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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.
The Zeppelin NT is purchased from "ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH" and the 4th they are building, see this link (german)
They're not blimps, so the engines are not attached to the person-carrying cabin, but to the hull. So they're not noisy for the passengers.
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.
Actually, the Hindenburg fire could well have had more to do with the surface coating than the hydrogen gas, although that certainly didn't help. At any rate most of the passengers and crew of the Hindenburg survived, and those who died were the ones who jumped out of the airship; people who stayed aboard survived. Compare that with the survival rate of any famous disaster on a jet plane and tell me airships are dangerous. I mean, these things were SUPPOSED to fly straight at skyscrapers. There's a mast at the top of the Empire State Building which was for mooring airships; if one had missed and crashed into the side, it would have gone bump, quite gently.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Zeppelins are great. We should really be using them for more than simple tourism. Their lifting capacity is much greater than an aeroplane and their cost much lower. Slower of course, but faster than a ship, I think. Next time I come to the US, I'd be more than happy to take two or three days on the journey in the comfortable, ship-like capacity of a zeppelin.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
As much as I get the joke, hydrogen as a lifting gas for airships is something whose danger is by far and away overblown. Germany used airships extensively using hydrogen... and it was the fact that they used what was effectively rocket fuel for the ship hull that did in airships like the Hindenburg, not the hydrogen gas.
Assuming that these airships are going to use some petrochemical substance like gasoline or JP-5 (military-grade jet fuel) to power its engines, I would be by far and away more concerned about some problem with the fuel system blowing up than the hydrogen.
As for why a 1930's technology isn't being used in the 21st century more extensively, there are a bunch of factors in that equation... including some irrational fear of hydrogen that makes it the target of lame jokes like this one.
The money goes from rich person R1 to rich person R2. Some of it goes to the state as taxes. R2 then has to spend some money on wages for workers W1 to Wn who operate and maintain the zeppelin (again, some of that money goes to the state via taxes at various points). He also has to spend money on material and parts required to maintain the zeppelin, which goes to suppliers S1 to Sn. Again, taxes apply and if the zeppelin business runs well enough the material suppliers might be able to expand their businesses, thus creating more jobs.
I don't know how much taxes this generates as opposed to taxes on money that lies around on the bank, but it does also generate jobs, which helps society because (at least in theory) it reduces welfare spending, among other things.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
There are a great many engineering problems that are associated with airships that have made it a technology that is difficult to work with compared to a wide-bodied fixed wing airplane like a 747 or A380.
Problems that need to be considered is having to fly in less than ideal weather, engines powerful enough to push through a strong headwind, and being able to handle the airship both at departure and at arrival. Airships simply can't even compete against large airplanes in terms of these basic handling requirements.
Consider that at least using 1930's technology, a typical airship required a terminal crew of hundreds of handlers just to get the vehicle into a hanger. A great many of these handlers often were injured when a sudden gust of wind lifted the airship up and caused it to go up 30 or more feet... picking up somebody holding onto the ropes that was trying to guide the ship into or out of the terminal.
Basically, the economic savings that came from slightly more efficient shipping costs were more than out weighed by the personnel costs including berthing suites (even for cargo haulers... you need multiple crews for longer flights), support personnel, and a much more elaborate terminal crew. Added on top of that the strong lack of reliability in terms of being able to use the vehicles in only nearly ideal weather conditions (meaning you can't trust when an airship is going to arrive with a cargo shipment) add up to the reason why they aren't used much at all.
This is a nice dream, and I'd love the chance to fly one of these gracious vehicles myself. But the challenges and obstacles necessary to make this something commercially viable are huge, and unless heavily subsidized by government I don't see that it would be viable as a business model. The government money IMHO would be a giant black hole of a concept too, and wouldn't maintain popular support for what would be openly a welfare program for elite rich folks.
But the average survival rate of a plane-crash is ZERO - and the amount of people inside are in the hundreds. There were 3 major air crashes last year !
Actually, the survival rate for commercial aviation crashes is around 24% for this decade. Last year alone, for example, in the April 15th crash in the Congo almost all of the passengers survived; as did all of the passengers on the BA 777 that had an unplanned early impact with the ground at Heathrow.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I think you have your automotive accident statistics way off... as are your airplane statistics in terms of the number of accidents.
