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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.
The Hindenburg always gets brought up here - I'm sure it was a big thing half a century ago. Now, much of the general public probably doesn't know what "Hindenburg" is, and the ones who are scared of airships are the same group who are scared of normal aircraft. I think the bigger thing here, in terms of travel, is that it only goes 80 knots. You can do 80 knots easily in an economy car. Legally too, in many places. 747s cruise at several hundred knots, around 250 IIRC. There's no reason to take this airship for long distance travel unless your goal is chillin' on the ship and looking out the window.
The Hindenburg and other airships were filled with volatile hydrogen, modern airships use inert helium. The problem is, helium is quite expensive in that volume. The fear at hydrogen airships was well founded, the Hindenburg wasn't even the worst airship disaster, that only killed 36, the worst disaster was the R101 which killed 48. Airships were not only vulnerable to explosion, they were unstable in high winds and storms. After the Hindenburg airships by and large stopped using hydrogen but there were still a lot of crashes due to weather.
The design in the article uses helium which isn't unstable like hydrogen but the problem of weather still remains. But that isn't what will kill it, it's economics as helium is going to be expensive in the quantities they need and who is going to pay for an airship to freight something at 80 knots when if it isn't time critical, a bulk carrier will do it for less.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
I think the bigger thing here, in terms of travel, is that it only goes 80 knots.
It is not intended for passenger transportation. It is for things like cargo to remote areas, or reconnaissance. If it can be automated, with no crew, then it can use hydrogen rather than helium, since there will be no risk to human life.
Again, there are cheaper alternatives.
Also, a lot of remote areas are remote because of weather, not terrain. If you cant get a helicopter in there, a blimp is just asking to crash.
In order for this to be true, it would need to be loaded, unloaded and operated away from populated areas. This gives it a very erratic (ergo, longer) flight path as you cant fly it over cities and a huge logistic cost to get the goods to a remote location for loading and unloading (and these facilities do not already exist). The extra cost does not make sense.
Beyond this, it's daft. The airship cost $90,000,000 (90 million) to build. You dont want it exploding before it returns that 90 mil.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Off by a factor of two. The cruising speed is almost 500 knots.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
In practice blimps would be usefull if they could be run using hydrogen.
Helium is a limited and expensive ressource, hydrogen is comparativelly "free"...
And I suspect that the issues with static electricity, heat, etc... are much better understood today than 80..90 years ago.
The weather forecasts are also much more accurate and the risk of loosing a blimp to the wind are way lower than in the 30s...
The advantage of blimps is that they do not need as much infrastructure as planes, and if you compare the safety records of antique hydrogen blimps to some of the developping world countries airline, ... one might reconsider ....
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.
I am really excited about the possibility of a week long cruise over Europe or a 5 day low altitude cruise across an African savanna or game park aboard a cruise liner such as the Airlander. However, when reading articles about the Airliner, it is always about the technical gobbledegook that engineers and airship geeks get off on... never does it cover the things that matter to the potential investor or future passenger.
At some point there was a view that future airships would be able to gently cruise the skies for days on end much like ocean liners of yesteryear. Future airships were said to be able to carry and support 200-300 passengers and crew over a few days or up to 1000 passengers and crew on a single transatlantic voyage. These were the promises (or dreams) being made a few years ago.
Now, with the Airlander, we have an opportunity to evaluate those promises and see how close to the dream of luxury airship liners, reminiscent of old school luxury ocean liners, we can get. And suddenly everyone appears to be silent about those prospects... nothing to fire up the imagination of a dreamy eyed 12 year old except for the fact that the Airlander's "unusual shape emulates a wing, giving it lift as it is propelled forward by its four engines, as well as from the 38,000m3 of helium that fills its hull."
Yawn!
We paid 90 million for something we sold back to the builders for 300k. What the hell man?
Probably out of embarrassment. It may be called the Airlander but Flying Buttcrack
would be a better name. If that thing was flesh-coloured instead of white it'd be on porn sites.
The fear at hydrogen airships was well founded, the Hindenburg wasn't even the worst airship disaster, that only killed 36, the worst disaster was the R101 which killed 48.
I think this statement is taking things very far out of context: in the context of modern or even vaguely recent air travel, that was not a good thing. In the context of 1936, it was barely a blip. Air travel in 1936 was primitive and dangerous: the classic planes like the DC3 were just introduced contemporarily with the Hindenburg. What was common at the time was things like th Ford Trimotor. Long range planes had many engines partly because the engines simply lacked the reliability due to pushing the technology so far: it was routine to lose one engine in a long flight and mechanical problems frequently caused planes to land early. It wasn't long since planes were designed to allow in-flight engine maintainance.
Additionally, crack porpagation and metal fatigue were very poorly understood and as planes transitioned from wood and linen to aluminium in the 30s, this was the cause of some parts flat-out falling off in flight (things like wings).
The main problem with the hindenburg was that it was large and grand and a film crew witnessed it's demise.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Why would it come out on April 1, and why would you compare it to a 747-400, not even the largest 747?
The An-225 is 84m long.
Bruce Dickinson has also done several April fools pranks before.
it only goes 80 knots. You can do 80 knots easily in an economy car.
Yes, but would you want to? For short trips, yes. For longer trips, not necessarily. I would rather spend a comfortable night sleeping on an airship than having to stay up focused and driving all night to get to the same place at the same time.
Speed is not everything, even when it comes to getting from A to B. And if getting from A to B is not the only goal of traveling, speed matters even less. That's why people go on cruises.
*cought* Cargo Lifter *cought*
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
Correct:
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.
The Airship era, had some pretty crazy stuff. Engineers in each engine nacelle with a normal sea-ship style Full Ahead, Ahead Standard, Full Reverse etc indicator for what Captain wanted from the Engines. There was also the late WWI German Riesenflugzeug large biplane bombers which either had the engines inside the fuselage with gearboxes and driveshafts transferring power to the propellers out on the wings, or large nacelles to accommodate the engineers. In some desperate attempt to get reliability out of early engines.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
That is most certainly not what "remote" means. The places this is proposed to be used are literally remote (as in "far away from"), and helicopters can't lift heavy loads for hours (or days), as this thing can. You seem to have misunderstood the word "remote", conjured up your own definition, then used that definition to bash the idea. I hope you realise how absurd that is :)
Most people's perception of how airships should behave from holes is wrong, and it's based on their experience with party balloons. The reason for the differences are:
* Party balloons are pressurized - the skin is stretched taught. The skin on airships are loose.
* Skin area (and thus leak rate) scales proportional to the radius squared, while the volume scales proportional to the radius cubed. Airships are many, many orders of magnitude larger than party balloons. Consequently the rate in which gas can leak out of a hope is drastically lower.
Even large holes in airships don't take them down quickly. Even a moderate sized airship can generally continue flying to its destination and then fix the damage and refill there.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
To elaborate on tsotha's explanation that "Hydrogen only burns in the presence of oxygen": an explosion requires a nice mix of something flammable and oxygen. If the mixture isn't of the right proportions, no explosion. If the flammable molecules and the oxygen molecules are not nicely mixed, no explosion. Drop a match in a bucket of gasoline: no explosion. Throw the bucket of gasoline into the air and walk into the mist with a lit match: big explosion.
Hydrogen does have a high flame speed. So a better choice for lifting gas might be methane - super abundant and cheap, albeit with half the bouyant force of hydrogen.
The potential explosiveness in a fully fueled 747 likely exceeds that of the R100.
I'm too lazy to look it up, but I suspect the majority of deaths in the Hindenburg accident were from falling or choosing to jump or poorly designed escape routes.