Zeppelins Over California

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.

Bang?

Rides will cost from $250 to $500 per person. Esther Dyson is one of the investors.

Or, for a hydrogen filled Zeppelin, they are offering the discounted, insurance free rate of $50 per person, one way.

Re:Bang?

Or, for a hydrogen filled Zeppelin, they are offering the discounted, insurance free rate of $50 per person, one way.

Any person having a bad outcome in the said NT Zeppelin will be met with the BSOD (Blue Sky of Death).

Re:Bang?

"Passengers will PLEASE observe the no smoking sign"

Re:Bang?

As much as I get the joke, hydrogen as a lifting gas for airships is something whose danger is by far and away overblown. Germany used airships extensively using hydrogen... and it was the fact that they used what was effectively rocket fuel for the ship hull that did in airships like the Hindenburg, not the hydrogen gas.

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.

1985 Sydney

Failed Australian Entrepreneur Alan Bond had blimps used for joy rides in the 80s in Sydney. They were pretty noisy and slow. I think they got taken to the US and had goodyear painted on the side and hung out around sporting events as they were worth more as event billboards than joyride vessels. I wonder how this is different, IF it is different...

Re:1985 Sydney

They're not blimps, so the engines are not attached to the person-carrying cabin, but to the hull. So they're not noisy for the passengers.

Re:1985 Sydney

I have memories of a Goodyear airship flying over my school back in the early 70s.

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.

Re:1985 Sydney

Wrong. Goodyear has built it's own airship since before you were a gleam in daddy's eye. They developed their own designs in house and would have sneered at any outside tech. A quick trip to google can provide the Goodyear legacy far better than I can, if you're still interested. The ships you're talking about in Australia, at least from all photos I've seen of commercial ships there, were Airship Industries Skyship 500's and 600's.

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.

aerial photography

I would love to go on one of those flights with some nice photography equipment. You really couldn't ask for a better platform for aerial photography: slow, stable, and not too high. The fact that the city and the surrounding area are beautiful doesn't hurt either!
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.

Purchased, not build.

The Zeppelin NT is purchased from "ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH" and the 4th they are building, see this link [lifepr.de] (german)

Good, if your name is Zorin...

and want to flood the silicon valley to push the prices of computer chips.

And In other News...

... it has been reported that a farmer has modified his cessna cropduster with machine guns. Something about "German Invasion"...

oh thats smart

so instead of the gangsters in oakland shooting their guns in the air for fun, they'll have a target. and fourth of july will come early if one of em hits it!

Re:oh thats smart

The Goodyear Blimps pick up bullet holes once in a while. No, they don't fly around in circles going PPPHHHFFFFFFFFTTT!!! because the gas pressure is quite low; the support crews notice it when the rate at which they're replenishing helium goes up slightly.

rj

What about the impending helium shortage?

Remember this?:
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?

Helium is a HUGE expense when you're filling the ship from the start, but in normal operation, even the big boys only use a few bottles a week and that's from accidental valvings and impurities that leak in from the ballonets.

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.

The Hindenburg crash set airships back 50yrs...

...Who knows if there's any significant air transport market for airships to fill in this day-and-age, but I thinks it's interesting to speculate whether fixed-wing aircraft would be the dominant air transport technology that it is today had the Hindenburg not gone down. OTOH maybe airships would have been killed of by fixed-wings regardless.

==C:\WINDOWS\system32\lusrmgr.exe==

Re:The Hindenburg crash set airships back 50yrs...

Depends what happens to fuel costs.

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.

Re:More Annoying Money Wasters for Rich People

Where's the waste?
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.

Re:More Annoying Money Wasters for Rich People

They take rich people's money, which would otherwise be locked down in someone's personal possession, i.e. not in the economy.

Not really, the savings you and your fellow rich men have in the bank are being put to good use, e.g the money is on loan at interest to others, or reinvested. Or perhaps the money appears to be locked down in equity, in which case it has already left the owner's hands in exchange for that equity. If you'd keep your savings in an old sock, then it would truly be locked down.

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).

Re:More Annoying Money Wasters for Rich People

The money goes from rich person R1 to rich person R2. Some of it goes to the state as taxes. R2 then has to spend some money on wages for workers W1 to Wn who operate and maintain the zeppelin (again, some of that money goes to the state via taxes at various points). He also has to spend money on material and parts required to maintain the zeppelin, which goes to suppliers S1 to Sn. Again, taxes apply and if the zeppelin business runs well enough the material suppliers might be able to expand their businesses, thus creating more jobs.

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.

Re:

250 USD is a lot of money? I have a few British pennies in my pocket that should about cover that fair.

Re:

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 mor

Re:There was a Hardy Boys about this

if the Zeppelin had been running on Helium like it should have it would almost certainly have survived

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.

Re:There was a Hardy Boys about this

There were 3 major air crashes last year !

Three major air crashes is probably about a thousand deaths.

I don't know what your definition of "major" air crash is, but there were 24 accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft worldwide in 2007. Three of these resulting in the loss of 100 or more lives, and one more nearly so. The total loss in the three accidents was 403 out of 403 on board(1).

Taking all 24 accidents and incidents, 697 of 1955 aboard were killed - no more than 36% of those aboard on average.

If we can cure the pedestrian-death problem - cars would be close to equaling planes right now.

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]