World's Largest Aircraft Seeks Investors To Begin Operation

An anonymous reader writes: The Airlander 10 is significantly larger than a 747. It's an airship that incorporates elements of blimps, planes, and hovercraft. Buoyed by a vast volume of helium, it's capable of cruising at a speed of 80 knots. It was built as a military venture, intended to be used for surveillance tasks. But as the war in Afghanistan wound down, government officials found they had no use for the airship. They ended up selling it back to the company who made it for $300,000 — after paying them $90 million to build it. Now, a small group of investors are trying to get it operational, in part to show people how safe the technology can be, and to hopefully spur construction of more airships. They say the Airlander 10 is capable of surviving a missile strike, but visions of the Hindenburg still loom large in our cultural memory.

Comments

As long as it's not windy

[GrahamCox]

Most people seem to focus on the safety of airships, in the light of the Hindenburg, R101, etc. Surely a more significant problem is the wind? Any amount of wind is going to make landing and takeoff hazardous, and making much headway against a strong headwind is going to take a lot of power with that much windage. Good luck to them, maybe there are enough fair-weather opportunities to make it pay, but this aspect is seemingly never discussed.

Re:Hindenburg?

[Anonymous Coward]

you seem to be under the false assumption that the amount of gas inside the skin of the blimp has to remain constant. There is no reason why it can't be released or compressed while underloading. a simple tether or Anchor would be more than adequate to permit loading and unloading.

Re:Knots?

[Anonymous Coward]

A knot is a nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is... "approximately one minute of arc measured along any meridian"*. IOW, it's used in the marine and aviation worlds (including weather) because it makes notepad speed and navigation calculations easier.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile

Re:Not so fast

[tsotha]

Correct:

Alois Böcker in the L-33 was the first to arrive over the capital. He dropped most of his bomb-load on the East End, around Bow and Stratford, with the airship crew reporting visible fires and explosions with each bomb burst . However, a shell from the defenses over Bromley exploded inside the ship, causing tremendous physical damage but no fires. She dropped much of her water ballast, reported by the ground spotters as a smoke screen, and made her way eastward, losing 800 feet of altitude each minute. After a dangerous encounter with a British airplane which pumped several drums of Brock-Pomeroy ammunition into L-33 to no effect, the airship came to earth at Essex, where Böcker and his men jumped to the ground and fired several flares into her. They were promptly captured as L-33 burned to the ground, mostly intact.

Hydrogen only burns in the presence of oxygen (for our purposes, anyway). That's also why British aircraft had so much trouble setting airships alight with incendiary rounds - the rounds would pass straight through without ever getting the right H2/air mixture for ignition. Incendiary rounds performed so badly the Brits thought the Germans were putting a layer of some inert gas just inside the airship skin.

It wasn't until they switched to a mix of explosive and incendiary bullets that they began to have success. The explosive rounds would tear big holes in fabric and allow hydrogen and oxygen to mix. It still took a couple drums to get the ship burning, though.