Trying to cheat the laws of physics so it sucks less than all the other failed attempts at making blimps more than a niche product.
Nothing in the announcements indicate any degree of success, so I'll suspect it'll be quietly shuffled off to the few markets where blimps are already successful in.
Setting the helium supply aside, this is actually something that scales up well, right? The blimp's lift scales cubicly with size, but its cross section and surface area (drag and materials weight) only scale quadratically.
Also, I remember someone trying to shape a blimp like a lifting body, so it gets a some extra lift from forward motion.
Helium supply was never really an issue. All the media hit pieces were essentially triggered by the Pentagon stopping to run a price-fixing cartel to the benefit of US universities, who after endless wailing and gnashing of teeth finally adjusted to market prices and such desperate last ditch measures like "we actually have to recycle our helium now and can't just vent it carelessly after every run!!1"
You say that but helium is essentially not renewable and is not produced naturally at rates anywhere near human consumption. Not sure if you're aware but helium currently only sourced as a byproduct of natural gas production.
Yes, but for better or worse, we have lots of natural gas producers, and they'll be in business for a long time. And once the selloff of the US's strategic helium reserve is done with and prices stabilize, more natural gas producers will actually bother to capture their helium.
Realistically, all the other fundamental problems of blimps will limit before the helium supply does — remember that it was artificially crippled by the selloff of the US's strategic helium reserve; it was sold under market value and so all the natural gas producers who could have trapped and sold off their helium production just gave up on doing so. Supply will stabilize again after the last of the reserve is sold off this month.
Hydrogen fusion creates helium as a byproduct. But I don't see why they can't use hydrogen for cargo. We have the tech to make it safer than long haul driving.
This is a pet peeve of mine when people talk about the advantages of fusion, if you did all of the US power budget with DT fusion that would generate very close to 10 million moles of helium, or 4E7 grams of helium, or 2E8 liters at stp. This is a big number! but it's 2E5 cubic meters and annual US consumption of helium is 40E6 cubic meters, less than 1% of consumption.
If you produced all the USA's electricity in a year with fusion and collected all the resulting helium with 100% efficiency, you'd have collected less than 1% of the amount of helium we go through in that year.
A naive translation (not checking facts in any way):
Converting 100% of power generation in the US to (deuterium-tritium) fusion would result in 200,000 cubic meters of helium generated per year. But the US currently consumes 40,000,000 cubic meters per year.
Hydrogen is "safe enough" if we want to use it, compared to gasoline and other routine hazards.
The Hindenburg provided a recognizable meme but even with that, there were things that could have been done differently (with technology of the time) to make even those disasters more survivable.
With modern materials, it could be quite safe, indeed.
> The Hindenburg provided a recognizable meme but even with that, there were things that could have been done differently (with technology of the time) to make even those disasters more survivable.
It’s also worth noting that 64% of the crew and passengers survived. I’m not sure how that compares to the average plane crash, but it was certainly not as severe a disaster as it’s usually thought of.
> It’s also worth noting that 64% of the crew and passengers survived. I’m not sure how that compares to the average plane crash, but it was certainly not as severe a disaster as it’s usually thought of.
64% survival would be great for VC investments (depending on the returns); it would be awful for a round of layoffs; for human lives on transportation infrastructure ... maybe we are losing sight of a big picture here! :)
> Hydrogen is "safe enough" if we want to use it, compared to gasoline
While I'm inclined to agree with your overall point, intuitively, it seems much more dangerous than gasoline. Gasoline is very difficult to ignite unless if it's vaporized. On the other hand, hydrogen is already a gas so it's significantly easier to ignite and more explosive when it does.
It only ignites in the presence of oxygen and a source of ignition so as long as you keep those things away from the hydrogen it should be quite safe. It's a solvable engineering problem. Use only materials that cannot burn for the gas envelope and structures immediately adjacent to it. Locate the engines as far out as possible on pylons. Divide the gas envelope as much as possible to limit the fuel supply for any fire that does start. The major complication is not adding too much weight but there's no reason airships couldn't be as safe as airplanes.
I thought that the Hindenburg was more about the materials the airship skin was made of than the Hydrogen itself. If the skin hadn't caught fire, the hydrogen wouldn't have. Also the fuel tanks caught fire, and they could have been better protected. Normally the hydrogen can only catch fire if it leaks out and there is an ignition source near the leak.
