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Airship Company Gets First Civilian Customer

Posted by samzenpus on from the float-into-the-future dept.

Zothecula writes "Hybrid Air Vehicles has recently achieved two massive commercial wins that seem to indicate that the airship has a very rosy future indeed. The aircraft's versatility plus an ability to stay airborne for 21 days enabled HAV to win a 517million contract (€370million) to supply a Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) to the U.S. Army for deployment in Afghanistan starting in 2012. Whilst the LEMV is a relatively small vehicle designed for surveillance, HAV has now announced a civil customer for their heavy-lift variant."

14 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Please.... by Mindcontrolled · · Score: 2

    Can I get it with brass dials, tropical wood furnishings and a ballroom? Oh, and steam engines, of course!

    --
    Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
    1. Re:Please.... by SomePgmr · · Score: 2

      I'd pay a certain premium to fly that way instead of the cattle car conditions of our present style of air travel. My understanding is that much of the cost in air travel is in dealing with the volatile cost of fuel... so maybe traveling by airship could be made affordable.

      I took a jet boat from Ft. Myers beach to Key West recently (after the last shuttle launch) that was very nice, and recall thinking it was way better than flying, even if it took a while longer. I'm picturing something like that.

  2. Cruise ship by DaMattster · · Score: 2

    I can see a large commercial use for this as a replacement for the traditional cruise ship. Imagine being able to take an air cruise, a nice slow trip across the US at a medium altitude. I think it could be a lot of fun.

    1. Re:Cruise ship by tsotha · · Score: 2

      Although it is slower than an jet (100mph instead of 800mph), it will provide more comfort and be much cheaper (if you think oil is expensive now, imagine what it will cost in 5-10 years).

      I've always been something of an airship buff and would love to see this, but I can guarantee you it will never happen. The problem is speed matters for a lot more than just convenience. If (using your numbers) your plane is 8x faster than an airship, that means you can sell eight times as many tickets over a given time frame. Or, to look at it another way, as a production airship of that size will cost about the same as a 747, by running a plane instead of eight airships you can save yourself ($300m x 7) $2.1bn in capital outlays.

      Realistically, with a more rigid hull you could fly airships at about a quarter of commercial jet speeds, since for fuel-consumption reasons they don't fly jets at top speed. Even then the numbers just don't work out unless you can get passengers to pay substantially more for a ticket. Plus, there are other problems. Maintenance on airships is likely to be more expensive, and they require more frequent major overhauls. They're not safe to fly in weather conditions that are no problem for jets, and long before you reach unsafe conditions the passengers will be turning green.

    2. Re:Cruise ship by tsotha · · Score: 2

      Nobody knows if the cruise (air) ship market exists or not. There are so many variables nobody knows how much you'd have to charge to make the whole thing profitable beyond "a whole lot". Boeing expects to build 1000 of its new 787 "Dreamliner", so it could divide the multi-billion development cost over enough units to keep it reasonably priced at $200m or so.

      How many airships could a cruise industry support? Maybe a half-dozen or so? In the mid 1930s when the Hindenburg was constructed the ship cost about the same amount as a destroyer (which is why Hitler wasn't fond of them). It's probably a good parallel for today, when a destroyer costs something like $2bn-$4bn. The final passenger capacity for the Hindenburg was 72. Now, with new materials we could probably carry more people even using less efficient helium as the lifting gas, and we wouldn't need an engineer stationed at every engine, so the crew complement of 40 could be reduced somewhat. On the other hand, if you didn't provide some of (heavy) amenities people are used to on cruises nobody would book a cruise.

      Say you ended up with a passenger complement of 200. The useful life of the ship would be a few decades under the rosiest scenario. How much would you have to charge to recoup billions in design and construction costs? Are there that many filthy rich people in the world dying to take such a cruise? It all adds up to a gamble with an enormous downside and a tiny upside. Who would fund something like that?

  3. Too soon? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Funny

    Would purchasing one with a printed skin texture based on the appearance of the burning, partially skeletonized, Hindenburg shortly before its fatal plunge be tasteless?

    Because I am tempted...

