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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]
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...
They are rich, they are powerful, they are once again literally over us.
I for one welcome our new recreating/floating overlords
My other sig is just as lame
Where's the waste?
They take rich people's money, which would otherwise be locked down in someone's personal possession, i.e. not in the economy. That's what I'd call wasted.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
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.
why exactly is this limited to people with a house in Malibu? people routinely spend several hundred dollars on a special activity while on leave/holidays.
What is...?
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 has been reported that a farmer has modified his cessna cropduster with machine guns. Something about "German Invasion"...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
250 USD is a lot of money? I have a few British pennies in my pocket that should about cover that fair.
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!
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.
But I agree, I don't object to money sinks for rich folks. People will be putting food on the table by providing this money waster, perhaps science or engineering will be advanced a little bit, and most importantly it's the rich people's own damn money. I prefer rich people spending cash on useless frippery, to taxing those people to death and spending the taxes on, say, putting little rainbow-colored stickers on every lamppost along a (shortish) stretch of highway to "give it an identity", for a cost of $200.000 (I kid you not).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
...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==
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.
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)
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 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 *
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.
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.
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
dumber people are doing harder things everyday
Taking all 24 accidents and incidents, 697 of 1955 aboard were killed - no more than 36% of those aboard on average.That's just crazy. Statistically, if you drove 100 million miles during the period 1989-2004, you would have an 83% chance of dying. For the same period, if you flew 100 million miles, you would have a 2 percent chance of dying. Furthermore, from 1989 to 2004, the death expectancy for driving dropped about one third, but that for flying dropped to only about 2%. Flying is much safer now, and is getting even safer at a much faster rate than driving is getting safer.(2)
References:
(1) List of commercial aviation accidents and incidents by year
(2) Comparative death rate by year for driving vs flying
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.
That's a great idea. Let's have you be in charge of what's useful and what's a waste, and tax people at extremely high rates so that money doesn't go into what's a waste. Rich people like the Wright Brothers should have been taxed into being "mddle class" with a respectable job too. What silliness to waste their time on a machine only rich people can afford. Wait a second. Maybe an even better alternative is to just tax you (and other volunteers) at a higher rate, since that's what you've chosen. Then nobody loses.
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.
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.
That's nonsensical. You use transportation to get somewhere. The distance to your destination is the same no matter what mode of transportation you use. (Minus things like having to follow rodes as opposed to being able to fly direct, but this doesn't make for a great change.) If a plane can go ten times faster than a car then you can spend ten times fewer hours inside the plane to accomplish the same travel, thus the proper measurement is per mile, not per time.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.