World's largest aircraft looking for investors to give it liftoff

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/30/worlds-largest-aircraft-looking-for-investors-to-give-it-liftoff

by ghosh • 11 years ago

55 33 11 years ago

briandear• 11 years ago

I would love to see how this aircraft would function at high altitude such as in Nepal. This could have a huge positive impact around Everest, especially with white knuckle Lukla airport.

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

This looks much more civilized than regular air travel. To the pleasure barge!

azinman22• 11 years ago

Umm the world is running out of helium and there's no good way to make more. Not sure how this will be viable.

monort2• 11 years ago

Natural gas has up to 7% of helium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Modern_extraction_and_d...

fit2rule2• 11 years ago

Yeah but it's eventually going to run out, is the point. Helium doesn't like to stay on Earth.

jnye131• 11 years ago

http://www.hybridairvehicles.com

sschueller• 11 years ago

What is the practicality of that aircraft? It can't lift near as much as a Antonov 225 (545,000lb (247,000kg) vs 22,050lb (10,000kg))

Size comparison: https://golong16.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/pic10808-1.jpg

danbruc2• 11 years ago

Avoiding complex oversize load transports on roads and ships, avoiding the need for nearby airstrips. Just hover above the manufacturing site, lift up the payload, fly to the destination and drop it of. At least this was the main motivation behind CargoLifter [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

msandford• 11 years ago

The 225 burns 16 tons of fuel per hour while flying.

This airship has 4x 325 HP V8 engines. Roughly speaking they each use about 150lbs of fuel per hour to generate 325 HP. That's 0.3 tons per hour between the four of them.

Now of course the 225 will do 5x the speed of the Airlander 10, so where the 225 would use 16 tons to go 500 miles, the 10 would use 1.5 tons.

Here's where things get interesting, though. The frontal surface area tends to dominate drag, where as the volume is what gives you lift capacity. You can scale volume much faster than frontal area and that means 10x (or 100x) the lift capacity might only be 2x (or 10x) the fuel consumption.

Big-Oh(airship) is potentially interesting.

danbruc2• 11 years ago

Failed German attempt CargoLifter [1] with up to 160 tonne payload that finally gave us a swimming pool in a ridiculous large hangar [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort

AlexMuir2• 11 years ago

:) I used to go to Tropical Islands every weekend when I was sleeping in a van in Berlin. It's an amazing place from an engineering point of view. And the spa is the best I've ever been to.

darklajid• 11 years ago

Celebrated one of our wedding anniversaries (or whatever you'd call that) there.

Crap if you want to swim, but quite amazing to relax and fun to stay over night.

AlexMuir2• 11 years ago

The insurmountable problem so far on these cargo airships is ballast. It's what killed off the Cargolifter Project (as I read while sitting naked under a palm tree in its former hangar. [0])

Their killer use case is moving heavy stuff to inaccessible areas. Wind turbines being the flavour of the moment. They combine the long distance capability of a plane, the hovering of a helicopter and the lift capacity of a crane...

However, once the 160 tonne payload has been dropped, the ship either needs to take on 160 tonnes of ballast or jettison helium (not an option since it's so expensive). The Cargolifter idea was to just pump up water if I remember correctly, but for land-based tasks that meant being met by ten tanker lorries at the drop site, thus negating all the benefits and meaning you might as well stick the cargo straight on those trucks.

I'd love to see it work out, but so far these projects have been nothing but a wipeout for investors. Coincidentally back in 2006 I worked a couple of desks over from people managing the liquidation of Skycat, which was basically the same thing, also built at Cardington. It may even have been the same team.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort

TheLoneWolfling5• 11 years ago

An interesting, though probably semi-insane, alternative.

What about having a tank on-board, that normally is filled with air, that, when you drop off the payload, gets filled with liquid air instead? It'd be power-hungry, but meh. I mean: liquid air has a density of ~0.87g/cm^3 - it's not so far off that of water.

Tank mass would kill you, but as you say, the actual lifting capacity is relatively cheap.

rpenm• 11 years ago

Compress the helium into tanks and use atmosphere as ballast. Ballast can be dropped by directly purging with helium. Alternatively, contain the ballast in bladders that vent as helium pressure rises. Designing flexible bladders that don't leak too badly would be an engineering problem. A terribly inefficient option would be to allow the gasses to mix and just use fractionation to separate the heavy elements when dropping ballast.

JulianMorrison• 11 years ago

It exists. http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-18... (Feb 2013)

noahl• 11 years ago

It seems like it should also be usable for shipping between non-remote places, in situations where you need more speed than a boat can provide but don't want to pay the full premium for air freight.

For instance, I seem to recall that Apple ships their laptops by air from Asia to keep the supply lines short. Shipping by boat might be too slow, but this thing might be able to cross the Pacific quickly enough, and at a lower cost than a conventional airplane. A route like this would have warehouses on either end, so you could easily have ballast waiting for the airship whenever it needed it. (You'd probably just pump water from the Pacific at one end, then put it back in the Pacific at the other end.)

shiggerino• 11 years ago

(You'd probably just pump water from the Pacific at one end, then put it back in the Pacific at the other end.)

You most certainly would not. Because the risk of spreading invasive marine species the MARPOL convention doesn't allow it. This means ships have to gradually replace all their ballast water during a passage. Just don't repeat Cougar Ace's mistake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar_Ace

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Exactly this, and you can't really navigate in cross winds (although the M&M shaped craft was trying to negate that by being a saucer). The steam punk in me would love to see zeppelins again in the sky but I somehow doubt we will.

stickfigure• 11 years ago

Many years ago (in the 80s), my parents took me on a road trip which happened to go through Tillamook, OR (yes, famous for cheese). At the time there were two huge WW2-era blimp hangars there, one of which housed a company building a blimp that had a rather novel solution to this problem. The blimp itself was neutrally buoyant and had four wing-like rotors with propellers at the end; the whole unit spun slowly. Lift and angle/direction were controlled by changing the blade angles like a helicopter. They were out field testing it, which is why we stopped by and chatted for a couple hours (yes, I am the son of engineers).

Picture a cross between a blimp and a Triebflügeljäger.

I heard they went out of business before getting it into production and I can't seem to find any relevant information on Google. Anyone know what it was called? I imagine that it would be much easier to develop the control systems today than it was back in the early 80s.

Since then, one of the two hangars burned down and the other has been converted to an air museum. The structure itself is actually worth a visit on its own - one of the largest wooden structures in the world.

leroy_masochist• 11 years ago

Wow. Bruce Dickinson is nearly unrecognizable in the photo that accompanies this article.

codewithcheese• 11 years ago

Here's the link if you want to 'invest' https://www.crowdcube.com/investment/hybrid-air-vehicles-lim...

digerata• 11 years ago

That's funny. I immediately thought that this guy had a FEVER. And the only prescription was more AIRSHIP.

But apparently there are two Bruce Dickinson's in music: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Dickinson

blakeyrat• 11 years ago

World's largest aircraft? The Hindenburg was 245m long.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Gia...

World's largest aircraft looking for investors to give it liftoff

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