Even if this happens, if the skin is flame retardant, the hole probably won't grow very fast. You will lose buoyancy, but you'll probably have time to make an emergency soft-ish landing. Helium wouldn't really make any difference because it can leak out and cause loss of buoyancy just as easily.
It unfortunately scales up very well, or rather it completely doesn't scale down. The problem is while gigantic design seems to be good on paper you can't build a demonstrator blimp or a small scale model (kinda like airplanes can with widebody/narrowbody or shorter/longer fuselages) to break into the commercial industry. And they need not only individual scale of a single ship but also quantity scale to show that they can operate profitable. And even if someone build them, then they need to convince people to switch from ships, trucks and trains. And places unreachable by those already don't have enough production for the gigantic blimp transport.
But it would be awesome if someone goes full Elon Musk on this idea and bruteforces the final giant design with a pile of money. Blimps are great :)
> Also, I remember someone trying to shape a blimp like a lifting body, so it gets a some extra lift from forward motion.
They are all shaped like that. Famously, the R101 at the end of it's final flight was so overweight (reasons disputed) it needed dynamic lift to stay afloat, with eventually disastrous consequences when first one engine was down for maintenance and then the second was ordered to cut revolutions for unclear reasons.
I suspect the main one is cargo, to fit the “reasonably fast but low-cost” market between boats (very slow) and planes (expensive). This is presented well in this video: https://youtu.be/ZjBgEkbnX2I?feature=shared
Sky yachts that can be put under a non-profit and marketed as humanitarian or "educational" or "research" platforms. I knew of a superyacht that was "studying" coral loss. Of course, at Fiji. Probably had to give one of the 8 staterooms to some academic.
For flight to a destination, it may be possible to use an altitude with a more favorable wind direction. For landing, the aircraft approaches a mooring mast from downwind.
"The Ministry for the Future" [0] slowly assembles.
[0] a book about the climate crisis, in which after global eco-terrorist attacks on airplane travel, airships make a dramatic return as the main way to do inter-continental travel.
[0] The story is set in the future, after the 'Gene Wars' have turned the Earth into a blighted wasteland. The inhabitants of Earth live a tribal-like existence and offer tributes to the Sky Lords. The Sky Lords live in giant airships and are the rulers of the people below.
This is technically a dirigible right? Surprised that term wasn't used anywhere in the article.
At its current stated speed of 75mph it would take over 45hrs to get from New York to London. Not sure how it would fare in the winds, but it would probably be a quiet ride.
> Starlink isn’t the only nor the first satellite internet provider.
It seems to be doing the best job so far at providing reduced latency while scaling coverage fast. From what I've seen, everyone else was stuck in a niche mentality, willing to milk that niche with high prices. Starlink is the first thing to come along aimed at completely solving last mile for out of the way locations.
Did you actually use HughesNet or Viasat? It absolutely sucked compared to Starlink on both price and performance. I really don't understand why everyone feels the need to dunk on Starlink (probably musk related).
The quietness will depend on how well sound-insulated those diesel generators are I guess. They'd probably have to be running for most of that trip given that battery technology is where it is currently.
I’m assuming that it would be feasible to cover the ship with flexible solar pannels and not need generators, but I understand that they want to deal with one problem at a time.
Of course not, but you can have sunlight for 12, reach the jetstream, cut the engines unless you are maneuvering, store some energy to have enough to operate for the next 12 hours, and replenish your batteries for 12 more hours while you still don’t need it too much. Before that is depleted, you should have arrived.
It wouldn't be feasible to cover the ship in solar panels. Solar panels, even light flexible ones, weight too much. To be able to take off, the dirigible is covered in lightweight fabric.
I'm on the spectrum, and I hate loud noises with a burning passion (due to the fact that the all of the information usually hurts like all get-out), but something ever since being a child that has gotten me extremely excited whenever I hear it is in the slow, giant-engine-whine "whip whip whip whip whip whip whip whip whip" sound of traditional old-school dirigibles from movies and such.
I don't even know if the classical dirigibles even make that noise. It just gives me dopamine.
I relearned a similar lesson while hiking the Appalachian Trail this year, I stayed at a paid campsite by the railroad tracks.
I thought I was going to hate it, but somehow my adult, self-believed rational self turned into a gasp-giggling, excitedly-breathing, and hand-clapping and jumping up and down experience whenever a train came by (and blew its horn at full volume because we were right freaking near a train crossing).
Intellectually I don't have the strongest passion for trains, but viscerally is something else. It did not matter if it woke me at 4-5 in the morning, I would always lift the hammock tarp and find myself very excited each time.
