World's Largest Aircraft Completes Its First Flight (cnn.com) 190
The world's largest aircraft has finally completed its first flight after months of preparation and years of searching for funding. The Airlander 10 as it's called spent 20 minutes in the air on Wednesday, landing safely at Cardington Airfield north of London. CNNMoney reports: "Part airship, part helicopter, part plane, the 300-foot long aircraft is about 50 feet longer than the world's biggest passenger planes. The Airlander, made by British company Hybrid Air Vehicles, has four engines and no internal structure. It maintains its shape thanks to the pressure of the 38,000 cubic meters of helium inside its hull, which is made from ultralight carbon fiber. The aircraft was originally designed for U.S. military surveillance. But the project was grounded in 2013 because of defense spending cuts. [The team behind the giant blimp-like aircraft] said the aircraft could carry communications equipment or other cargo, undertake search and rescue operations, or do military and commercial survey work. The Airlander can stay airborne for up to five days at a time if manned, and for more than two weeks if unmanned. It can carry up to 10 tons of cargo at a maximum speed of 91 miles per hour. The aircraft doesn't need a runway to take off, meaning it can operate from land, snow, ice, desert and even open water." You can view the historic flight for yourself here (Warning: headphone users beware of loud sound).
largest aircraft target (Score:2)
Re:largest aircraft target (Score:5, Funny)
"hey, y'all! watch this!"
Meanwhile, North Korean garlic, chili and cabbage head leader, Kimchi Jong-Un, has announced that they have successfully launched a giant rocket pin, which intercepted "a real big ass balloon".
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Why would anyone need to shoot it down? The whole thing is a bomb! [youtube.com]. /s
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Most "Radar Guided" are really semi-active homing, which means they home in on microwave energy radiated from an illuminating radar and reflected back from the target to the missile. The interesting part of this is the Airlander has a carbon-fiber skin, and carbon is a microwave sponge; so the radar cross-section is going to be pretty small, I wouldn't be surprised if commercial versions have Radar reflectors [westmarine.com] installed to make them more visible. In fact the airlander might be a very effective anti-radiation
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carbon is a microwave sponge; so the radar cross-section is going to be pretty small
Relative to its size, sure, that's at least plausible if not outright likely, but that thing is enormous. I'm pretty sure any SARH missile made in the last 30 years would be able to hit it.
Waste of helium (Score:3, Insightful)
Helium is a rare element on Earth, despite being common in space. We need to be conserving our helium supplies. Why are we wasting helium on stuff like this?
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we should switch to Hydrogen, it's easier to get
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The envelope would have FAR less volume then the hydrogen cell. Besides, pure nitrogen is also 3% lighter than air, which also has oxygen, which is heavier then nitrogen by about 15%.
A small quantity of oxygen is absolutely no danger, same as you can throw a match into a full tank of gasoline, or if you throw it into a pool of diesel, it goes out. Can't do that with an almost empty tank because there's enough oxygen to sustain combustion.
Re:Waste of helium (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't work that way. Ignoring the tremendous amount of extra mass you're proposing and the increased cross section, hydrogen does not instantly dilute; by and large it will just rise through the nitrogen to the outside. Furthermore, hydrogen has an incredibly broad flammability range; you only need a couple percent H2 for it to burn.
Permeability does not work that way. Permeability is a complex process involving not just porosity but also affinities and solubilities. As a general rule, hydrogen and helium permeabilities are quite similar.
It's actually not that much of a difference because both are vastly lighter than air (2 vs 4 vs. 29).
It's not that simple. They didn't just switch lifting gases, they also added an exhaust water recovery system (aka added weight and a bit of extra drag and a bit of parasitic energy consumption). Range of an airship is relative to its drag, its energy efficiency and the amount of fuel it can carry.
They wanted to use helium as the lifting gas, and lobbied the US for permission to import it. They actually designed the airship around the premise that they'd be able to convince the US, and had to redesign it when the US refused. Zeppelin, the world's biggest producer of hydrogen airships, still preferred helium. Hydrogen was out of necessity, not desirability.
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Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention with your N2 idea. It's the same problem that hydrogen airship ballonets suffered: hydrogen will permeate through its cells and accumulate in the "N2" space. And again, remember that it only takes a couple percent H2 to burn with air (it's surprisingly tolerant of oxygen depletion, too.... hydrogen just loves to burn, and burn aggressively :)
Making all matters worse is that airships tend to be somewhat like lightning rods. Even a tiny, imperceptible discharge can ig
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You seem to forget that the nitrogen envelope weighs less than the equivalent volume filled with air. 3% less by volume, because nitrogen weighs 15% less than oxygen. There is no weight penalty for the envelope, since nitrogen is a weak lifting gas. Also, all things considered, hydrogen still has an 8% to 12% lift advantage to helium. 8% can be the difference between profit and loss for a business. link [academia.edu]
The economic case for hydrogen is much better. Hydrogen doesn't need to be transported - it can and is ge
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I'm not talking about the mass of the nitrogen. I'm talking about the mass (and cost) of having an entire extra envelope.
So's the economic case for shutting down your city's fire department.
Until a fire happens. Which it invariably will, when you're dealing with a gas that burns in almost any fuel-air mixture, needs only a tiny ignition energy, and is the "eas
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What is this "tremendous amount of extra mass" you are referring to? If we take Hindenburg(not -berg you millennials!) as an example, the solution, and the idea, would be just to replace gas contents of the space between hydrogen cells and the airship outer shell.
This is not increasing mass a lot since the only thing needed is to have a airtight and controlled outer shell where the pressure can be adjusted. Splitting the sections and adding pressure monitoring system would detect the outer shell ruptures im
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See the post above yours. The extra mass is the mass of an entire extra envelope.
