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World's Longest Aircraft Gets Full-Production Go-Ahead (bbc.com)
The Airlander 10 -- the world's longest aircraft -- is set to go into full production with the model designed to take its first passengers. "It comes after the prototype Airlander 10 -- a combined plane and airship -- was formally retired following successful final testing," reports the BBC. "As a result, Bedford firm Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) has been given Production Organization Approval from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA)." From the report: An eyewitness said the aircraft appeared to "break in two" after breaking its moorings and deflating, in November that year, less than 24 hours after completing its sixth successful test flight. The firm was given Design Organization Approval from the European Aviation Safety Agency (Easa) in October. Stephen McGlennan, HAV's chief executive, said 2018 had been very good, with Easa's backing a "huge highlight." He said the firm had changed its focus last year towards the production of Airlander 10 as a commercial aircraft for customers. "The prototype served its purpose as the world's first full-sized hybrid aircraft, providing us with the data we needed to move forward from prototype to production standard," he said. It is now hoped the full commercial model will take to the skies with its first paying passengers "in the early 2020s." Approval from the CAA and Easa now puts the firm in a "strong position to launch production."
DOA approval. /s
It's 92m long, which may make it the longest currently [soon] in production, but the Zeppelins were 235m long back then.
Also, would not have hurt to put the length in the summary, would it?
Aviation has been 99% planes-with-wings and helicopters the last few decades. Blimps were used as advertising billboards and PR attractions mostly. So its nice to see an airplane-airship hybrid being tested. Maybe this design has some decent benefits, for air-cargo hauling, leisurely sight-seeing from the air and similar? (Not "putting all your eges in one basket" and so on...)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Contrary to certain media scare-mongering, helium is fairly abundant. Extracted natural gas contains as much as 7% helium.
Do people just pepper hyphens at random into their sentences? If you're going to hyphenate full-production and go-ahead, why not hyphenate longest-aircraft too?
Haven't you ever heard of the Oxford-Hyphen? /s
I think there could be a niche market for this, a luxury cruise in the air. I'm not convinced anyone would want to use it for A to B transport though because it is so much slower than traditional aircraft.
Luxury passenger transport will be a big money maker. Also remote access, advertising, surveillance, communications, yada. It is worthy.
There's a lot of it in the universe, but not that much (relatively speaking) on earth. And we don't know how to produce more of it economically.
There's a lot of it under our feet, not too easy to extract. We usually get it as a byproduct of natural gas extraction. Other than that, a lot of it naturally seeps from the rocks up into the atmosphere, but quickly goes up and gets lots into outer space.
Known reserves will last some 50 to 100 years an current consumption rate (party baloons are not a major factor). After that we need to learn how to extract it from rocks, or perhaps by then we can just swoop it from Jupiter's atmosphere as He3.
Yes, it is the longest. I imagine its volume and body width are amongst the highest as well. But the cool thing about this plane is it combines a plane and an airship. It requires very little in the way of runway length, has an absolutely massive cargo bay, has a low carbon footprint, is reasonably fast (nowhere near as fast as an airliner but faster than most other means of transport), the ability to fly very slowly, and offers a flight endurance measured in weeks.
You can transport stuff by truck, but the locals tend to support the Taliban.
The rest of your comment was fairly insightful, so it's really too bad you had to ruin it with this horseshit. In surveys something like 90% of Afghans say they are afraid of the Taliban. The majority of Afghans support things like educating and voting rights for women; things which the Taliban vehemently opposes. The idea that "the locals tend to support the Taliban" is just blatant nonsense; the vast majority of them want nothing to do with it.
The ratio of locals who support the Taliban in Pashtun areas is quite a bit higher, but your statement would be an unfair characterization even of just those areas, let alone of Afghanistan as a whole.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/28/africa/helium-discovery-tanzania/index.html
And there's a finite supply of everything here on Earth. Some things are more finite than others.
Except stupidity - there's a limitless supply of that
Just look at the address bar "worlds-longest-aircraft-gets-full-production-go-ahead".
Isn't Helium the second commonest element after Hydrogen?
In the universe? Yes. On Earth? No. We're talking about helium accessible to us. I don't think we're about to go mining the Sun for helium. We're not going to run out this minute or anything but we have a finite supply currently available to us. It doesn't help we waste a lot of it on party balloons and other frivolous uses.
Contrary to certain media scare-mongering, helium is fairly abundant.
We're not going to run out in the next few years if that is what you are talking about. But our supply of readily accessible and economically available helium is limited unless we find new ways to extract more. It's nothing to lose sleep over at the present but it is worth worrying about in the long term. There have been some shortages in recent years but these are more due to supply chain disruptions than anything else.
Extracted natural gas contains as much as 7% helium.
That number is only true for a few fields - most have less than that and not all have enough to make it economically worthwhile to extract it. Natural gas reportedly needs to have more than 0.3% helium for it to become profitable to extract it.
Here's an interesting survey, the popular things (like education for women) are the types of things that would get you killed by the Taliban. and there is a big drop in "country going right/wrong" right around the time that President Obama started the draw-down of troops. Mean that - contrary to what you often hear - the Afghans, by and large, prefer to have US troops around rather than Taliban.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!