Three whole major air crashes involving commercial passenger travel? That is it? Seriously? In other words, it is "news" when a major crash occurs precisely because it is such a rare occurrence. Automotive crashes might make local press coverage if some famous celebrity or politician died, or perhaps on the morning traffic report when it shuts down a major arterial road... but they happen so often that it isn't even really considered a newsworthy topic to cover. This is true even when there are fatalities in the crash.
In terms of overall expectation in terms of living to see the next day, travel by airplane is much safer than travel by any surface vehicle transportation. In fact, you are more likely to die in the airport terminal parking lot than on the airplane itself... at least that is my assertion. Certainly you are much more likely to die in transit going to and from the terminal.
As far as "most people these days walk away from a car crash"... I have buried far too many close friends that have died from an automotive crash to believe this to be true. And yes, it is more than one person or even one incident. From both personal experience and from raw statistics I find this to be utter BS to even suggest such a thought.
Okay...
1) No technology is "proven" out of the box.
2) All technology that is being given attention in any form improves over time.
3) Payroll initially comes from the investors then from customers just like any other business.
4) The money spent on hiring all those people GOES BACK INTO THE ECONOMY.
So what you end up with is what is basically a young technology that will improve over time and stimulates the economy.
You gotta start somewhere my friend...
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Goodyear has never made a serious business of selling blimp rides, although lease arrangements in certain venues sometimes force them to offer a few.
rj
rj
dumber people are doing harder things everyday
Wrong. Goodyear has built it's own airship since before you were a gleam in daddy's eye. They developed their own designs in house and would have sneered at any outside tech. A quick trip to google can provide the Goodyear legacy far better than I can, if you're still interested. The ships you're talking about in Australia, at least from all photos I've seen of commercial ships there, were Airship Industries Skyship 500's and 600's.
I worked as a nightsign technician on Airship Shamu for a few years, as well as on Bud One, Gulf Oil's WDL ship, and the Met Life blimp before they made the switch to the lightships. The only serious manufacturers in the industry during the 80's were Goodyear, Aiship Industries (A British firm) and WDL, a german company that made a rugged ship that was more like a flying VW in it's simplicity. It wasn't until the 90's that the Lightships came into popularity because of their smaller size (cheaper operating costs).
Advertising has always been what paid the bills for commercial blimps, passenger service is break even at best. Smaller projects, like the 80' ship I helped build for the Florida Institute of Oceanography were always used as research platforms or surveillance, and typically could not carry passengers due to insufficient lift and FAA Experimental ratings.
(name withheld by request)
The Zeppelin NT is not new. The first one was completed in 1997. Three of these Zeppelins exist and they've transported over 50.000 passengers. The only thing new is that they plan to build one in the US. It is normally built in Friedrichshafen, Germany.
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;
The R100, the better design of the two, was not only the most reliable airship ever built, it was also the fastest of its time. The design, by Vickers, was originally derived from the Zepplins but the engineers found many ways to improve on the original. The result was radical, robust, capable of carrying far more, and safe. This is the design modern airship builders should start from, not the older Zepplins, and no doubt countless improvements can be made again today, perhaps leading to a still stranger design. When designing wheels for cars, we base them on the more recent succssful designs, we don't go back to examining wooden log rollers. When designing computers, we look to what works now, not what worked when ENIAC was new.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
LA to New York is actually a longer flight than New York to London. America's a big place.
I actually think the Hindenburg accident would have been survivable for the airship industry. Trouble was, it was 1930s Germany. So the war began, and suddenly nobody's got the time to float merrily about the place in Zeppelins, and all the aviation workers are making bombers for London. The pressure of war drove the development of jet planes to the point where they were viable for civilian aviation, and far, far faster than an airship could ever be. Plus, a big bonus for planes in the immediately post-war world, they weren't iconically Nazi.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
R101's frame was largely made of stainless steel, which is why it was overweight. This led to them overinflating the gas cells which led to chafing against the frame and loss of gas. The major problem is thought to have been the airship's cover splitting which let the wind play havoc with the gas cells.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.