My emotions about the issue are roughly about the same as if you personally suddenly found your body and brain doing that around trains. I'll probably seek trains out more for that reason (because it feels...amazing!), and continue working through whatever residual shame lies in authentically experiencing such a thing as my self with that kind of joy. My brain may be autistic, but my soul is not, so some things require adjustment. <3 :')))) ;')))) :')))) <3
Still, what a beautiful thing to have such small things to make me extremely happy, no matter how unexpected or "strange", given the context.
There seems to be something somehow wired into (at least some) people’s brains that makes trains appealing. You don’t see, e.g., BusFan forums to correlate with the RailFan forums. Heck, I can entertain myself for extended stretches of time just following the path of railroad tracks on Google Maps.
I have to imagine that sounds like that from movies are entirely fabricated from a sound designer's mind. The best you could hope for would be a live sound recording from a Goodyear blimp.
In fact, from a quick Youtube check, the Goodyear Blimp sounds a lot like any other propeller driven plane on takeoff. While LTA's design is electric and hopefully quieter, it adds evidence that the desired sound from movies is probably fiction.
I have a sinking feeling under some further investigation that it may be! I am pretty sure that I've heard it in a few places, one of which being the Disney movie Up.
I'm not sure how to describe it, it is a sensorially very unique and pleasant experience for me hearing it.
I listened to some older zeppelin/dirigible recordings based on your comment and they seem to make a rather nice, but also not as-euphoric fan whine. Noooooo, that is quite disappointing!
I think there's one game that had an extremely highly punctuated, very clockwork-like soundtrack in one of its worlds that used the dirigible-whip sound as a base layer for one of its themes whenever you were in that part of the world. I'll see if I can find it.
Curious that it shows up in a few places, there _has_ to be able origin for why people who are designers associate it with airships. It likely wouldn't just occur by chance....
Okay, I found the MonkeyBall adventure reference, at about 2:17:00 or so (it's so low in the mix usually you just here it when falling out, and there's this sorta terrible whining noise above it), but I remember it sticking out to me for whatever.
Yes, movie sounds are intended to sound like viewers expect, not how they actually sound. See Airplane! where the action all takes place on a passenger jet but the background sound effects are all for a propeller airliner, because it evokes the sound and feel of Zero Hour, the movie it’s parodying. (https://www.google.com/search?q=zero+hour+movie&ie=UTF-8&oe=...)
I am sure it adds another layer of ironic, wry, situational comedy to that movie as many other layers of it are.
When I learned about how it was basically a shot for shit remake of Zero Hour, AND the story of how and why they basically got to remake it, it tickled me even further.
Sorta reminds me of the infamous official "Ghost Stories" dub, which is....uh.... something else. Er. Lol.
If this was cheap, I'd definitely ride it for long trips like that, but I'm sure it will not be. I guess I'm curious also what the interior is like and how much square footage they have available too.
Edit, I found this information in a different article:
It could eventually carry up to 14 people and has a cargo capacity of up to 11,000 pounds. To that end, LTA says the airship will be primarily used to bring humanitarian aid (food and supplies) to remote areas that are difficult to access via traditional aircraft and vehicles.
"Dirigible" re-directs to the "Airship" on wikipedia, and the dictionary also considers them to be synonyms. I think "dirigible" is just considered to be a dated term and to not add anything.
I had a conversation with a contractor involved on the project who had a willingness to spill beans. Apparently there was also a non-publicized test flight sometime in late August or early September.
Very nice, and I heard lots of Helium was found on Canada's Baffin Island. With that news, hopefully these can be used to replace some container ship and air travel in the near future.
Airships have always fascinated nerds and always will, but whether there is a niche that airships can fill which airplanes, helicopters or ground transportation can't still remains to be proven. A German startup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter) tried something similar 20+ years ago, but only got as far as building a giant hangar (which is now a tropical theme park - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort) before they ran out of money. So LTA Research has already surpassed them...
I would imagine airships are easier to autopilot and could be used for setting up automated warehouse to warehouse deliveries - including loading and unloading cargo, establishing a continuous flow of goods.
Maybe, but smaller blimps don't have very much throughput compared to trucks, much less rail. A Hindenburg sized megablimp that can actually carry a lot (but still way less than rail + trucks) is logistically difficult.
Seems like the niche is more point-to-point, where a large cargo needs to get somewhere unusual or unscheduled, and kinda quick. Something too big or too cheap for a helicopter, and maybe where a manned truck would not work or have a similar cost.
if you are building new then an automated isolated railway network is not hard to achieve; and with any airship infrastructure you are pretty much building new anyways.
