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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."
What, did they land too hard?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"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.
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
Popcorn, obviously.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You woudn't have if you'd just RTFA, which BTW was excellent and described a whole lot of the technology that went into this thing. For instance, how it can land without a huge ground crew, why it doesn't take off when cargo is offloaded, why it's necessary in the first place. Its use will be for places like northern Canada and the Australian outback where there's no airport and no landing strip and no infrastructure whatever but where there are a lot of resources like timber and minerals.
This is one FA you should R. You'll not have to look anything up on wikipedia.
Oh yes, you welcome them. You welcome them LONG TIME!
Helium, It's in TFA.
In terms of alternatives: I think the dangers of hydrogen have been overstated but I don't think there's much likelihood of anyone switching to that in the near future, and there's also its corrosive effects on iron to consider. Vacuums? Until someone can come up with a lightweight container that's able to withstand an atmosphere of air pressure (which is much more than you might think) it's not going to happen.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
""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)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
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
It's more like a million per kilometer.
- If you're building a road in the bush, it's for freight transport, so that means extensive earthworks and groud prep to make it solid enough.
- Even dry areas have huge flash floods so you need decent drainage too.
- Plus you have to pay the contrstruction workers big $$$ to build roads in the middle of no-where
- Plus support infrastructure like construction camps etc.
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.
No we are not. Hardly anyone lives in those deserts so with a few rare exceptions the roads go around them. While the deserts are big the vast majority of the continent is not actually desert.
Rain washes out dirt roads, or they turn into very nasty blacksoil mud - but of course since you've assumed the whole continent is like Chile's Atacama desert you've thought that is unimportant. Also dirt roads get very badly worn over time (corrugated), and some of the dirt (appropriately called bulldust) is dangerous to drive through so different dirt and gravel has to be brought in even if you want a dirt road. Just dumping gravel on that stuff without a road bed made from dirt from elsewhere doesn't last long.
Anyway, let's get back to airships. The graf zeppillin world circumnavigation revealed some very real limits for large lighter than air vehicles - weather tosses them about like a leaf in the wind and there's some that can't be climbed over. California, Central Australia etc may be viable places for the things because of a lack of sudden weather changes. If you can see a storm coming hours away then you can do something about it, such as avoidance or try to get it on the ground and inside something or block the wind somehow. In other areas, such as the Atlantic with rapidly changing weather, the things are an accident waiting to happen.
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