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Aeroscraft Begins Flight Testing Following FAA Certification
Zothecula writes "After a 70-year absence, it appears that a new rigid frame airship will soon be taking to the skies over California. Aeros Corporation, a company based near San Diego, has received experimental airworthiness certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to begin flight testing the Aeroscraft airship, and it appears that the company has wasted no time getting started."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_airship
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What, did they land too hard?
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Unfortunately, I think that the days of glamourous airship travel are gone. Cargo will probably find a niche, but passenger flights will be either nonexistent or close to it. We might some cruise-type flights over majestic terrain, but the true awesomeness of the Zeppelins was the ability to travel in luxury while taking in views the passengers never imagined.
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I like airships, the problem is that they're not practical these days. Back in the '30s, I'm sure they were great, but the parts of the world that can afford lighter than air travel, also have decent railroads and highway systems that can make the trip with more efficiency.
I suppose this might replace ships for passengers, but even there, I can't imagine it being practical.
"The Aeroscraft airship can compress a certain amount of its lifting gas and put it into fabric tanks, under pressure. The density of the compressed gas is higher so that it is no longer lighter than air, and therefore this airship, unlike any of its predecessors, can change its buoyancy."
Uhh... That works with submarines because they actually do change their mass-inside-the-hull (and therefore their density) by taking in or dumping out water from the environment around them. With a rigid frame containing just helium, it doesn't matter whether you store the helium in a tank or in the balloon, you have the same total mass inside the footprint of the hull, and therefore the same overall density (for reference, a balloon "containing" a vacuum would have more buoyancy than even one using Hydrogen).
Not to say they couldn't have found a solution to that particular problem, but the explanation given... Doesn't solve that problem.
These can also be used in places that cannot afford those things. Imagine you have a large mine in some third world nation and need to get your product to port, but there are no roads for large vehicles. Since this craft can become heavier than air at will it is easier to land and can deal with weather far better than previous airships.
The Spokane area is all aflutter with some "megaload" controversy about shipping some water treatment equipment to a mine in Canada over some "scenic" roads.
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2013/aug/14/megaload-fight-headed-federal-court/
Driving this stuff over mountain roads is apparently the only method of getting equipment of this size to the location where it's needed. I realize this is bigger than the airship is capable of lifting but I'd bet there are plenty of other situations where this would be a good option.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Have fun waiting, they are using He not H.
So, you've discounted the fact that we won't be using a flammable substance for the ship's skin, and we won't be using a flammable gas for lift ? Helium doesn't burn/explode, and neither does the intended skin.
Those that dies in the Hindenburg were burned by diesel fuel spilled when the skin and lifting gas ignited. So on the whole, I'd say we have learned from History in this case. Of course, we still drive to work knowing that this is the least safe commuting option.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
What do they fill it with? If it is rigid, then couldn't it be a vacuum since that would give the most buoyancy? Or perhaps an aerogel?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship
I don't think you understand how lighter than air crafts work. Yes, they can use the engines for a bit of lift, but no, they can't be used as you describe. These craft have severely limited capacity for cargo, ever seen a photo of one of those things? The size of the compartment is tiny compared with the rest of the craft.
What's more, you'd be far, far better off just getting a Chinook, as those are much smaller and are designed to handle a substantial amount of cargo.
But, even a Chinook is going to be more expensive than just trucking it. Anybody with a mine doing substantial volume is going to have to have roads anyways, as miners do need to eat, and there's a tone of other supplies involved as well.
You mean, mistakes such as posting without having read the fucking article?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The fine article says that they're intended for places that need heavy cargo delivery but lack infrastructure, such as Alaska and Northern Canada where there's plenty of valuable minerals and damned few ways to efficiently ship supplies in and the raw materials back out. It's aimed at cargo transport to/from places that other forms of air travel are too impractical for, not really for replacing existing air travel.
I don't think you read the article. What I am talking about is what it says.
They want to move remote or oversized cargo. They can become heavier than air and the airship is shaped as an obvious lifting body.
