving cargo from railway terminals and sea ports to destinations on the far side of difficult terrain (mountains, wetlands). Building fleets of dirigibles could easily be more sound fiscally and environmentally than continued maintenance of some existing rail lines and trucking routes.
But these are long term goals. Something is needed to fund the immediate R&D work. Giving joy rides to rich bas^H^H^H people is the kind of low hanging fruit that is worth pursuing.
Most of the historic problems with dirigibles concerned their bouyancy when on the ground. We now have heat pump technology that could be used to change the bouyancy of the lifting gas on a minute by minute basis. We can also manage mixtures of hydrogen and helium that would give better lift at lower cost than pure helium while avoiding any real and many of the irrational concerns over using pure hydrogen. Combined with lighter, stronger, and less porous gas bags and lighter and stronger frames, a modern dirigible would compare to the old Zeppelins like a racing yacht compares to kid's raft with a bedsheet sail.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b7J5k3BNtc A Tokyo Flight By Zeppelin NT
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Zeppelin NTs have been flying for ages now over various bits of Europe. Saw one over Frankfurt about eight years ago, they were running short sightseeing flights (sorry linked article is in German) from a field just outside a nearby town (which had historically been used as a Zeppelin airfield). There are some videos if you are interested in seeing more. One should be flying in the Munich area in 2009 (there was some hope to get it for Oktoberfest this year, but it didn't work out).
The article isn't quite accurate, Airship Ventures is only ordering. Construction is taking place down at Friedrichshafen where the original Zeppelins were built.
See my journal, I write things there
Lame.
it's been what- 60+ years?
take a look at this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_800 from 1996
now read this from 1998
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29630
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
take your statistics and logical thinking elsewhere.
It figures - we get a thread about airships, it gets a good 150 replies, and not one of them even make a reference to breeding giant riding chickens that can be armored for conflicts.
Not really. They both stand for "New Technology", although for the airship that's "Neue Technologie" and for Windows it's a bit of a bacronym.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_NT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
Wikipedia - Now everyone can be Cliff Clavin!
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Everybody needs to get a blimp,
Cause blimps are pretty pimp,
You can fill it up with air,
But that wont get you anywhere,
Advertise upon the side,
Take your girlfriend for a ride,
Just fill up the ballon with the very best gas in Toon.
HELIUM!
you need helium to fill that bitch up,
its the second symbol on the periodic table,
oxygen and nitrogen are way behind it,
as chemicals go they're both pretty stupid,
HELIUM! HELIUM! HELIUMM!
*dinosour high voice* Don't breathe it in though!
/appologies to Weebl.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine. Made up my mind to make a new start, Going To California with an aching in my heart.
Robert Plant has a project with Allison Kraus going on.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
if they want to fly zeppelins over california, all they have to do is get Pamela Anderson airborne. i'm not sure how many passengers she can accomodate.