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Boeing-Skyhook Airship Faces Technical Challenges
waderoush writes "Since the Hindenburg disaster, dreams of giant airships capable of lifting heavy cargo have been restricted mainly to Popular Science covers
(with the notable exception of the Cargolifter AG failure) — until Boeing and a Canadian company called Skyhook announced on July 8 that they're building a 300-foot-long, helium-filled craft that will lift loads of up to 40 tons and carry them 200 miles. But an aeronautical engineer at the University of Washington cautions that there are still some big problems to be worked out with mega-airships, including their stability in turbulent weather."
Wow, it seems we're coming full circle with air travel..
"I'd like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogiro?"
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
This is, once again, a stupid and worthless article. Allow me to summarize again.
1. Someone's trying to build something
2. Someone else says it was hard a few decades ago
That's it. Gee, thanks for the news. Once again, "Someone is going to try to do something" is not a headline!
If it works reliably, this could be a very cheap alternative to traditional cargo planes. The price of helium ain't nothin' compared to the way the oil market is behaving.
There's got to be more to this analysis than TFA leads on. I mean, identifying turbulence as a problem is hardly a feat of aeronautical engineering. We've been flying aircraft of many varieties for a long time, and it's not as if we don't have strategies in place to deal with turbulence or any of the other weather conditions that exist (which TFA seems to confuse with turbulence). Problems with aerodynamic control are hardly showstoppers either. If worse comes to worse, put a tail-rotor on the thing just like a helicopter, or use counter-rotating props. As for the third problem (the high price of helium) - that's hardly a "technical challenge". If companies feel this new design opens some profitable avenues, they'll find a way to fund it - otherwise, it will remain a prototype. I'd like to hear what this engineer ACTUALLY had to say, since the folks at xconomy.com seem to have left nearly all the meat out of his critique.
I'm disabling ads until because I choose not to reward redesigns that are less usable than "view source".
"oh the humanity..." Hindenburg disaster
I suspect the 300 foot blimp with a 20-40 ton payload will be exceptionally stable. It is the empty ones that would be bothered by turbulent weather, so maybe they should not fly them empty in turbulent weather.
They must not read /.
Helium Crisis Approaching, slashdot earlier this year.
A Helium Shortage?, Wired eight years ago.
But an aeronautical engineer at the University of Washington cautions that there are still some big problems to be worked out with mega-airships, including their stability in turbulent weather.
Well, duh. Don't fly them in a storm them. Geez, do these guys need to have everything explained to them?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Almost all the large airships that were built in the past crashed, Google can tell you that (I removed Hindenburg from the list because that was a fire, not a crash). As a matter of fact, I think they ALL crashed, except but one, that is I think I once read about a large airship that was retired due to old age, but I'm not sure.
Being fragile is an intrinsic condition of a structure that must be very large, yet very lightweight. Heavier-than-air craft are much sturdier, just because they are, well, they are heavier.
First off, they're already using aerostats, so a full blown airship for surveillance isn't a stretch.
Secondly, iff (that is if, and only if) you support illegals I hope one robs you one day and blows your filthy brains out in the process. I'm not racist and I'm not a xenophobe (just to short-circuit the logically impaired).. I just feel one needs to go through the appropriate process to enter the country and if they do not, then they are a criminal as they've broken the damned law.
"Once again, "Someone is going to try to do something" is not a headline!"
Sure its a headline.
But, for you, when people are doing something huge, you apparently dont want to know till its done. Many news stories are worthy just that someone i undertaking the challenge, usually because of the scope of the challenge and implications. Some things take longer. Like USA decides to go to the moon was pretty big back in the day. That certainly is/was news to even try the feat. You seriously wouldn't be interested to know Iran is trying to build a nuke? Or do you just say "yawn, let me know when they have a nuke... its not news they are trying...".
Your ideal newspaper would read "2020: The USA successfully set up their base mars yesterday after 12 years of work on the project"?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Mankind does Life Threating actions everyday; Flying Aircraft is but one dangerous occupation. And when the weather is rough, good pilots change flight plans. One benefit would be that Truck Jackings would go down, (a bad use of words here...). But what is the cost per ton by the Consignee? What is the average ground speed for cargo delivery. What are the Logistics of this Grand Design? I know this; "Point to Point Delivery" would open up our congested Freeways, that's cool.
