Lighter-than-air craft rise again

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120921-lighter-than-air-craft-rises

by duelin_markers • 14 years ago

63 53 14 years ago

ahi• 14 years ago

This shows up every few years in credulous magazines like Popular Mechanics and Wired. It is literally vaporware.

machrider• 14 years ago

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).

[1] http://www.aeroscraft.com/#/video/4565658106

anonymouz• 14 years ago

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.

cdash• 14 years ago

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1G-L7qvTKI

whalesalad• 14 years ago

Northrop Grumman is building one for the Army, called the LEMV. It had its first flight recently.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/army-spy-blimp/

raleec• 14 years ago

Is this a pun?

arrrg• 14 years ago

Yeah, reminds me of CargoLifter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

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.

bduerst3• 14 years ago

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.

PaperclipTaken• 14 years ago

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.

TylerE• 14 years ago

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.

tisme2• 14 years ago

The good news is that the time that it can stay aloft is substantially longer than any rotor or prop driven craft.

mylittlepony• 14 years ago

“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!

JoeAltmaier2• 14 years ago

Um, the point is, you can get there without building roads and raping the environment. Its supposed to be kinder to Nature.

freehunter• 14 years ago

"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.

pstuart• 14 years ago

Or at least rape the environment in a kinder manner.

camtarn• 14 years ago

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."

O.o

terhechte2• 14 years ago

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.

adaml_623• 14 years ago

I think we're all going to be heading that direction before too long.

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?

kirubakaran• 14 years ago

Name of the said VPN provider please.

threedaymonk• 14 years ago

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?

lutusp6• 14 years ago

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microburst

Picture of a microburst: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Microburstnasa.JPG

tisme2• 14 years ago

That's not a picture of a microburst, that's an artists rendering.

lutusp6• 14 years ago

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."

mikeash2• 14 years ago

What would be the pass/fail criteria for such a test? Conventional aircraft are hardly immune to microbursts either, after all.

sliverstorm4• 14 years ago

If you read the included notes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microburst#Danger_to_aircraft

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.

arturadib2• 14 years ago

> 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.

Ha, it's an inverted submarine!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine#Submersion_and_trimmi...

tocomment• 14 years ago

This idea seemed obvious too me. In fact that's how I've assumed blimps worked since I first heard about them.

How would they descend otherwise, release helium and reload before taking off?

arturadib2• 14 years ago

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.

lutusp6• 14 years ago

> 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.

cstross• 14 years ago

Various mechanisms.

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.

zefi• 14 years ago

Here is a screenshot of the article. http://i46.tinypic.com/358du2c.png

Couldn't get the video unfortunately. I'm in the UK, the VPN I used was Hotspot Shield, it's free.

ginko• 14 years ago

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.

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.

malandrew• 14 years ago

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.

jakeonthemove2• 14 years ago

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.

sliverstorm4• 14 years ago

The ignition point of magnesium is fairly high, and its ability to act as a heat spreader further reduces the risk.

To put it simply, you can set off magnesium with a blowtorch. You can set off hydrogen with a match.

TheSOB88• 14 years ago

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?

andyjsong• 14 years ago

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.

troebr• 14 years ago

How well does it cope with wind?

dangrossman• 14 years ago

If you're in California, you can book a zeppelin tour almost any day -- http://www.airshipventures.com/

Unfortunately it's quite expensive starting at $375 for a 45-minute flight.

Lighter-than-air craft rise again

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