  4. All in the costs...as always by TrueSatan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In the 1980's I worked for a company that supplied the engines (Mercedes Benz motor car engines brought up to aviation standards) used in gondolas run under Airship Industries (maker of them) blimps. The gondolas ran as mobile generator sets and saw significant usage to power the lighting for the LA Olympic games. Other airships flew over the games sites so as to provide a high vantage point for security services to monitor the event. This led all involved into a false feeling of a new dawn for airships...fancy plans were drawn up for them to run tourist trips in and out of the Grand Canyon for instance and over Ayres Rock in Australia. Some even hoped for African wildlife tourism to be involved and for trips up the Amazon...then we came to our senses as the company (AI) went under. The cost of filling a large blimp with helium is immense and the wretched things leak! To make matters worse in order to move a blimp around a country one either has to wait ages while it covers any noteworthy distance under its own steam or deflate the thing (usually by venting all the helium) and transport the remaining items by more conventional means (road, rail, air or ship) then pay out for a new fill of helium. This made the costs look pretty awful pretty fast. High winds and airships aren't a good combination so should the prevailing conditions grow nasty the owners of the blimps were, again, forced into a deflate/re-inflate cycle so as to protect the structures. In short almost all the proposed uses of the blimps were unable to see a reasonable return on investment and those that had any chance of same were too few to keep the company making the blimps running. I very much doubt that an economic case that can be viable long-term really exists for all but a tiny number of large civilian use blimps in anything but an unrealistic pipe-dream. Small military use ones may be a niche product with a future and that's where money might be made off of these things.

  5. Re:I still don't understand why... by NSash · · Score: 2

    So, really, why haven't we done more of this?

    The main problem isn't fire. It's that that they require large ground crews to manage and airplanes are much faster. When it comes to cargo, they're more efficient than airplanes but less efficient than trains or ships. There are niches where they could be useful, but they don't make sense as a general replacement for airplanes or railroads.

  6. Re:This is awesome! by St.Creed · · Score: 2

    If that had been the reason we would be drowning in zeppelins nowadays, as cars and airplanes have had a much worse track record and see what happened there.

    The problem was more that it is really difficult to get them to fly profitable. You need ground crew, they're very sensitive to heavy winds and they take a lot of fuel compared to an airplane due to a distinctly un-aerodynamic profile.

    This blimp seems to have solved most of the issues due to its shape, requiring no groundcrew and much more stable in the face of even heavy winds. I'm curious to see how the fuel efficiency works out.

    --
    Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
  7. Very good. by roman_mir · · Score: 2

    Very interesting indeed, this could become a competitor to airlines, not only in price, but also in comfort (not in speed though).

    I would love to take a ride in one of those. Even cooler would be to buy and own one, and just live in it!

    What the hell, I would want to try it - live on an airship, spending most of my time in the air!

    --
    You can't handle the truth.
  8. Re:I still don't understand why... by Nefarious+Wheel · · Score: 2

    So, really, why haven't we done more of this?

    ... It's that that they require large ground crews to manage....

    [Citation Needed]. Highly skilled or just somewhat trained? How many? I'd guess the head count could be managed. Specialised heavy tether vehicles or tethering installations, cable capture and spool down -- these could be engineered, and could bring the personnel cost down. And you could bloody well earth them against static.

    --
    Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
  9. Re:I still don't understand why... by Adriax · · Score: 2

    Solar for supplemental power, fully weather simulated flight plan could save a ton of fuel by using every available wind along the way.
    Heavy assistance from an autopilot could compensate for side winds long before a human pilot could notice.
    GPS enhanced with ground based transponders could allow the tethering and other ground operations to be almost completely automated.

    --
    I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
  10. A description of the first civilian customers by dkleinsc · · Score: 2

    It's a small group of misfits, consisting of:
    1. A guy with spikey hair and red armor.
    2. A guy wearing some sort of ninja-like outfit who can really kick.
    3. A gal wearing white robes.
    4. Somebody with a pointy yellow hat and blue robes. All you can see of the face is their eyes.

    They keep on going on about reviving the power of the orbs or some-such, and are carrying a wide array of crazy-looking potions and a lot of gold that they use to pay for everything.

    --
    I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  11. Re:This is awesome! by Patch86 · · Score: 2

    I think the fact that almost every major class of airship also suffered huge numbers of disasters with massive loss of life may also have been a factor. Hopefully nothing some good-old 21st century engineering can't fix though.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents