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Zeppelins Over California
kdawson
on Sun May 11, 2008 03:45 AM
from the oh-the-humanity dept.
from the oh-the-humanity dept.
It seems that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow may not have been completely off the mark. According to Venture Beat, Airship Ventures has raised capital sufficient to build their first Zeppelin NT (Microsoft Windows reference purely coincidental). The airship will offer rides for up to 12 passengers out of the old Navy Blimp hangars at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley. Airship Ventures notes that airships are already flying safely in Japan and Germany, so now the US will have its chance. Rides will cost from $250 to $500 per person. Esther Dyson is one of the investors.
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Bang? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bang? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Bang? (Score:4, Funny)
"Passengers will PLEASE observe the no smoking sign"
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Re:Bang? (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming that these airships are going to use some petrochemical substance like gasoline or JP-5 (military-grade jet fuel) to power its engines, I would be by far and away more concerned about some problem with the fuel system blowing up than the hydrogen.
As for why a 1930's technology isn't being used in the 21st century more extensively, there are a bunch of factors in that equation... including some irrational fear of hydrogen that makes it the target of lame jokes like this one.
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1985 Sydney (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:1985 Sydney (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:1985 Sydney (Score:4, Interesting)
Airship Industries operated from the old Cardington Airship hangers in the 80s. They did trips over London
http://www.aht.ndirect.co.uk/airships/ss500/index.html [ndirect.co.uk]
One morning I drove past to see one spread over the airfield after they could not get it in before a storm.
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Goodyear has never made a serious business of selling blimp rides, although lease arrangements in certain venues sometimes force them to offe
Re:1985 Sydney (Score:4, Informative)
I worked as a nightsign technician on Airship Shamu for a few years, as well as on Bud One, Gulf Oil's WDL ship, and the Met Life blimp before they made the switch to the lightships. The only serious manufacturers in the industry during the 80's were Goodyear, Aiship Industries (A British firm) and WDL, a german company that made a rugged ship that was more like a flying VW in it's simplicity. It wasn't until the 90's that the Lightships came into popularity because of their smaller size (cheaper operating costs).
Advertising has always been what paid the bills for commercial blimps, passenger service is break even at best. Smaller projects, like the 80' ship I helped build for the Florida Institute of Oceanography were always used as research platforms or surveillance, and typically could not carry passengers due to insufficient lift and FAA Experimental ratings.
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aerial photography (Score:5, Interesting)
IF they actually build it (we've been hearing about the return of dirigibles to the US for years now) I would go for a ride next time I'm around San Fran.
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I rode "Bud One" a 15+ years ago. It is slow and we stayed low but I would not describe it as stable. It was summer time in Central Florida and while there was no real wind, the air ship pitched constantly due to up currents from sun heated roads and down currents over ponds and lakes.
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Purchased, not build. (Score:4, Informative)
Good, if your name is Zorin... (Score:3, Funny)
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And In other News... (Score:5, Funny)
oh thats smart (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:oh thats smart (Score:5, Informative)
rj
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What about the impending helium shortage? (Score:5, Informative)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/14/0219246 [slashdot.org]
I hope they included the increasing price and decreasing availability of helium in their business plan. No wonder it's $250+ per flight.
Re:What about the impending helium shortage? (Score:5, Informative)
On Shamu, we'd shoot gas any time the purity dropped below a certain level, and when in the hanger (the big one at Weeksville, NC tha burned down a few years back), we'd hook up to a purifier truck... a huge contraption that used extremely high pressure to filter the gas.
The largest single ongoing expense for our Airship Shamu operation was personnel. A big ship needs two dozen men, ranging from pilots and mechanics to ground crew. Those need to be housed and transported for traveling operations such as most of those in the aerial advertising biz. Fuel was up there, too, but in pure gallons per hour, it's very hard to beat an airship for fuel economy.
The smaller ships of today have evolved and survived largely because they need less crew and are cheaper to operate on an ongoing basis. Not so much over the cost of helium.
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The Hindenburg crash set airships back 50yrs... (Score:4, Interesting)
==C:\WINDOWS\system32\lusrmgr.exe==
Re:The Hindenburg crash set airships back 50yrs... (Score:5, Interesting)
In theory, an airship ability to move 1,000lbs of cargo is the same as carrying 10,000lbs of cargo due to fact its altitude is simply stabilized in the air by how much ballast and helium. Yes there is still the cost of the fueled into the momentum of the airship which is still offset by mass, headwinds, and of course aerodynamics.
Though the main advantage the airship has over the fixed wing is that the fixed wing has to use its engines to keep itself aloft where the airship could turn its engines off at any point and not risk falling out of the sky.
So it really depends on how much fuel costs for air travel is going to get in the near future. If something like peak oil got really bad, one solution for international shipping could to simply take an airship into the jet streams, turn off the engines, and say just drift until you are close to your destination and then turn the engines back on to get to your exact destination.
Of course that would make shipping things from Japan to California quite efficient, but shipping to California to Japan would take a bit longer using this method.
If we do find cheap alternative fuels for fixed winged aircraft I'm sure we'll stick with that, but otherwise airships might be more economically viable.
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More to the point, the economics of operating airships are such that it is far more expensive in terms of personnel costs, hanger sizes, and economies of scale compared to fixed wing aircraft that airships died out a slow
The Hindenburg crash set airships back? Nope. (Score:3, Informative)
Airships have a HUGE sail (amount of surface the wind can push against) compared to their weight, and that puts them at the mercy of any sort of significant convective weather. Couple that with the pathetic state of weather forecasting during that period, and you have disasters like those that occurred to the U.S.S. Macon and the U.S.S. Akron. So, launching one of these ships in anything but ridiculo
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I for one welcome our new recreating/floating overlords
Re:More Annoying Money Wasters for Rich People (Score:4, Insightful)
They take rich people's money, which would otherwise be locked down in someone's personal possession, i.e. not in the economy. That's what I'd call wasted.