Just a thought, but what about a "Sport Light Aircraft Blimp"? Just please don't call this Aircraft an "Icarus".
It can carry 40 tons of cargo but only enough fuel to travel 200 miles? I can see this being useful for heavy construction, but c'mon- it can't be too hard to sacrifice a little bit of cargo space in order to extend the range dramatically. What am I missing?
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
The target carrying weight of 40 tons appears to be the normal maximum carrying weight for trucks.
Heavy lift aircraft can carry an order of magnitude more weight.
Helicopters appear more limited (but I couldn't find references). So it looks like the idea is to build a flying semi truck for use in remote areas where roads don't go.
Interesting.
Blimps are relatively small craft, made of rubberized fabric, they are in a different class from the larger airships with metal structures.
They're full of helium, man. Even if you manage to set fire to one, it'll crash and go out
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
... I just had a thought: why not make the thing positively bouyant with the rotors tilted upward holding it down? Then the rotors could rotate around when it picks up a load. Then it could carry a heck of a lot more stuffs. Brilliant!
The one method that you can trust to make sure you have not altered the past or diverted to an alternate world, is the relative absence of blimps.
Of course there would be problems with an airship based on skyhooks.
Jeez
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
this thing has a lift capacity of 40 tonnes.
to achieve that requires:
40 short tonnes is 36287389.6 grams
each gram of helium displaces about 29 grams of air, so this requires lift equaivalent to:
14.5 thousand kilograms of helium
Now imagine you fly this somewhere. If you unload the cargo, the tiedowns have to hold 40 tonnes of pull. So you can't just teather this ting like a balloon on one end like they used to do. The needle on the empire state building was an air ship dock and all the pictures show the airships teathered oriented horizontally not point up.
So how do they do this. You might think well they could cantaleaver an moveable weight to hold the back down. But then you have to strengthen the middle to support this tension without bending plus you have to drag the weight. Worse yet if the teather erer came loose you'd suddenly have 40 tonnes of lift shooting you towards the moon like a watermelon seed.
The best Idea I can think of is you could pump water onto it at the same time you remove the cargo to keep it all neutral.
But this means no dead heading. No matter where you go the cargo is always exactly 40 tonnes. otherwise you'd have to waste 14 thousand kilograms of helium on every trip.
by the way, for comparison the cargo capactiy of the biggest 747 is 53 tonnes. ( and a DC-10 has 50% more capacity)
It's not clear to me if the cargo volume of a 747 or a blimp is bigger. On the one hand the blimp has a lot of excess lift capacity. But still if the size of the cargo area gets bigger the weight does go up.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I was just thinking with amusment what would happen if the cargo itself were Evian water. you load it with 40 tonned of evian fly it to NY city, then unload it as you pump onboard 40 tonnes of NY city tapwater. Then dead head it back to the evian plant. where they now have to dispose of 40 tonnes on NY city tap before they load it up again.
Kinda makes bottle water transport seem even more ridiculous.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
My problem with this aircraft is that for the complexity and cost of 4 heavy lift helicopters plus a giant airship all you get is twice the lifting power of a helicopter that was designed 30 years ago!? WTF? You can rent a Mi-26 today. This project doesn't make any sense.
Nice comment. Except for the part where you make the assumption that the ship is neutral with it's cargo. The article is talking about a ship that is neutral without it's cargo. Then it as rotors, just like an helicopter, for lifting the cargo. The rotors are compensating for the weight of the cargo. To go down, just slow the rotors. When you unload, the ship just stay there.
Try to read the article next time ;-)
Let me summarize responses which for some weird reason have been modded down:
+ 200 miles in a blimp = 8 hours You fly around with a refinery cracking tower for 8 hours you gonna want to take a leak.
+ Any long distance you do by ship or train. Pick up your oversized baggage directly from the ship, and fly it to its final destination.