Main problem here is that it is a floating device. As soon as it unloads 4 tons of cargo it gets pushed up with 4 tons force upwards. And you'd better do not release helium to compensate that - it is quite expensive.
Without solving that problem airships are mostly for travel...
4 tons of water is smaller than a cube 6ft on the side. Water flows where you want it, it’s disposable without special procedures, and is literally available anywhere out of the tap.
This doesn’t seem like the hard part.
Edit: sibling comment points out that helium can also be compressed. I don’t think “too much lift” is an intractable issue.
The niche I'd like them to fill is low-carbon intercontinental travel. Right now the only option is hitching a ride on a cargo ship, which is very slow, expensive, and only low-carbon in a marginal sense, and the prospects for long-distance electric planes or actually-sustainable aviation fuel seem pretty grim.
Cargo ships burn incredibly dirty fuel, the working conditions are bordering on modern slavery, and it isn't sure if some cargo travel routes will stay viable in the near future - the Panama Canal has issues fitting the latest and greatest ("Postpanamax") ships and it's dealing with severe water shortages, and the Suez Canal is under threat from Iran as well as from a repeat of the infamous Ever Given incident.
There are a lot of people working on converting cargo ships to ammonia fuel. This will at least burn clean producing only nitrogen and water with appropriate engine tech. The ammonia can come from green hydrogen, so it could be 100% clean tech and ammonia doesn't have the problem of needing to be compressed and has good energy density.[1]
The problem is, shipping is incredibly price sensitive (as evidenced by the industry's SOP of using cheap flag states, exploiting labor and burning bunker fuel aka refinery residue). As long as said refinery residue is cheap, they'll keep the old guzzlers for as long as they can, and only convert a couple "flagships" to ammonia to appease ESG investors.
It just doesn't scale, there's only a few passenger seats available, and if we used the whole cargo ship to transport people it wouldn't be low carbon anymore.
Believe me, low carbon intercontinental travel is ships. Like normal, mundane, boats.
Boats can lift so much more stuff for the weight of the craft and support that it is not even fair.
A container ship can lift about 10 times the weight of the ship as cargo.
I don't have stats for airships but my guess would be it is reversed, so no more than 10% of the weight of the airship in cargo.
Also, each airship can only lift very small amount of cargo so a single container ship can probably transport as much stuff as all the airships we will be ever able to build combined.
If you don't care about how much cargo is used, then you have sailing ships which we know quite a lot about. You can sail long distances without using a drop of fuel.
If you stick to container ships, you still have net zero options. We can use expensive hydrocarbon fuels made from renewable sources and drive those ships at slower speeds which would lower fuel consumption. This I think would still be so much cheaper than airships given the costs to produce and maintain those.
No need to convince me, I would love to take a ship instead of flying. I still think airships could fill a niche that waterships can't though, because again they're slow and obviously they can only dock on the coast. You can't take a boat from Chicago to Madrid. I think it would be fun to go train->boat->train, but that is a long journey.
These airships are supposed to fill a niche halfway between ships and airplanes. Ships can take weeks to make a journey, planes take hours, airships can split the difference and take days. They're less efficient than ships but much more efficient than planes.
Since it’s Sergey Brin funding the venture, I don’t think running out of money is any real concern. So maybe they’ll be able to pull it off this time, assuming it’s even possible.
From what I recall, strong wind is kryptonite to any lighter than air vessel. I’m not sure how they plan to solve that problem, but I’d be really impressed if they do.
Aviation is a great way to turn a large fortune into a small one, even for the richest people on Earth.
DOD estimates the F-35 will cost $1.7T in total development cost The Concorde was a couple billion, Howard Hughes pretty much spent his fortune developing aircraft that turned into a flop.
One thing I've thought about, when thinking about airships, is the problem of expendable stores, like lift gas or ballast. Solar might well be the solution! One approach being taken is re-liquefying of the lift gas. Another approach might be the condensation of water from the air. Both might be combined. Either way, the problem is made simpler by the availability of power. Airships have a lot of surface area for solar power!
"While Pathfinder 1 can carry about four tons of cargo in addition to its crew, water ballast and fuel, future humanitarian airships will need much larger capacities."
For context, a C130 can airdrop 21 tons of cargo. So if the use case is delivery of humanitarian aid in zones without landing strips, Pathfinder is still really far from a viable replacement of current aircraft.
