I was surprised to see the article mention that they'll be going for flight testing later this year, given that the only picture accompanying the article is a rendering. However, if you go to their site, they have photos and videos[1] of working airships. The cabin is tiny though, with room for only the operators (these may be the cargo ships mentioned in the article, rather than passenger vehicles).
There is also a video accompanying the article which shows a BBC reporter interviewing an engineer at the hangar. In the video one can clearly see that at least some rather large airship is well under construction (it's 90m x 27m x 30m, l x w x h). It's frame seems to be finished, and parts of the hull are installed too.
I am not sure if the aircraft in the article is actually light than air or if it is a hybrid but I can assure you that hybrid airships are in no way shape or form vaporware. The US Military is currently developing multiple models and her is a recent video of one that can stay in the air for 21 days with a 1 ton surveillance package. Note the difference between these and normal airships though, they are not 100% buoyant in air and require active thrust in order to fly with a somewhat aerodynamic body.
Though maybe it will work out this time, who know. It’s not like this is some sort of earth shattering innovation, so whether it works or not seems pretty unimportant to me.
I guess the only problem this solves is being able to land on the spot?
Even with compressing the helium to land again, I guess it could be more energy efficient, but it would take forever to reach it's destination. People typically fly in jets because they are fast, not because they are fuel efficient.
I guess, but cargo would require much more lift which is difficult with Helium alone. It looks like they're shooting for the passenger crowd with this.
This is a concept that I find myself continuously in love with. As ahi points out, it comes up every few years and never seems to go anywhere, but something like an airborne luxury craft sounds like a fun vacation. You couldn't have all of the grandness of a cruise ship, but you could find several ways to take recreational advantage of being several thousand feet in the air. For example, a rock climbing wall outside of the ship. And instead of having a ship designed for a 2 week journey, maybe only 3 days (or one day), because there is inherently less room for things like spas and casinos and restaurants.
I also like the transportation focus presented by this article. Perhaps having a useful application (IE retrieving large things that are difficult for helicopters to retrieve) will help to encourage the market for all types of lighter-than-air craft.
Would cruise ships have happened without cargo ships first being designed? My guess is no, because cruise ships largely piggyback off of a technology that is industrially very useful. I do not think that a recreational company would dump so much money into finding ways to make ships more economically feasible. That takes industry, where the need is more obvious, and the potential demand is much easier to predict.
The problem with lighter than air craft is that the payload fraction is minimal - you need a big craft to get a fairly small useful load. This problem is worse if you don't use hydrogen.
For comparison, the S-64 Skycrane (a heavy lift helicopter), weighs 19,000lbs, can lift 20,000lbs, and is 70ft long.
The Zeppelin NT, a modern semi-rigid airship, has an unloaded weight of 24,000lbs, is almost 250ft long, but only had a payload capacity of 4,200lbs.
“It’s impossible to get into some of the resource rich areas of the world. Ecologically, you can’t do it. Areas of the far north, or the Amazon are good examples.”
Oh great, now we can give the final blow to that annoying Nature!
"Resource rich" tends to lead me to believe that the reason we want to get there is to take the resources. Having a road or having a blimp, either way it's not going to be good.
Even with a coal mine, the roads do more widespread damage than the actual mine. Oil derricks in Alaska do minimal damage; its the construction, pipeline and roads that do it all.
If you try and load this page from the UK, you get:
"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes."
This is offtopic but, for precisely this reason I recently bought vpn access to a provider that has severs in all major countries. I'm living in Germany, and here, YouTube is almost unusable because everything music or somehow copyrighted can't be accessed. Also, I like to watch BBC programmes or Hulu, again impossible from here. VPN has been a great investment so far.
Couldn't find you a different host for the video, but the product page for the Aeroscraft is honestly much more informative and interesting than the video anyways:
http://www.aeroscraft.com/#/aeroscraft/4567337667
I'm using https://www.privateinternetaccess.com. They seem to be doing good privacy-wise: They claim to not do any logging, and they even encourage you to create a throwaway mail account and buy their service via bitcoin.
Yeah, it makes no sense, does it? I think what they're trying to say is: this page is monetised solely by advertising, and we're not allowed to show adverts to people in the UK, so you can't see it.
Can anyone recommend BBC Worldwide a good copywriter?