+ If I can add my own: the weather can change a lot in 8 hours. Flying into a storm with a 50 ton windmill hanging from your butt is bad news.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
There is a reason EVERY picture of an airship teathered to the Empires state building looks the same - they only did it once
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
...from the airship to the dock. It could be sold to the dock for money or "lift gas credit." Then when a load is being picked up, buy more gas/spend the credit. The tough part would be adding more gas in the right amount as the cargo goes on board...but a similar system is used with ships when adding/removing ballast when unloading or loading (except the ballast is basically free).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Free, rotating rotor blades and blimps do not mix.
"The ship will be filled with helium to make it neutrally buoyant-that keeps the vehicle and its fuel in the air-while the rotors provide lift and thrust to support whatever itâ(TM)s transporting"
2nd paragraph dumb ass.
I think Stephenson created dirigibles built from nanotubes that "stored"(?) a vacuum. No hydrogen or helium needed.
It's all in the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
If you read the fine article you will discover that the helium in this airship exactly compensates for the weight of the vehicle, i.e. the tare weight, and uses propellers to lift the cargo (and to provide thrust). For most vehicles (anything bigger than a bicycle, I guess) the vehicle weighs more than the payload and most of the output of the engine has to go towards moving the vehicle rather than the payload. Here, the vehicle effectively weighs nothing and the entire output of the engine can be used to lift the payload.
You need to read the article. This is a neutrally buoyant craft when it's under no load. It uses rotors (like a helicopter) to lift the cargo itself. So when it's not carrying anything it is neutrally buoyant, but when it has a load it needs it's rotors to generate lift.
Obviously, the craft would be useless if it had the problems you describe, but the engineers at Boeing aren't as brainless as you imagine them to be.
I usually don't mind when people don't RTFA, but you just look really stupid right now and I think in the future you might want to consider it.
tonne != ton
1 tonne = 1,000 kg = 1,000,000 grams
Fnord.
this thing has a lift capacity of 40 tonnes.
to achieve that requires:
40 short tonnes is 36287389.6 grams
each gram of helium displaces about 29 grams of air, so this requires lift equaivalent to:
14.5 thousand kilograms of helium
Now imagine you fly this somewhere. If you unload the cargo, the tiedowns have to hold 40 tonnes of pull. So you can't just teather this ting like a balloon on one end like they used to do. The needle on the empire state building was an air ship dock and all the pictures show the airships teathered oriented horizontally not point up.
So how do they do this. You might think well they could cantaleaver an moveable weight to hold the back down. But then you have to strengthen the middle to support this tension without bending plus you have to drag the weight. Worse yet if the teather erer came loose you'd suddenly have 40 tonnes of lift shooting you towards the moon like a watermelon seed.
The best Idea I can think of is you could pump water onto it at the same time you remove the cargo to keep it all neutral.
But this means no dead heading. No matter where you go the cargo is always exactly 40 tonnes. otherwise you'd have to waste 14 thousand kilograms of helium on every trip.
by the way, for comparison the cargo capactiy of the biggest 747 is 53 tonnes. ( and a DC-10 has 50% more capacity)
It's not clear to me if the cargo volume of a 747 or a blimp is bigger. On the one hand the blimp has a lot of excess lift capacity. But still if the size of the cargo area gets bigger the weight does go up.
how about compressing the helium. to ascend you increase volume, there by displacing an equal volume of heavier air. To descend you compress the helium into on board pressure cylinders there by decreasing the volume and becoming heavier than air.
What is a tonnes? Is it like a brazillian?
They should have known that Kareem would still play soft on defense.
You didn't simply read the article.
The vehicle is neutrally boyant. It has 4 hydrocarbon powered helicopter blades to lift the NET PAYLOAD, so it only needs enough Helium for the vehicle itself.
It could run very low on gas and still deadhead it back or take on a small amount of fuel at the destination just for steering and empty mass propulsion.
That would be a problem if it were the helium lifting the payload.
From TFA-
The helium-filled envelope is sized to support the weight of the vehicle and fuel without payload. With the empty weight of the aircraft supported by the envelope, the lift generated by four rotors is dedicated solely to lifting the payload, leaving the aircraft neutrally buoyant.
