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Dirigible Airship Prototype Approaches Completion
cylonlover writes "The dirigible airship, the oddball aircraft of another era, is making a comeback. California-based Aeros Corporation has created a prototype of its new breed of variable buoyancy aircraft and expects the vehicle to be finished before the end of 2012. With its new cargo handling technology, minimum fuel consumption, vertical take-off and landing features and point to point delivery, the Aeroscraft platform promises to revolutionize airship technology. The Aeroscraft ship uses a suite of new mechanical and aerospace technologies. It operates off a buoyancy management system which controls and adjusts the buoyancy of the vehicle, making it light or heavy for any stages of ground and flight operation. Automatic flight control systems give it equilibrium in all flight modes and allow it to adjust helium pressurized envelopes depending on the buoyancy requirements. It just needs one pilot and has an internal ballast control system, which allows it to offload cargo, without using ballast. Built with a rigid structure, the Aeroscraft can control lift at all stages with its Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) capabilities and carry maximum payload while in hover. What makes it different from other cargo vehicles is that it does not need a runway or ground infrastructure."
And it's going downmodded...Oh the humanity!
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Seems this comes up every decade or so. There are some advantages in niches. But in the end, the large volume craft, at relatively slow speeds, and relatively less useful when winds are up seem to doom it from becoming a highly useful aircraft.
For some reason, it reminds me of something
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Given all the articles I've read about helium shortages et al., I'm not sure I'd invest in a company that claims He based dirigibles are about to make a comeback.
Every year, without fail, there is an article about the blimp renaissance. Been that way since the 1930s. Akron calls itself the blimp capital of the world. I remember a college job fair where there was some kooky company from Quebec that made hydrogen-filled blimps, and they insisted that hydrogen is not flammable.
For niche markets, that is. Such as point-to-point delivery of oversized and/or very heavy loads that are simply not transportable by road. A rugged and dependable vehicle of this kind could probably sell some dozen copies across the U.S., and even more world-wide. If these guys are sensible about their corporate cost structure, and do not base their expenditure on expectations of selling thousands of the things, they could be just fine, and be in this for the long run.
If their basic airship design is sound, of course. But it probably is - getting that sort of thing right is not *that* hard. They could do fairly nicely working examples in the 1920ies (provided they did not fill them with Hydrogen, but fire protection should be a no-brainer these days).
And the worst enemy of airships, the weather, is now firmly under control from an operational viewpoint - something it was absolutely not back then. Weather forecasts are so accurate nowadays that such vehicles can just reliably avoid those areas where they could get into trouble. One would not be operating scheduled services that have to be at some point at a given time with them anyway. With these specialised heavy lifters, you would rather be delivering oversized pieces of machinery and such in a one-off fashion. And if one of these things arrives two days late because of a thunderstorm front, it is usually not that much of a problem.
Revolutionary?
Nope ... just the Segway of the Dirigible world ...
but if you don't have a ticket he will punch you out of the window. And that is how you say good by in German.
"So no, airships will always be tourist attractions. No one wants to pay more money to transport things less quickly."
If it's faster than a container, slower than air freight, and has a price to match, there will be a market for it.
Realistically speaking, though, they don't seem to lift very well. I'm looking at the O-1 airship: 177 feet long, cargo weight of 3290 lbs. That's pretty lame. The soviet V6 was 344ft and could to 20k lbs...which is less than 1/3 the maximum weight of a 20-foot container.
However, as a large semi-stationary platform it would be ideal. I'm not sure how happy I'd be having an airship permanently anchored over my city, though from what I understand you get used to it.
As you can see on their web site, Airship Ventures is out of business and there's a campaign to save the airship from being scrapped.
Bruce Perens.
Helium is a non-renewable resource, even more so than liquid hydrocarbon fuels. At least with jet fuel you could synthesize it if you really wanted to and had a large enough energy input, but the only way to synthesize helium is to fuse hydrogen in large quantities and if we knew how to do that in a controllable fashion we probably wouldn't need to mess around with dirigibles. Once you extract helium from the ground it eventually ends up in the atmosphere and then escapes to space, so once it's gone it's gone for good.
For some other reason, it reminds me of something else.
Sent from my ENIAC
Hello, airplanes? It's blimps. You win.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter - made it about as far as building a small blimp-size prototype and a nice large assembly hangar for "the real thing" ... which is now used as a large indoor beach resort instead
And even back then it was pretty clear that their planned fleet size whould totally exhaust available Helium supplies ...
This would require a smaller volume balloon than the equivalent helium balloon. There is the small technological breakthrough that needs to be made for the containment vessel. At the moment the only thing that can contain a vaccuum is something very thick and heavy like steel which would ruin the whole project.
...If it means I don't have to deal with the TSA!
I like the Austrian way better.