The good news is that blimps rely passively on the relationship between their overall density and that of the atmosphere to stay aloft. That's also the bad news.
In some future, more rational society, blimps would be tested for their resistance to a microburst, and if they failed, they would not be allowed to carry passengers. It's not true now, and every famous lighter-than-air disaster except Hindenburg involved the craft being pushed down to the surface entirely out of control.
I would have used "photograph" if I had meant a literal recording of nature. This reminds me of the conversation between an artist and a critic, who complained about his distorted woman on display. He replied, "madam, that's not a woman, it's a picture of a woman."
Perfect word. It's not an exaggeration to say that most of our conversations about (a given topic) "A" aren't about "A" at all, but its symbolic or metaphysical version.
You'll see that, at least according to Wikipedia, the main threat to aircraft is the combination of a microburst and an inexperienced pilot, in contrast to your parent's claim that non-rigid aircraft simply lose all control.
> in contrast to your parent's claim that non-rigid aircraft simply lose all control.
But that's exactly right. A large, slow craft like the Macon cannot be controlled in conditions of vertical air motion. Pilot skill is no longer an issue. It's equally true, by the way, for rigid lighter-than-air craft -- once they go outside their controllable envelope, they're in the hands of nature.
I knew my choice in words was probably not very good. Not arguing against the claim, merely observing to my parent that non-rigid aircraft are alleged to lose all control, while rigid aircraft are alleged to simply have problems if the pilot does something dumb.
Sure, but that doesn't really answer the question of where you draw the line in the proposed tests. I'm wondering just how safe you want something like this to be before you carry passengers, since 100% is obviously impossible to achieve, but the state of the art in that domain is apparently not sufficient.
> When the pilot wants to descend, the vehicle needs to be heavier, so the helium in the main body of the craft is compressed and put into storage chambers.
Read the paragraphs above the one I quoted. Like this:
> “The biggest advancement is our buoyancy management system that allows the vehicle to operate autonomously - without the hundreds of people that you saw grabbing the Zeppelin type airships”
or this:
> The system gets around a major drawback of traditional airships [...where] ropes and docking stations are needed on the ground to stop a vessel floating off.
> How would they descend otherwise, release helium and reload before taking off?
Too wasteful, and uneconomic. The way they control their buoyancy is by compressing the helium to reduce buoyancy, then later releasing it from a special storage tank to increase buoyancy. BTW this is how submarines control their buoyancy -- they displace water with air in set-aside volumes made available for this purpose, which increases the craft's overall buoyancy. Then, when they want to descend, they recompress the air and allow water back into the set-aside areas.
They obviously considered the bladder option when designing the craft, which means that:
- either air and He separate fast and well enough to make it unnecessary;
- or there are big problems which make the bladder impractical. I have no idea what these problems might be.
Anyway you're right: a scientifically literate journalist would probably have explained the rationales behind this non-obvious choice.
The basic idea is that, in an optimal craft of this kind, there's a flexible bladder containing the expensive helium, surrounded by varying amounts of air. When you want to descend, you pump some helium into a metal container under high pressure, and the helium bladder decreases in size, allowing more air to enter. When you want to ascend, you release some helium into the bladder, which expands and displaces some air. All inside a semi-rigid enclosure.
> They mention that on the descent, they mix outside air with the remaining helium in the ballasts.
If that's true, I gave them too much credit for intelligence. :)
> Helium is expensive, and is only going to get more so in the coming decade or so.
Yes, true, and it's yet another example of something we could be paying attention to before it's too late. But we probably won't.
> Wouldn't it be easier to have a sealed bladder that inflates/deflates with pressure changes?
I have to confess that to me this seemed obvious, because it's more or less how a submarine works (the submarine doesn't have a flexible bladder, it just pushes water around with air, but it's the same basic idea).
The plan for the Hindenberg (a rigid frame airship, of course, not a blimp) was to have concentric gas cells -- spherical gas-bags inside the truss framework. Each outer sphere full of helium would contain a large inner sphere of hydrogen. The He would effectively insulate the H2 gas from atmosphere, reducing the fire hazard, while taking advantage of the superior lift provided by H2; to descend, they could simply vent hydrogen (via a valve out the top of the lift cell). Unfortunately the US helium export ban put paid to that plan, forcing them to use only hydrogen. The rest is history.