We have shows like Ice Road Truckers about dangerous, expensive, and time-limited freight delivery in the Artic circle because impassable terrain most of the year... And at the opposite end of the globe, the 1,000 mile-long McMurdo â" South Pole Highway constructed over 4 years at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars with lots of ongoing maintenance... And also consider the manifold poor remote villages that are often starving and suffering after natural disasters because they are accessible only by foot (or mule) due to mountainous terrain over which road construction would be astronomically expensive...
All these scenarios, because flying-in heavy items via conventional aircraft over long distance can consume twice their weight in jet fuel.
Airships can no-doubt fundamentally change the arithmetic of delivering supplies to these hazardous and remote locations. If these airships prove to be reliable heavy-lifters, that consume far, far less fuel, they could generate a LOT of cash from carrying cargo to such difficult destinations, no matter how slow they are to arrive at their destinations.
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""After a 70-year absence, it appears that a new rigid frame airship will soon be taking to the skies over California..."
No, not a 70 year absence: a ten month absence. Zeppelin "Eureka" was flying over California from 2008 to 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Ventures
--couldn't make enough money flying sightseeing cruises to pay its way, alas
http://mountainview.patch.com/groups/business-news/p/airship-ventures-says-goodbye
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Yes to bad-terrain; no to bad weather.
The real killer to the age of the Zeppelin wasn't the Hindenberg; it was the continuing series of crashes of airships due to bad weather.
Zeppelins are fair-weather flyers.
(with that said, however, with modern weather satellites and predictions, this would be much less of a problem than it was in the 1930s)
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-Matt
-Matt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwh07fYNdCY
In fact they can. They talk about this exact scenario at the very bottom of TFA...
Their absolute cargo capacity doesn't matter... It's a question of cost per kg of cargo. Since airships need to consume extremely little fuel, they are extremely economical to operate, and the cost of shipping heavy materials will be vastly less expensive than flying them on conventional airplanes.
That's absolute nonsense. A helicopter will consume MORE fuel than conventional airplanes, has less range, and moves more slowly, all for the convenience of VTOL. An airship will be VASTLY more economical to operate.
The diamond and oil mines in the arctic are operating without roads... Instead they truck in supplies at great expense only part of the year, over the ice. The Alaska pipeline was perhaps the most expensive engineering project in history, and the investment nearly bankrupted the whole US oil industry. Until recently, the South Pole McMurdo station was operating without a road over the 1,000 mile distance, and it was an incredible expense to develop, only profitable because conventional aircraft are so expensive to operate that it cost double the jet fuel for a given cargo weight to fly in supplies.
In short, there are MANY places that don't or perhaps CAN'T have roads, yet are profitable locations that need lots of bulk freight deliveries. Pretty much everything you've said in your comment is undeniably factually incorrect, and if these airships prove reliable, they may have a few incredibly profitable routes.
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Interestingly, we now accept air disasters every few years that cause more death and destruction than the Hindenburg without a single call to ground the dangerous jetliners.
SKY TRUCKERS!!!
Bingo. As for bringing raw materials back, I have to wonder - if the Aeroscraft can take in machinery for extraction of a resource, if it's one that can be readily pre-processed by straightforward mechanical or chemical means perhaps that could be done on site as well. I suppose the airship could be used for many 'outback' construction needs besides mineral extraction sites also - remote weather stations come to mind.
Existing heavy-lift helicopters such as the later Chinooks and S-64 are range-limited to several hundred miles, last I looked. I don't know if either one can be refueled in flight.
I've been following Pasternak's project with great interest since he started it and hope everything pans out.
Even if you can refuel the chinook in flight, helicopters burn fuel like that is their job. Not a cheap way to move cargo.
Yeah, I guess that's near Sand Diego
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Is everyone off their meds?
1) No the GP didn't make a particularly good point. It amounts to "oh noes, multiple things in the air! Oh the collisions!". And he throws in "drones" in there for some reason. It might have been a vaguely good point if he actually mentioned what his brother has said at the supposed collision between an airship and a drone, but decided to simply chuckle as his own unspoken joke instead.