I should point out that aside from the Hindenberg, the only time airships ever went down in flames was during World War 1, when they were being shot at. Even then, German Zepplins could take a lot of damage, and it was only when British aircraft started carrying a mixture of explosive and incendiary rounds (called Buckingham and Pomeroy mixture, after the inventors of the two bullet types) that they could feasably destroy a Zeppelin. Even then, aircraft attacking Zeppelins sometimes found themselves firing hundreds of rounds, at a range too close to miss, and having no. Remember, today we don't doubt the safety of 747s, simply because World War 2, B-17 bombers used to come apart when they were shot at enough.
Also during World War 1, the British operated hundreds of SS Class, Coastal Class and NS Class, non-rigid blimps. Not a single one was lost to fire during 10's of thousands of flying hours. Admittedly, several WW1 British airships were destroyed in a catastrophic fire in a hanger, but that was because one Darwin Award nominee decided to get busy with testing a radio, while he was standing in a puddle of petrol that was leaking from a broken fuel tank.
So I'm inclined to write off the Hindenberg as a on-off, at a time when aircraft routinely dropped out of the sky. I might even go so far as to give a tiniest whisker of credence to the conspiracy theory, that it was down to an anti-Nazi saboteur.
Now, I fully appreciate hydrogen dirigibles will absolutely never, ever, ever, fly again simply because of PR and (well justified) safety fears. But I guess my point is that they could be made safe, or at least, safe enough if there was a need.
Gaseous hydrogen leaks a great deal, no matter how it's stored. That's a cost that will strongly affect the economy of such aircraft. One could theoretically use the hydrogen for fuel for the propellers or electronic systems safely, so I wouldn't anticipate large problems with carrying enough fuel, but hydrogen molecules are very small and tend to leak right through pressure containers. And as the hydrogen leaks, it will tend to collect in any physical reservoirs around the gas bag. That could make preventing flammable buildups, especially near modern electrical systems, quite awkward.
Hydrogen is also quite reactive. (This is partly why it burns so well.) So I'd expect corrosive surprises with materials used in such an unusual environment, especially if low-cost bidders substitute cheap components that haven't been tested properly in the infrastructure exposed to the hydrogen. This isn't to say it can't be done economically, but the first few such ships are going to be prone to some unexpected failures due to interaction with an unusual environment.
"With its new cargo handling technology, ... and point to point delivery,..."
I can see merchants adding a "Dirigible P2P shipping (45 days)" radio button to their websites. Obviously it would be listed AFTER 5-day ground or freight.
Just sayin.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This is what I thought of, those Zeppelin NTs are pretty sophisticated, crew of two, &c. Goodyear is replacing their fleet with them, I think.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I'm still waiting for Zeppelin XP. (But I think I'll stay away from Zeppelin Vista and Zeppelin 8.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
If nothing else it's certainly an easier sell than a weather balloon...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
So do I.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
"Hello planes? This is blimps, you win".
One of the Eureka's sister ships (or was it the Eureka itself?) was used in Africa for exactly this kind of research for a while.
Estimates are about 4x less fuel efficient than trucks when roads exist.
Good to know.
But fuel expense is just one of the costs of running a fleet of trucks. If one airship could deliver the same goods as ten big trucks, the total cost of goods shipped might be less (factoring in employee expenses-- drivers, mechanics, dispatchers, etc-- licensing, insurance, taxes, and so on).
But just looking at fuel efficiency, I am guessing that there are routes over mountains where airships would be more efficient than trucks on steep, winding roads. I drove across the northern tier of USA states the spring before last, and there were an awful lot of miles one had to go just to get around this or that obstacle, or line up with some mountain pass.
Another several times less fuel efficient than trains when rails exist.
Oh, yeah. Hard to beat rail once the tracks are laid down and paid for.
Will
It's the storms, not the flames, that are the demise of lighter-than-air craft. Solve that problem, and they will be more practical.
Bruce Perens.
It's in the government's interest to consume Helium as fast as possible, to keep it out of the hands of the Germans who could use it in their long-range strategic weapons, AKA "Zeppelins". Or it may just be one of the disadvantages of having laws, regulations, and policies that aren't scheduled for mandatory review every X years or so. Don't even get me started on why we still occupy military bases in Germany and UK over 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, or why states regulate marriage but no longer restrict pre-marital relationships or cohabitation, or why we support democracy in Libya and help suppress it in Bahrain.
It was a joke, perhaps not a great one. Nitrogen is nearly the same weight as air, being its main component. In any case, it's hard to view a balloon full of hydrogen as more dangerous than a tank full of jet fuel. They're both pretty scary to tell the truth. Just put hydrogen in it and don't take passengers.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I thought it was 120km not kn.
2999 nm is pretty much what I said in km.
If you are correct that only makes it cheaper and even more plausible as a method of travel.
Heavy load at lower cost. See concordlift.com. Presented at the recent AIAA ATIO conference. The paper, presentation and animation are on the web site. There are "issues". Every issue identified as a known possible solution