(Another key breakthrough in the early noughties (of the 20th century) was the invention of Blaugas -- a gaseous combustible fuel that was of neutral buoyancy in air. You could store fuel in gas cells and pump it straight to the engines without having to make any trim adjustments.)
Blimps -- non-rigid airships -- use concentric gas bags as well: there's an inner cell hidden within the outer lift cell that can be inflated or deflated with air to maintain internal pressure (keeping the outer bag taut but not over-pressurized) and regulate lift. But the ability to compress or liquify helium is indeed a valuable new technique that will reduce operating costs enormously for future airships.
The problem with aircrafts like these is that helium is slowly but surely becoming a scarce resource on Earth. Here's a somewhat related story about scientists speaking out about using it in balloons.
From what I understood, there are helium bladders and separate outside air bladders and they re-compress and store the helium used, so there isn't as much loss.
Is hydrogen really that dangerous anymore? I mean, we use bikes that have highly flammable fuel right under your body, surely it's possible to create some safety measures to prevent the hydrogen from catching fire.
Not to mention that Hindenburg wasn't that much of a disaster - of 97 people, 61 survived, which is not bad at all for an airship the size of three 747's (or six if you don't include the wingspan) chockfull of hydrogen.
I'm sorry, I don't understand - I was talking about the gas in the tank on motorcycles (which also ignites from a match and it's pretty damn explosive). Also, hydrogen does not ignite without air, just like gasoline.
Hah! My mistake. Well, thing is with gasoline, is it isn't actually all that explosive in pure liquid form. Go take a pan with a cup of the stuff outside, light it with a match. No, seriously! It will just sit there and burn, slowly and usually with a lot of soot.
Gasoline vapor is a completely different story, and the reason you think of gasoline as explosive. But, this doesn't generally prove to be a problem, in part because motorcycles (and just about every type of vehicle) have pressure vents so that the tank doesn't become dangerously pressurized.
When I saw the title, I thought they'd figured out a way to make use of something other than helium, but I guess I was wrong. I was thinking maybe they built self-resizing vacuum chambers in order to reduce the weight/volume ratio. Like, there would be two membranes, and between them, supports that can extend or shorten to change the volume of the vacuum-space, and affect the overall density that way.
Does anyone know if this has been done, or if it's at all feasible?
I wonder what the costs are to build an airship to the same scale as a commercial airliner. If speed was not a factor and it seated comparable amount of people, but it cost significantly less to build and operated there could be a niche market for the not-in-a-hurry air traveler.
61 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] thread[1]: http://www.aeroscraft.com/#/video/4565658106
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1G-L7qvTKI
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/army-spy-blimp/
Though maybe it will work out this time, who know. It’s not like this is some sort of earth shattering innovation, so whether it works or not seems pretty unimportant to me.
Even with compressing the helium to land again, I guess it could be more energy efficient, but it would take forever to reach it's destination. People typically fly in jets because they are fast, not because they are fuel efficient.
I also like the transportation focus presented by this article. Perhaps having a useful application (IE retrieving large things that are difficult for helicopters to retrieve) will help to encourage the market for all types of lighter-than-air craft.
Would cruise ships have happened without cargo ships first being designed? My guess is no, because cruise ships largely piggyback off of a technology that is industrially very useful. I do not think that a recreational company would dump so much money into finding ways to make ships more economically feasible. That takes industry, where the need is more obvious, and the potential demand is much easier to predict.
For comparison, the S-64 Skycrane (a heavy lift helicopter), weighs 19,000lbs, can lift 20,000lbs, and is 70ft long.
The Zeppelin NT, a modern semi-rigid airship, has an unloaded weight of 24,000lbs, is almost 250ft long, but only had a payload capacity of 4,200lbs.
Oh great, now we can give the final blow to that annoying Nature!
"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes."
O.o
Could somebody who can see the video give us a 2 line description so we can see if it's available locally at a different URL?
Make sure you get a dedicated IP address though.
Edit: Link for the lazy - https://www.astrill.com/
Can anyone recommend BBC Worldwide a good copywriter?
In some future, more rational society, blimps would be tested for their resistance to a microburst, and if they failed, they would not be allowed to carry passengers. It's not true now, and every famous lighter-than-air disaster except Hindenburg involved the craft being pushed down to the surface entirely out of control.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microburst
Picture of a microburst: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Microburstnasa.JPG
Perfect word. It's not an exaggeration to say that most of our conversations about (a given topic) "A" aren't about "A" at all, but its symbolic or metaphysical version.