Dirigibles benefit from the square-cube law, so as long as you have a hangar large enough to build them, larger is overall better. There are probably some questions about those 3,000 titanium hubs, so it might not be trivial to make it bigger, but it feels more manageable to scale than an airplane.
Hangar One at Moffett (where Pathfinder is) is 348,964 sqft while the largest airship hangar ever built was the Aerium hangar at 851,500 although they didn't wind up building the big airship that was supposed to go along with it and converted it into an indoor rainforest resort and waterpark.
I don’t think larger hangars than what we have now are that hard to build – not compared to, say, buildings like the Burj Kalifa. We can do tall.
The biggest issue would be to have a wide span without columns. But those are long shapes: if you can make a gate 50 m tall (18 floors) and 50 m wide (the Golden Gate bridge has a 1,280 m span between each tower), you can build 10 gates in a row and have enough room for a dirigible with a 45 m diameter and as long as you need, but 300 m seems doable.
This prototype is 20 m wide and 124.5 m long, so if you scale it to 45 m x 45 m x 300 m, you might get something that can carry about twelve times more than this one.
If the overall carbon footprint is less, then I guess its worth it?
I would imagine that they have plans to tether a few of these together, load up the cargo, and fly it around un-populated areas to build a distribution network. Perhaps tethering them can also mean overall stability and resistance to wind effects, something like an air train. Maybe, a small aircraft can lock-in to the first one and simply pull it along at higher speeds?
Assuming they can fly at about 50 MPH, can be automated and can fly day and night with minimal energy consumption, companies like Amazon and FedEx would be interested.
Not to mention tourism applications, surveying, etc.
For the humanitarian use case, how quickly could an airship landing zone be established? I assume it's more than a helipad (empty dirt field) but far less than a runway (FOD-free, long, flat, straight, paved).
I wonder if the airship could deliver it's own LZ kit in a delicate touch-and-go slash hover.
The article briefly mentions repurposing yachts and that made me think of hospital ships. I wonder if you could reconfigure the internal space as a go-anywhere hospital (or at least, a set of operating rooms) or if it just makes more sense to deploy a standard field hospital with tents.
The ship doesn’t need to touch the ground, but you need to attach it firmly (because as soon as you unload a ton, that ship wants to jump up by about a ton). You can mitigate some of that with helium pumps and pointing the engines up and down, but a firm cabling would be necessary. In a pinch, I assume you can drop the necessary equipment to attach cables from the ship itself (it will still jolt when you do that).
Right. We're far removed from the 1930's "have lots of men hold on to lots of ropes" level of technology.
I assume airships aren't allowed to touch the ground because it needs to rotate with the wind. For an LZ, the load could just be slung then released. If the craft jumps skyward, who cares because it can't land yet anyway.
To your point about weight, I was thinking that instead of permanent anchors fixed to the ground, you could use water bladders or those large military sandbags[1] for ad-hoc purposes. You need to forage for the ballast on-site because of the relationship of lift you described.
> We're far removed from the 1930's "have lots of men hold on to lots of ropes" level of technology.
This morning, the airship floated silently from its WW2-era hangar at NASA’s Moffett Field at walking pace, steered by ropes held by dozens of the company’s engineers, technicians and ground crew.
> I assume airships aren't allowed to touch the ground because it needs to rotate with the wind.
It can touch it, it’s just that because it’s designed to be buoyant, it won’t have a good grip without enforcing it.
> For an LZ, the load could just be slung then released.
The solutions I’ve seen discussed are closer to what you see on ships or airplanes: narrow passerelles for people and a roll-on-roll-off option for heavier equipment.
The issue is to have a system that can handle a literal ton of either extra weight (that’s easy if the nacelle can push on the ground) or less weight (the part that would need anchoring). Most aeronautical mitigations are nowhere fast enough to avoid buckling.
Money: most projects didn’t have enough investment. Brin presumably can handle a conversation that starts with “We need another billion for…”
Wind patterns are actually well understood: hot-hair ballons already move around simply by changing their altitude and going around reasonably freely. I don’t know if those could handle the jet stream, but that would make NY-London a lot faster.
Agree with you on how slow previous prototypes have been: I was part of a project that tried to use them for urban transport, and it was not going nearly that fast… 65 knots is the speed of cars on a highway (at least the legal limit).
The key answer was “a more energy intensive power source and better aerodynamics”.