If you unload the cargo, the tiedowns have to hold 40 tonnes of pull.
Only if you unload all the cargo at once without compensating by reducing the amount of gas in the airship. Unless you are unloading tanks or some other really heavy object this shouldn't be much of an issue, since the airship has to have this capability anyway, in order to control its altitude or fly with different payloads.
Or they could just keep compressing and uncompressing the gas as required for level flight and docking.
Unless you compress the gas into storage tanks to make it denser in order to adjust the amount of lift.
...we will have moved into a parallel universe. Everyone knows that parallel universes are just like our own, except for several small details such as airships , repressive governments spying on their citizens and several countries with unfamiliar names ( eg US torture going on in Cuba of all places, proud Soviet Union fragmented into a load of tin-pot republics- how ridiculous is that? )
Another thought. If we become a parallel unverse, their version of imagined parallel universes probably dont have airships.
So keep reading Northern Lights etc. When the airships disappear from the book, then we'll know for sure.
Seems most haven't been following the story :( (which is not really new - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/11/skyhook_jhl_40_boeing/ from yesterday's Register.
The concept involves making the airship (and only the airship) "neutral buoyant". In other words, the amount of helium on board would only be sufficient to counterbalance the airframe and crew.
Lift is to be provided by swivelling thrusters, making the entire beast a hybrid of a helicopter and airship.
Being neutral in buoyancy would mean that the entire weight of the payload is supported by the rotors, so that when the payload is dropped off, the airship does not rise, it simply remains where it is.
tonne != ton
True, but it's very close....
1 tonne = 1,000 kg = 1,000,000 grams
= 2,200 lbs, whereas the standard (non-metric) ton = 2,240 lbs. 40 lbs or less than 20 kg difference. So at the full 40 tonne load, the difference is about the same as an adult male.
You can use pumps and compressors to take the helium from the lifting bags and put it back in a tank. This will effectively kill the lifting force of the helium in a controllable manner, but slowly.
Water ballast was commonly used on the old dirigibles; you can see it pouring down in the footage of the Hindenburg accident.
they had to use H because we(USA) wouldn't sell them He (rightfully so)
.
I suggest as a quick corrective Len Deighton's 1978 book Airshipwreak. - a 74 page photo book of crashes with brief explanations of their cause.
Rich Archbold and Ken Marschall's The Hindenburg: An Illustrated History is less scathing an overview, but doesn't gloss over the problems.
It would be more truthful to say that only the Graf survived until retirement.
The structural integrity of the rigid airship was always questionable.
That is why Moffat wanted airships like Macon and Shenandoah as a picket line over the relatively benign waters of the Pacific.
The dirigible had range and endurance. It could not fly above the weather. It could not evade the weather.
= 2,200 lbs, whereas the standard (non-metric) ton = 2,240 lbs. 40 lbs or less than 20 kg difference. So at the full 40 tonne load, the difference is about the same as an adult male.
40 x 40 lbs = 1,600 lbs. An adult male what, exactly? Or is the obesity problem in the US even worse than they're letting on?
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
Remember the Concorde, price is a factor.
:P )
For many of us, air travel is beyond our means, or a luxury we can archieve a couple times in our lifetime - I can't find exact statistics but I'm pretty certain that more than half the population in the world has never flown, or moved outside their country. I'd be willing to bet it's actually something like 4/5ths of the world population (I didn't find the actual stats but I found one that says only 7% of the world's population has ever owned a car).