You'll see that, at least according to Wikipedia, the main threat to aircraft is the combination of a microburst and an inexperienced pilot, in contrast to your parent's claim that non-rigid aircraft simply lose all control.
But that's exactly right. A large, slow craft like the Macon cannot be controlled in conditions of vertical air motion. Pilot skill is no longer an issue. It's equally true, by the way, for rigid lighter-than-air craft -- once they go outside their controllable envelope, they're in the hands of nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macon_(ZRS-5)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macon_(ZRS-5)#Disaster
Ha, it's an inverted submarine!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine#Submersion_and_trimmi...
How would they descend otherwise, release helium and reload before taking off?
> “The biggest advancement is our buoyancy management system that allows the vehicle to operate autonomously - without the hundreds of people that you saw grabbing the Zeppelin type airships”
or this:
> The system gets around a major drawback of traditional airships [...where] ropes and docking stations are needed on the ground to stop a vessel floating off.
Too wasteful, and uneconomic. The way they control their buoyancy is by compressing the helium to reduce buoyancy, then later releasing it from a special storage tank to increase buoyancy. BTW this is how submarines control their buoyancy -- they displace water with air in set-aside volumes made available for this purpose, which increases the craft's overall buoyancy. Then, when they want to descend, they recompress the air and allow water back into the set-aside areas.
They mention that on the descent, they mix outside air with the remaining helium in the ballasts.
Aren't you going to lose a lot of the helium in this process?
Wouldn't it be easier to have a sealed bladder that inflates/deflates with pressure changes?
Anyway you're right: a scientifically literate journalist would probably have explained the rationales behind this non-obvious choice.
> They mention that on the descent, they mix outside air with the remaining helium in the ballasts.
If that's true, I gave them too much credit for intelligence. :)
> Helium is expensive, and is only going to get more so in the coming decade or so.
Yes, true, and it's yet another example of something we could be paying attention to before it's too late. But we probably won't.
> Wouldn't it be easier to have a sealed bladder that inflates/deflates with pressure changes?
I have to confess that to me this seemed obvious, because it's more or less how a submarine works (the submarine doesn't have a flexible bladder, it just pushes water around with air, but it's the same basic idea).
The plan for the Hindenberg (a rigid frame airship, of course, not a blimp) was to have concentric gas cells -- spherical gas-bags inside the truss framework. Each outer sphere full of helium would contain a large inner sphere of hydrogen. The He would effectively insulate the H2 gas from atmosphere, reducing the fire hazard, while taking advantage of the superior lift provided by H2; to descend, they could simply vent hydrogen (via a valve out the top of the lift cell). Unfortunately the US helium export ban put paid to that plan, forcing them to use only hydrogen. The rest is history.
(Another key breakthrough in the early noughties (of the 20th century) was the invention of Blaugas -- a gaseous combustible fuel that was of neutral buoyancy in air. You could store fuel in gas cells and pump it straight to the engines without having to make any trim adjustments.)
Blimps -- non-rigid airships -- use concentric gas bags as well: there's an inner cell hidden within the outer lift cell that can be inflated or deflated with air to maintain internal pressure (keeping the outer bag taut but not over-pressurized) and regulate lift. But the ability to compress or liquify helium is indeed a valuable new technique that will reduce operating costs enormously for future airships.
Couldn't get the video unfortunately. I'm in the UK, the VPN I used was Hotspot Shield, it's free.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19676639
We could always use hydrogen, which is even lighter and therefore more efficient than helium. There's just the problem with it being highly flammable.
Not to mention that Hindenburg wasn't that much of a disaster - of 97 people, 61 survived, which is not bad at all for an airship the size of three 747's (or six if you don't include the wingspan) chockfull of hydrogen.
To put it simply, you can set off magnesium with a blowtorch. You can set off hydrogen with a match.
Gasoline vapor is a completely different story, and the reason you think of gasoline as explosive. But, this doesn't generally prove to be a problem, in part because motorcycles (and just about every type of vehicle) have pressure vents so that the tank doesn't become dangerously pressurized.
Does anyone know if this has been done, or if it's at all feasible?
Unfortunately it's quite expensive starting at $375 for a 45-minute flight.