2) Correct, the sarcasm is unwanted, and more importantly unwarranted, as there would be no "balls of flames". Specifically because the Aeroscraft (which is a horrible fucking name btw, it's like they let an 's' crawl out from their southern drawl mid sentence) is filled with helium, not hydrogen, and drones are typically smaller. And they don't currently carry babies. so wtf?
Given that they have things that take off vertically, and things that take off horizontally, I don't imagine it's all that crazy of an idea that airports could service airships as well.
So who is to say that every 63rd flight would have done that? Especially with new precautions in place. Even if the odds were literally one in a trillion it could happen on the 1st flight or the trillionth or anywhere in between (it could even go 12 trillion then have two disasters in a row).
Keep in mind too that at that time, the accident rate for general aviation was more than 10 times what it is now. Other forms of travel were also less safe than now.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but there's a reason why this technology was never used for this purpose back in the '30s. What's more, it was never proposed for this purpose.
I'm familiar with how the vessel operates, it's just questionable if it's going to have any practical application like this. The amount of supplies that mining crews need is huge, take a look at the vehicles they're using. They're both immensely heavy, as well as huge. The dumptrucks that the larger mines are using are literally larger than a house.
The reality here is that these vehicles have limited use as they're both light on their cargo capacity in terms of mass as well as in terms of volume. And yes, they do maneuver better than the ones in the past, but they're still not going to be useful in the way that the GGP was talking about.
You obviously haven't worked in areas where you can't build roads. The reality is that most of those areas aren't typically suitable for airships either. You've got steep hills and deep canyons. And something the shape and size of an airship is going to be a logistical nightmare to use in a situation like that. Even up north in the Arctic there are serious problems as well.
Yes, the maneuverability is better than in the past, but it's not that good. And most of the best mining ground in the world is in areas where ships like this just don't work. Even if they can convert into heavier than air for periods, trying to fly something with that much surface area in a place like the Andes is a logistical nightmare.
So, they might claim that this is reasonable, but between the limited cargo capacity per volume of ship and the terrain they're talking about, I wouldn't expect this to happen in the next few decades or ever. This sounds like city boy talk about how easy it's going to be for them to get into an area where the locals haven't been able to. And it rarely works out well, otherwise the locals would already have been doing it.
Fuel a jetliner with automotive diesel and you'll probably ramp the crash rate way up, assuming they can even get off the ground - they just aren't designed to use that blend of fuel. Similar issue with the Hindenburg - it was designed to use non-flammable helium as the lift gas, and as such had minimal protection against fire incorporated into it's design. Obviously the fact that they then chose to operate it with much cheaper hydrogen lift gas eventually became a problem.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Chinook, maximum 13 tons of useful cargo capacity.
Aeroscraft, maximum useful cargo capacity 66 tons.
Your argument, is invalid.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
All your arguments are circular nonsense and fact-free... A large mining operation will be too large for these? And a small mining operation will be too small for these?
It's undeniable airships have FAR lower operating costs per mass of cargo than conventional aircraft, and your suggestion of Chinook helicopters is positively laughable. Airships certainly CAN do many things you baselessly claim they CAN'T.
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The Andes are pretty much out of the question, even in those areas where helicopters can't operate adequately because of the altitude. Winds are utterly unpredictable and frequently outrageous (especially in August). I've seen a 'vientarron' rip a chunk of corrugated roofing off a house, toss it a couple hundred feet in the air, and drop it half a mile away. There is no way that an airship of any type could survive something like that, especially in an area where valleys are often only a kilometer or less wide at their bottom (where the resources generally are). It might work in the open Amazon jungle, but not anywhere higher than Quillabamba (and that's a stretch).
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One summer, I was physically carrying gear up a steep mountain because there wasn't any way of getting a helicopter in, and the trail wasn't big enough for pack animals.
