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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.
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...
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.
...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.
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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.
An unmanned automated airship would be the best candidate for such a thing. As long as it doesn't crash on anyone, if it were to burn up the only thing lost would be it and the cargo.
I'm curious of you could get enough solar cells light enough to wrap it in it so that it could power itself and run 24/7 365 days a year without having to refuel.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I can do math you know - I said myself that right now, it is almost certainly still true. Three major air crashes is probably about a thousand deaths. The number of major aircrashes per year is on the increase. The number of FATAL auto crashes is on the DECREASE as newer cars are ever LESS likely to have accidents with FATALITIES.
Sooner or later, that means cars will become SAFER than planes, because plane deaths are becoming MORE common, car deaths are DECREASING. Even though ACCIDENTS are getting MORE common, number of people INSIDE CARS who die are getting LESS every year. If we can cure the pedestrian-death problem - cars would be close to equaling planes right now.
Anyway, I wasn't really comparing cars to planes, merely pointing out that even THAT statistic is changing. My point was that dirigibles done right would be far safer than EITHER - near zero risk in fact. True it would be slower, but then again it's also much CHEAPER. You aren't wasting ANY energy to get lift, the atmosphere is giving you lift for FREE - helium at ground level has enormous potential energy which you don't need ANY difficulty to tap into. Almost all your energy expense is purely for going forward, you ONLY use a bit of energy to counteract the helium in order to land again. Your craft can survive almost any crash with nothing more than a light bounce happening. It's like a giant airbag ! The worst thing turbulence can do is shake your about a bit, maybe make you late - it cannot smash you out of the sky.
It's just a pity that one (fairly minor) tragedy seems to have permanently made people afraid of lighter-than-air travel.
A much more logical prediction of the future (prior to the Hindenburg) would have been that most passenger trips over medium-distances was handled by dirigibles which would be more comfortable, cheaper and safer. Airplanes would be used where speed was crucial. You probably wouldn't have a passenger dirigible over the atlantic as the time and associated costs (like food) wouldn't be worth it - so Jumbos would do that, but it doesn't make ANY sense to fly a jet from L.A. to New York - THAT trip would be much more sensibly done in a dirigible, even if it did take a few hours longer.
Strangely, the titanic didn't end the luxury cruise business and no aircraft crash has yet ended the passenger-flight industry. The only real difference is that the Hindenburg happened at a critical time in history, right when dirigibles and airplanes were both entering the mass-transit-market - the dirigibles had a major and much publicized accident which the airlines cashed in on. The dirigibles as a technology never really recovered from that blow at that critical time.
Bringing us back to my original point - the fact that we, right now have ONLY planes to choose for medium-distance airtravel has nothing to do with logic - it's a pure matter of emotion combined with established-market position (much the same reason some would say why Linux doesn't rule the desktop yet perhaps ?).
I would actually like to see this change. Dirigibles are safer, cleaner and cheaper. Whether it WILL or CAN change I can't speak about. I just think that it's illogical it ever ended up the way things ARE. Oh, and it's interesting that the medium distance planes have by FAR the worst track record for safety - exactly the market sphere where dirigibles would have been at their best.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
That's kind of the point... the rich person's money IS in the hands of a smallish company providing a service, which owes the bank, which owes the depositor. Money can be like electrical current, what's most important about it to the economy is not how much there is, but how quickly it cycles through different users.
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.
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.
A 747 does have a 1930's comparator: The DC-3
That was the "state of the art" at the time for heavier than air vehicle. And a pretty good design all things considered (I've even flown in one on a regular commercial passenger flight).
The point I was trying to make, however, was that bringing this into the 21st century that perhaps some refinements could be made to the handling system that wouldn't necessarily require so many people... especially if you could build some automated systems that would adjust based on wind currents on different portions of the airship and some advanced avionic sensors that simply weren't possible in the 1930's.
Still, I don't see how you can get rid of more than about half or so of the handlers there were for a comparably sized airship with modern technology. Perhaps a few more than that, but even now the Goodyear company has dozens of handlers even for their smaller blimps... and that is current technology that is compared to current 747s.
Furthermore, I'm trying to compare a major airship like the Hindenburg or USS Akron (google that one, if you would) to the 747.... which IMHO is a proper comparison if you want to compare carrying capacity for major kinds of air transport.
That is where the "apples to apples" comparison is at... as the 747 and its general class of airplanes is performing the task that the airships of the 1930's were originally designed to fill. It is also the supposed claim that airships are oh so much more efficient and should replace these monster airplanes for bulk air cargo shipments that I'm trying to refute and point out that the 747 exists precisely because the airships simply couldn't do the job in the first place.