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Re:More Annoying Money Wasters for Rich People (Score:5, Insightful)
But I agree, I don't object to money sinks for rich folks. People will be putting food on the table by providing this money waster, perhaps science or engineering will be advanced a little bit, and most importantly it's the rich people's own damn money. I prefer rich people spending cash on useless frippery, to taxing those people to death and spending the taxes on, say, putting little rainbow-colored stickers on every lamppost along a (shortish) stretch of highway to "give it an identity", for a cost of $200.000 (I kid you not).
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Re:More Annoying Money Wasters for Rich People (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know how much taxes this generates as opposed to taxes on money that lies around on the bank, but it does also generate jobs, which helps society because (at least in theory) it reduces welfare spending, among other things.
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why exactly is this limited to people with a house in Malibu? people routinely spend several hundred dollars on a special activity while on leave/holidays.
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Zeppelins are great. We should really be using them for more than simple tourism. Their lifting capacity is much greater than an aeroplane and their cost much lower. Slower of course, but faster than a ship, I think. Next time I come to the US, I'd be more than happy to take two or three days on the journey in the comfortable, ship-like capacity of a zeppelin.
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Problems that need to be considered is having to fly in less than ideal weather, engines powerful enough to push through a strong headwind, and being able to handle the airship both at departure and at arrival. Airships simply can't even compete against large airplanes in terms of these basic handling req
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1) No technology is "proven" out of the box.
2) All technology that is being given attention in any form improves over time.
3) Payroll initially comes from the investors then from customers just like any other business.
4) The money spent on hiring all those people GOES BACK INTO THE ECONOMY.
So what you end up with is what is basically a young technology that will improve over time and stimulates the economy.
You gotta start somewhere my friend...
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That was the "state of the art" at the time for heavier than air vehicle. And a pretty good design all things considered (I've even flown in one on a regular commercial passenger flight).
The point I was trying to make, however, was that bringing this into the 21st century that perhaps some refinements could be made to the handling system that wouldn't necessarily require so many people... especially if you could build some automated systems that would adjust ba
Wasters for Rich People: low hanging fruit (Score:3, Interesting)
Whether parent post a troll be, matters not. Reply I shall</yodavoice>, as these points have yet to be addressed:
Dirigibles made with today's technology are an interesting concept, and could become an important part of the infrastructure in a few short years.
Dirigibles could provide manned, stratospheric bases that could replace cell phone towers and fiber optic cables (think point to point laser links operating above cloud cover over hundreds of miles). Such bases would be excellent command/contr
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It didn't in the last 11 years, it seems not everything bearing the name "NT" is doomed from the start. Besides, Windows NT wasn't bad either. The first flight of NT 07 was in September of '97 and there was no serious accident yet.
Re:There was a Hardy Boys about this (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the Hindenburg fire could well have had more to do with the surface coating than the hydrogen gas, although that certainly didn't help. At any rate most of the passengers and crew of the Hindenburg survived, and those who died were the ones who jumped out of the airship; people who stayed aboard survived. Compare that with the survival rate of any famous disaster on a jet plane and tell me airships are dangerous. I mean, these things were SUPPOSED to fly straight at skyscrapers. There's a mast at the top of the Empire State Building which was for mooring airships; if one had missed and crashed into the side, it would have gone bump, quite gently.
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Actually, the survival rate for commercial aviation crashes is around 24% for this decade. Last year alone, for example, in the April 15th crash in the Congo almost all of the passengers survived; as did all of the passengers on the BA 777 that had an unplanned early impact with the ground at Heathrow.
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Three whole major air crashes involving commercial passenger travel? That is it? Seriously? In other words, it is "news" when a major crash occurs precisely because it is such a rare occurrence. Automotive crashes might make local press coverage if some famous celebrity or politician died, or perhaps on the morning traffic report when it shuts down a major arterial road...
Re:There was a Hardy Boys about this (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking all 24 accidents and incidents, 697 of 1955 aboard were killed - no more than 36% of those aboard on average.That's just crazy. Statistically, if you drove 100 million miles during the period 1989-2004, you would have an 83% chance of dying. For the same period, if you flew 100 million miles, you would have a 2 percent chance of dying. Furthermore, from 1989 to 2004, the death expectancy for driving dropped about one third, but that for flying dropped to only about 2%. Flying is much safer now, and is getting even safer at a much faster rate than driving is getting safer.(2)
References:
(1) List of commercial aviation accidents and incidents by year [wikipedia.org]
(2) Comparative death rate by year for driving vs flying [airlines.org]
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That's just crazy. Statistically, if you drove 100 million miles during the period 1989-2004, you would have an 83% chance of dying. For the same period, if you flew 100 million miles, you would have a 2 percent chance of dying. Furthermore, from 1989 to 2004, the death expectancy for driving dropped about one third, but that for flying dropped to only about 2%.
How about, instead of comparing the two in distance traveled, we compare them in time. A plane might take 8 hours to go from Vancouver to Toronto. How long do you think it takes a car to travel that same distance. To travel 100 million miles in a car... I don't think it's even possible to do that within someone's lifetime, so you could theoretically say it has a 100% fatality rate. So here's a question: Which is safer, flying for 5000 hours, or driving for 5000 hours? I personally think flying is safer s
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LA to New York is actually a longer flight than New York to London. America's a big place.
I actually think the Hindenburg accident would have been survivable for the airship industry.
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An unmanned automated airship would be the best candidate for such a thing. As long as it doesn't crash on anyone, if it were to burn up the only thing lost would be it and the cargo.
I'm curious of you could get enough solar cells light enough to wrap it in it so that it could powe