I don't understand. You are saying that a helicopter couldn't get there, or they didn't want to pay for it? I've seen helicopters work around a variety of steep mountains, and they do quite well, so long as your final site is visible to the sky (lowering things on a 100 ft cable, released from the helicopter when touched down is not impossible). But I've not seen anywhere actually "not accessible", except for caves and such.
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Kill yourself for not knowing that modern airships use helium or even bothering to check. That's basic historic and aviation knowledge.
Slashdot is at least theoretically a tech site.
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Chose? The U.S. embargoed sales of helium to Nazi Germany, their choices were either use hydrogen, or not have the airships.
Which caused the price of helium to increase, leading them to choose to use hydrogen instead. The US was hardly the only source of helium.
> their choices were either use hydrogen, or not have the airships. ...or use airships designed to use hydrogen as a lift-gas. Such airships were not uncommon at the time, just more expensive. They could probably even have retrofitted the Hindenburg to use hydrogen relatively safely had they chosen, though it might have involved replacing the flammable skin at not inconsiderable expense.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Statistics don't work that way. It is irrelevant to the crash rate how many flights a particular airship made before it crashed - a one-in-a-million outcome is just as likely to occur on the first test as on the millionth. To find the actual crash rate you would have to look at the total number of Hindenburg-style airship flights and divide the number of crashes by the total number flights. You'd need to have a statistically valid number of airships in action to confirm that it was a design flaw and not a manufacturing defect or operator error.
Consider the Titanic - the fact that it sank on it's maiden voyage doesn't mean there was any great flaw in the ship itself.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In May 2005, pilot Didier Delsalle of France landed a Eurocopter AS350 B3 helicopter on the summit of Mount Everest.
Its an interesting craft, and I hope it succeeds, but its going to all fall to how the demonstrator performs. They're making some lofty statements, two man crew, 66 tons, minimal ground crew, 120 knots, minimal fuel consumption, 3,000 mile range, etc. If they can hold to it and keep construction/operation costs down it'll be a great craft, but they're obliviously trying to wave around the military applications of the craft so I'd watch out for massive cost overruns, ever decreasing capabilities & constantly extended time tables. Hangering these craft is also going to be an issue, the company seems to be open about the fact that these craft will not be able to handle bad weather, but their "they'll just fly around bad weather" explanation seems questionable even if their speed capabilities are not exaggerated. These things will require massive hangers as I highly doubt just tethering them to the ground would be sufficient protection from even a Midwestern thunderstorm let alone hurricanes or monsoons.
I think the big deal is that you can build them big enough to carry more stuff than a Chinook for a price a lot less than an Osprey - so that sort of nice instead of situations where you just use a truck or a train. The bigger they are though the more vunerable they are to bad weather. The graf zepillin had a lot of very close calls due to bad weather.
The Osprey can be refuelled in flight but you could probably afford a fleet of airships for the same price :)
It was, in a similar situation to most rare earth supplies coming from China until recently. There's other deposits around but nobody was getting it out of the ground and selling it.
First - not deserts, and all I wrote above is based on direct experience and what I've heard from a civil engineer that works in road construction in Australia. Dirt roads are nowhere near as simple as you pretend. Second - not a great deal of difference in design for the failure mode I mentioned - still big, light and prone to be blown around. Actually modern attempts have been a step backwards to those 1930s craft in structure due to cost constraints.
I suppose this is the site where the high school VB coders like to call engineers ignorant so feel free to whine a bit more about "factually incorrect assertions".
Also did you even make it to my last paragraph before whining about desperately trying to discredit stuff? If you did you'd find I even gave a couple of examples where large airships would be useful.
These airships are perfect for installation and maintenance of windmill farms. One could easily handle the big components like towers and blades that are currently so hard to get to good sites. Airships would also be useful when building new power lines. And of course an airship could carry a huge amount of solar cell panels into roadless areas.
Airships and renewable energy development are a good fit.
The Chinook and other heavy lift helicopters are great for short distance hauling, such as logging. But these are too expensive to operate over hundreds of miles.
Will
I may not be the ultimate authority on all things mining
I definitely agree with the author's statement.