If you offered air travel that took more time but costs, say, half or one-third the cost of an airplane ticket, I'm pretty certain A LOT more people would travel (since their time isn't that expensive relative to the cost of a ticket... a plane ticket to the US from my country costs 200 billable hours of my time for example, which would be more than one month and a half of work excluding stuff like eating or actually living
Too bad I don't see this being competitive unless they clear those major hurdles (and Helium prices and all that stuff). Also, someone mentioned you can probably transport a lot more people in the same period in an airplane, so maybe it's not more economical as a passenger carrier (unless mixing it with cargo is feasible and works to offset the longer time between cycles).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Maybe there's some technical reason I haven't fully grasped, but why can't they put a rigid shell over the main envelope? One would think that with materials like kevlar or carbon fiber composites that there'd be something light enough to use in this manner. You could build it almost like a turtle shell, so the halves could expand in the middle if needed. With a hard shell surrounding the main envelope, wouldn't that prevent turbulence from deforming it and causing all the stress problems? Another advantage I could think of is that it could be used to hold a particular shape, such as an airfoil. If designed as a lifting body, you could save a lot more on fuel.
I would like them to hold a Private Pilot's night at Six Flags -- to get on the roller coasters you have to show a pilot's certificate. I would like for just one time in my life ride the coasters with a bunch of people who appreciate the fine points of their design and won't yell, scream, raise their hands and go "woo" and just plain STFU and enjoy the ride.
I love the idea of seeing giant airships make a comeback, but what is the practical angle? The article says that this ship can only lift twice the capacity of the most powerful helicopter (40 tons vs. 20 tons). Why not just split the load and take two choppers? Loads that can't be split to under 20 tons are probably rare, and they'd be non-existent in the drilling and mining operations this is designed to support.
Ultimately the factors that will matter are speed, safety, weather tolerance, and the cost per ton of transfers. Can this really beat the helicopter on any of those counts?
/me crashes a helium blimp into the flamebait :p
The trick is to not use any gas at all. Take a sphere, say 10' in diameter. Use aerogel to make the surface of the sphere. Put a thin lightweight material on the outside. Take all the air out of the sphere. You'll need enough aerogel thickness to withstand atmospheric pressure. Voila, a sphere that is lighter than air with no hydrogen or helium. These things rise. The compressive strength of aerogel would determine the diameter or the thickness of the aerogel layer. A collection of these spheres would provide lots of lift. If the arrangement suffered a slow loss of vacuum, it would be possible to restore the vacuum inside sphere and put it back into service. When I first heard about aerogel this struck me as the perfect use. The Wikipedia article on aerogel shows it supporting a brick; it should have plenty of strength. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel
Yay, it's time for a class action lawsuit against McDonald's!
Fnord.
This is why we've spent billions (trillions?) fighting a war on "terror,"
Not true. The billions have been spent because of U.S. government corruption. The U.S. government is being guided to do exactly what weapons and oil investors want.
Here is some information copied from numerous places:
There is evidence that whoever controls the U.S. government is planning to declare martial law. That's a top-rated story on Digg.com.
Search for "martial law" on digg.com or reddit.com. There are hundreds of links.
Cheney's company Halliburton is building prisons. There has never been an adequate explanation why. Do a Google search.
The U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security committee is not allowed to see the martial law plan.
According to the New Yorker Magazine, the Bush administration has already started another war in Iran. See President George W Bush backs Israeli plan for strike on Iran.
Bush and Cheney and their friends and families and associates are oil and weapons investors. Weapons investors want war all the time. Oil investors want to restrict the supply of oil, so that the price will rise.
The war with Iran has the same purpose as the war in Iraq. It will allow whoever controls the U.S. government to restrict the flow of oil even more, making the price go even higher.
The war with Iran is extremely unpopular with U.S. citizens. It is said that whoever is doing the planning will do terrorist acts in the U.S. and blame them on Iranians. That will allow the declaration of martial law. It is said that the planners have put a lot of time into passing laws that allow them to have more control and that they will not allow Barack Obama to become president because he would undo their work.
The U.S. government has manipulated the facts in other cases so that it will be allowed to start a war. One example is the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. "In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August."
Simply divide the helium-holding tanks in half with a membrane, which is large enough that it can give all space to either half. One half contains helium, the other air; the membrane keeps them from mixing. When you want to decrease lift, pump helium out of the tank and into a high-pressure storage bottle, while simultaneously pumping in air to the other half; and when you want to increase lift, let some helium back to the tank while simultaneously removing air.
In this way you can get exactly the lift you require in any given situation; but of course the membrane will add some weight.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.