Also, the question is not whether a big airship can be made to fly, because there’s little doubt they can. The question is whether a business model exists that can pay for their construction and operation.
65 knots is probably the most surprising piece of information there. That’s the speed of a car on a highway. If there were a bridge from NY to London, would you take it? What if the views are nice, and you can nap, walk around, and have tea while you work?
The problem with that sort of speed in an aircraft is that suddenly weather becomes very important. It's not unusual for wind speed to be close to 65 knots at altitude. If that's a headwind, you're standing still.
175 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadNothing in the announcements indicate any degree of success, so I'll suspect it'll be quietly shuffled off to the few markets where blimps are already successful in.
Setting the helium supply aside, this is actually something that scales up well, right? The blimp's lift scales cubicly with size, but its cross section and surface area (drag and materials weight) only scale quadratically.
Also, I remember someone trying to shape a blimp like a lifting body, so it gets a some extra lift from forward motion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_Unite...
I really hope we can make airships work, but it seems like the volumes of helium required will be prohibitive for wide-scale deployment.
Hydrogen works well but remains dangerous... perhaps modern tech can make it "safe enough"?
Converting 100% of power generation in the US to (deuterium-tritium) fusion would result in 200,000 cubic meters of helium generated per year. But the US currently consumes 40,000,000 cubic meters per year.
But the USA currently consumes 40,000,000 cubic meters of helium per year.
https://cen.acs.org/materials/3-availability-increase-new-su... ("³He availability to increase with new supply deal")
It'd cost $30 billion to fill one of OP's blimps with synthetic helium-3 (which—to be fair—is a superior lifting gas to helium-4).
The Hindenburg provided a recognizable meme but even with that, there were things that could have been done differently (with technology of the time) to make even those disasters more survivable.
With modern materials, it could be quite safe, indeed.
It’s also worth noting that 64% of the crew and passengers survived. I’m not sure how that compares to the average plane crash, but it was certainly not as severe a disaster as it’s usually thought of.
Average plane crash survival rate is about 95%. I'm guessing it's a somewhat bimodal distribution, however.
64% survival would be great for VC investments (depending on the returns); it would be awful for a round of layoffs; for human lives on transportation infrastructure ... maybe we are losing sight of a big picture here! :)
While I'm inclined to agree with your overall point, intuitively, it seems much more dangerous than gasoline. Gasoline is very difficult to ignite unless if it's vaporized. On the other hand, hydrogen is already a gas so it's significantly easier to ignite and more explosive when it does.
The big advantage (and what could be designed for) is that hydrogen goes up and so (by default) the flammable stuff escapes.
While that might be true, it's been said before. I'd be interested in an engineering study about the costs and risks.
2. If you must burn, do it politely.
Even if this happens, if the skin is flame retardant, the hole probably won't grow very fast. You will lose buoyancy, but you'll probably have time to make an emergency soft-ish landing. Helium wouldn't really make any difference because it can leak out and cause loss of buoyancy just as easily.
But it would be awesome if someone goes full Elon Musk on this idea and bruteforces the final giant design with a pile of money. Blimps are great :)
They are all shaped like that. Famously, the R101 at the end of it's final flight was so overweight (reasons disputed) it needed dynamic lift to stay afloat, with eventually disastrous consequences when first one engine was down for maintenance and then the second was ordered to cut revolutions for unclear reasons.
A merry Art Deco Tic-Tac sailing obliviously across the sky.
Ochre white on chill blue.
I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains
Of rugged mountain ranges
Of blimps from San Jose
I suspect the main one is cargo, to fit the “reasonably fast but low-cost” market between boats (very slow) and planes (expensive). This is presented well in this video: https://youtu.be/ZjBgEkbnX2I?feature=shared
* I have zero experience with any of this.
[0] a book about the climate crisis, in which after global eco-terrorist attacks on airplane travel, airships make a dramatic return as the main way to do inter-continental travel.
[0] The story is set in the future, after the 'Gene Wars' have turned the Earth into a blighted wasteland. The inhabitants of Earth live a tribal-like existence and offer tributes to the Sky Lords. The Sky Lords live in giant airships and are the rulers of the people below.
It's time to bring back these kinds of jobs: https://www.gallerym.com/products/repairing-the-hull-of-the-...
(see also, The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, by John McPhee)
Somehow the Wikipedia page has no photos?? Tons of great ones here:
https://lynceans.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Aereon-Corp_...
Its a fat, tapered arrow! It so outrageous.