Extracting oil from the Canadian tar sands requires huge pieces of equipment that are currently barged up the Columbia River then trucked through Idaho and Canada on oversized vehicles, at night, requiring road closures because the things are so wide. Air freight by dirigible from the Port of Portland or Seattle would be much more economical (and avoid a lot of political noise as well). Not that I favor this: my politics are quite green and tar sands exploitation is one of the dirtiest ways of getting our gasoline fix.
Getting oil rigs into the tundra is also a major hassle, both in road building and in politics. Dirigibles would be a better alternative than road building.
Production mining often requires railroads to efficiently move product to market, but pre-production exploration could often be supported by dirigible, with a major reduction in the amount of road building needed. In the Chilean Andes, this could be the difference between a ten mile road to the nearest safe dirigible air field and a two hundred mile road to the nearest existing road.
Modern airships will be useful as "go anywhere" barges.
Will
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but there's a reason why this technology was never used for this purpose back in the '30s
And that reason is because the technology did not exist back in the '30s.
That was before carbon fiber, before Mylar, before the concept of a lifting body air frame. In short, it was before 80 years of engineering advancements.
The Aeroscraft airship is not the steampunk airship you imagine it to be.
Will
Look at the list of airship and dirigible acidents. The Hindenburg was minor. An awful lots of dirigibles broke up in mid air
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
Newer materials may help as will the mor aerodynamic shape but the forces that can be generated on a surface area that large are huge.
Oh sorry - I thought you wanted an engineer's perspective instead of poetic licence. Just about anything taken out of context can mean just about anything, but that just fucks up communication. In this context corrosion means oxidation and nothing at all else.
If you'd been first to use the word, then you might have been able to get away with this argument, however it would have been pointed out to you that corrode is not generally used as a synonym for oxidation, and you're using an obscure definition.
However, you weren't. I was. I used the word corrode with its usual, widespread, definition.
I would suggest that rather than flame me for using the word as it is usually used - by engineers and everyone else - that you learn to use a dictionary. Generally speaking its the height of stupidity to "correct" someone without checking your facts first. And it's the height of arrogance to flame someone (while pretending they're wrong!) who shows that, actually, you were wrong and they were right.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
With a load capacity ~5 tons and 450nm combat range (800+otherwise), the V-22 could be useful for some on what is envisioned for the Aeroscraft - at least for such things as crew and small supplies replenishment.
In-air refueling is cool and all, but as with helicopters there is a limit (don't know hours for Osprey, sorry) of flight hours before maintenance; a helo may have as few as ten hours of flight before mandated down time. See also
http://www.justhelicopters.com/HELIARTICLES/tabid/433/ID/13287/Helicopter-In-Flight-Refueling.aspx
for a fascinating excellent account, and a history of helicopter aerial refueling.
The Aeroscraft (the big one, if after this prototype proves out) in contrast is designed to be able to shift _66_ tons out to several thousand km. So, for its designed role, the Aeroscraft looks a winner in all respects. It will remain to be seen how it fares in heavy weather, tho. To put it another way, for its intended missions it has no competition.
There seem to be a lot of misconceptions on here about the Aeroscraft. I've been following the development of this for around a year now and can tell you that many people on here would be quite surprised if they would just take 2 minutes to Google the damn thing. This thing will honestly change the way freight will he transported in the future. The size is amazing, if the tests go through there will be an Aeroscraft with a 250 ton capacity with full hover and VTOL capability. It really is not the same zeppelin from years past.
I'm sorry but hydrogen embrittlement doesn't even meet your expanded definition. It makes things weaker instead of actually breaking them.
Also the post a few steps above was no flame, unlike your arrogant cut and paste, but merely a gentle correction implying no fault on your part other than being from a different field. If you are going to start throwing cut and pastes from the dictionary around it's best to work out whether they apply or not first - hence learning how to use the thing!
'Helium doesn't burn/explode ... '
My uneducated friend hasn't heard of the sun! That things full of helium, and look at it burning and exploding all the time! :-)
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