At its current stated speed of 75mph it would take over 45hrs to get from New York to London. Not sure how it would fare in the winds, but it would probably be a quiet ride.
It seems to be doing the best job so far at providing reduced latency while scaling coverage fast. From what I've seen, everyone else was stuck in a niche mentality, willing to milk that niche with high prices. Starlink is the first thing to come along aimed at completely solving last mile for out of the way locations.
It is an order of magnitude improvement.
I don't even know if the classical dirigibles even make that noise. It just gives me dopamine.
I relearned a similar lesson while hiking the Appalachian Trail this year, I stayed at a paid campsite by the railroad tracks.
I thought I was going to hate it, but somehow my adult, self-believed rational self turned into a gasp-giggling, excitedly-breathing, and hand-clapping and jumping up and down experience whenever a train came by (and blew its horn at full volume because we were right freaking near a train crossing).
Intellectually I don't have the strongest passion for trains, but viscerally is something else. It did not matter if it woke me at 4-5 in the morning, I would always lift the hammock tarp and find myself very excited each time.
My emotions about the issue are roughly about the same as if you personally suddenly found your body and brain doing that around trains. I'll probably seek trains out more for that reason (because it feels...amazing!), and continue working through whatever residual shame lies in authentically experiencing such a thing as my self with that kind of joy. My brain may be autistic, but my soul is not, so some things require adjustment. <3 :')))) ;')))) :')))) <3
Still, what a beautiful thing to have such small things to make me extremely happy, no matter how unexpected or "strange", given the context.
In fact, from a quick Youtube check, the Goodyear Blimp sounds a lot like any other propeller driven plane on takeoff. While LTA's design is electric and hopefully quieter, it adds evidence that the desired sound from movies is probably fiction.
Edit: clarity
I'm not sure how to describe it, it is a sensorially very unique and pleasant experience for me hearing it.
Here's one example, starting roughly around 7-8 seconds or so: https://youtu.be/ah7I6jr-gKQ?feature=shared
I listened to some older zeppelin/dirigible recordings based on your comment and they seem to make a rather nice, but also not as-euphoric fan whine. Noooooo, that is quite disappointing!
I think there's one game that had an extremely highly punctuated, very clockwork-like soundtrack in one of its worlds that used the dirigible-whip sound as a base layer for one of its themes whenever you were in that part of the world. I'll see if I can find it.
Curious that it shows up in a few places, there _has_ to be able origin for why people who are designers associate it with airships. It likely wouldn't just occur by chance....
Like many things in autism, I have effectively 0 clue why: https://youtu.be/rdnITafjFcQ?si=2mCNpD9zne8YjaKq
When I learned about how it was basically a shot for shit remake of Zero Hour, AND the story of how and why they basically got to remake it, it tickled me even further.
Sorta reminds me of the infamous official "Ghost Stories" dub, which is....uh.... something else. Er. Lol.
Edit, I found this information in a different article:
It could eventually carry up to 14 people and has a cargo capacity of up to 11,000 pounds. To that end, LTA says the airship will be primarily used to bring humanitarian aid (food and supplies) to remote areas that are difficult to access via traditional aircraft and vehicles.
https://youtu.be/vzYLTnI7TUI
Maybe, but smaller blimps don't have very much throughput compared to trucks, much less rail. A Hindenburg sized megablimp that can actually carry a lot (but still way less than rail + trucks) is logistically difficult.
Seems like the niche is more point-to-point, where a large cargo needs to get somewhere unusual or unscheduled, and kinda quick. Something too big or too cheap for a helicopter, and maybe where a manned truck would not work or have a similar cost.
Maybe prefab structures too? All but the smallest dwellings are too bulky for roads.
if you are building new then an automated isolated railway network is not hard to achieve; and with any airship infrastructure you are pretty much building new anyways.
Main problem here is that it is a floating device. As soon as it unloads 4 tons of cargo it gets pushed up with 4 tons force upwards. And you'd better do not release helium to compensate that - it is quite expensive.
Without solving that problem airships are mostly for travel...
This doesn’t seem like the hard part.
Edit: sibling comment points out that helium can also be compressed. I don’t think “too much lift” is an intractable issue.
What's the issue with this? Cargo will always need to be shipped around so as long as the marginal impact is low that seems fine?
[1] https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/worlds-fir...
Boats can lift so much more stuff for the weight of the craft and support that it is not even fair.
A container ship can lift about 10 times the weight of the ship as cargo.
I don't have stats for airships but my guess would be it is reversed, so no more than 10% of the weight of the airship in cargo.
Also, each airship can only lift very small amount of cargo so a single container ship can probably transport as much stuff as all the airships we will be ever able to build combined.
If you don't care about how much cargo is used, then you have sailing ships which we know quite a lot about. You can sail long distances without using a drop of fuel.
If you stick to container ships, you still have net zero options. We can use expensive hydrocarbon fuels made from renewable sources and drive those ships at slower speeds which would lower fuel consumption. This I think would still be so much cheaper than airships given the costs to produce and maintain those.
Going to have to rebuild a sailing vessel fleet.
From what I recall, strong wind is kryptonite to any lighter than air vessel. I’m not sure how they plan to solve that problem, but I’d be really impressed if they do.
DOD estimates the F-35 will cost $1.7T in total development cost The Concorde was a couple billion, Howard Hughes pretty much spent his fortune developing aircraft that turned into a flop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron
For context, a C130 can airdrop 21 tons of cargo. So if the use case is delivery of humanitarian aid in zones without landing strips, Pathfinder is still really far from a viable replacement of current aircraft.
Hangar One at Moffett (where Pathfinder is) is 348,964 sqft while the largest airship hangar ever built was the Aerium hangar at 851,500 although they didn't wind up building the big airship that was supposed to go along with it and converted it into an indoor rainforest resort and waterpark.
The biggest issue would be to have a wide span without columns. But those are long shapes: if you can make a gate 50 m tall (18 floors) and 50 m wide (the Golden Gate bridge has a 1,280 m span between each tower), you can build 10 gates in a row and have enough room for a dirigible with a 45 m diameter and as long as you need, but 300 m seems doable.
This prototype is 20 m wide and 124.5 m long, so if you scale it to 45 m x 45 m x 300 m, you might get something that can carry about twelve times more than this one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-64_Skycrane
I would imagine that they have plans to tether a few of these together, load up the cargo, and fly it around un-populated areas to build a distribution network. Perhaps tethering them can also mean overall stability and resistance to wind effects, something like an air train. Maybe, a small aircraft can lock-in to the first one and simply pull it along at higher speeds?
Assuming they can fly at about 50 MPH, can be automated and can fly day and night with minimal energy consumption, companies like Amazon and FedEx would be interested.
Not to mention tourism applications, surveying, etc.
I wonder if the airship could deliver it's own LZ kit in a delicate touch-and-go slash hover.
The article briefly mentions repurposing yachts and that made me think of hospital ships. I wonder if you could reconfigure the internal space as a go-anywhere hospital (or at least, a set of operating rooms) or if it just makes more sense to deploy a standard field hospital with tents.
I assume airships aren't allowed to touch the ground because it needs to rotate with the wind. For an LZ, the load could just be slung then released. If the craft jumps skyward, who cares because it can't land yet anyway.
To your point about weight, I was thinking that instead of permanent anchors fixed to the ground, you could use water bladders or those large military sandbags[1] for ad-hoc purposes. You need to forage for the ballast on-site because of the relationship of lift you described.
This morning, the airship floated silently from its WW2-era hangar at NASA’s Moffett Field at walking pace, steered by ropes held by dozens of the company’s engineers, technicians and ground crew.
That made me chuckle.
It can touch it, it’s just that because it’s designed to be buoyant, it won’t have a good grip without enforcing it.
> For an LZ, the load could just be slung then released.
The solutions I’ve seen discussed are closer to what you see on ships or airplanes: narrow passerelles for people and a roll-on-roll-off option for heavier equipment.
The issue is to have a system that can handle a literal ton of either extra weight (that’s easy if the nacelle can push on the ground) or less weight (the part that would need anchoring). Most aeronautical mitigations are nowhere fast enough to avoid buckling.
Still wind is the enemy and the airship need to be huge to deliver relevant amount of cargo.
Also super slow normally...
Wind patterns are actually well understood: hot-hair ballons already move around simply by changing their altitude and going around reasonably freely. I don’t know if those could handle the jet stream, but that would make NY-London a lot faster.
Agree with you on how slow previous prototypes have been: I was part of a project that tried to use them for urban transport, and it was not going nearly that fast… 65 knots is the speed of cars on a highway (at least the legal limit).
It's fortunate the Wright Brothers didn't listen when the guy at the Kitty Hawk bar said that.
Also, the question is not whether a big airship can be made to fly, because there’s little doubt they can. The question is whether a business model exists that can pay for their construction and operation.