In reality, hydrogen diffuses across membranes and pools in adjacent spaces. Aka, you won't have a nitrogen space, but a nitrogen-hydrogen space, adjacent to the outside air. To make matters worse, the hydrogen in the nitrogen space tends to pool at the top. Furthermore, any electrical discharge will burn through both the inner and outer
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Hummm... I was under the impression that the lifting power of H2 was only marginally better than He.
What matters is not the ratio of the mass of H2 with He but their difference with respect to the mass of the surrounding air.
I do not have the right numbers but let's assume that the mass of 1m3 if gas is 1000g for air, 200g for He and 100g for H2.
The lifting power of 1m3 of air is 1000-1000 = 0 (by definition)
The lifting power of 1m3 of He is 1000-200 = 800g
The lifting power of 1m3 of H2 is 1000-100 = 900g
T
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Wikipedia gives 8% more lifting power for Hydrogen vs Helium so probably not worth the risk of using an explosive gas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Since you can't use either on in absolute pure form, it's generally 8% to 12% (i've posted links elsewhere) in practice. Even 8% is a huge difference in performance when you are looking at moving cargo by air. 8% more capacity is the difference between profit and bankruptcy for airlines. That's why they keep packing more people like sardines.
The nitrogen envelope doesn't just contribute to safety - it's also a slight lifting gas (3%), so adding it imposes no weight penalty.
We use explosive gases all the t
Re:Waste of helium (Score:5, Insightful)
So this is a waste, but party balloons ore ok? Because I guarantee a lot more He is wasted on party balloons than will ever be used on these aircraft, by many orders of magnitude.
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The Helium used in party balloons is highly impure and it is not cost effective to refine. One would hope that this aircraft is using the same impure Helium.
Not always. According to this helium wholesaler [askzephyr.com], grade 4.5 (99.995%) gas is often used in the balloon industry. Granted, getting the "5th nine" is a lot more costlier than getting to 4 nines, but I would not use "highly impure" to describe that level of purity. Most industrial uses use 99.997%. Anything higher than that is research/military grade and probably relatively low-volume in comparison to the welding shops, cryogenic cooling systems, and manufacturing users using 99.997% or lower.
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Helium is sold in highly pure form as a side effect of its being transported in liquid form. Since gasses liquefy at different temperatures, preparing He for transport works kind of like fractional distillation. On the user end the remaining impurities are mainly trace atmospheric gasses, which of course are approximately neutrally buoyant.
However it given the titanic volume of He used in these things, it might more economical to fill them or top them off near the natural gas fields we get He from. In that
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So this is a waste, but party balloons ore ok? Because I guarantee a lot more He is wasted on party balloons than will ever be used on these aircraft, by many orders of magnitude.
It depends on how many of such aircraft are made but I estimate the number of orders of magnitude to 2 or 3 (100x to 1000x more). One Airlander 10 has the equivalent of 2.5 million party balloons inside it, though I suppose this helium can get pumped out and recycled at the end of life.
But helium as a lifting gas accounts for only a small part of total usage, and party balloons are only part of it (maybe half, to about 5%).
Possibly one of the biggest waste is in MRI machines. They use up several times more
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The leakage rate through vectran is a couple orders of magnitude less than through PU-coated nylon. Liquid crystal polymers are neat that way :)
Also, since it doesn't need to vent to descend, you don't lose helium that way either.
Better solution than Helium (Score:2)
We need to develop materials that allow us to create airships using vacuum (even lighter than hydrogen).
=)
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Re:Waste of helium (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh, this stuff again....
1) All lifting uses combined (party balloons, blimps, etc) make up a fraction of the 13% "other" category.. The big wasters are industry, where they buy either gaseous (e.g. welding) or liquid (e.g. cryogenics) and just dump it to the outside air. No recovery effort whatsoever. To the people who run cryogenic / industrial equipment: Yes, I know, recovery systems are a cost and it's always iffy whether it pays for itself. But you, "cryogenic people", and you, "we're running out of helium people", fight amongst yourselves and leave lifting purposes - which use little helium - out of it.
2) Of that fraction of a 13% dedicated to lifting purposes, blimps use only a small fraction of it.
3) Modern fabric for blimps such as vectran or aluminized BoPET leak literally several orders of magnitude less than old fabrics like polyurethane-coated nylon.
4) Old style blimps need regular venting to adjust lift. Part of the purpose of this new generation of hybrid blimps is that they don't have to do that. And it's not the only type that can do this; variable-superpressure blimps can as well, as can phase-change blimps (see project ALICE).
In short, you're looking at a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a small fraction of a fraction of 13% of helium usage. No, this is not a problem. Furthermore, concerning helium itself:
1) It's not clear that we're anywhere near "running out of helium". Helium hasn't been studied nearly as much as more economically important resources like oil and gas. We really don't even understand why most deposits that are rich in helium are like that. Entire new categories of helium deposits, such as volcanic helium, are looking increasingly likely to be economical (it had previously been thought uneconomical because it would all be diluted with CO2; we're now finding that this isn't always the case). We're finding out that groundwater plays a role in where helium migrates to. And on and on. As helium prices rise, more work is finally getting put until understanding helium resources and finding new ones. It used to be just way too cheap for that.
2) The absolute worst case for helium is refrigerating it from the atmosphere, as the end stage of what we currently do to separate other noble gases. By volume, neon is about 3,5 times more common than helium, while helium is about 60 times more abundant than xenon; so the volumetric price for helium should be between that of neon and xenon, but closer to neon. Expensive, but still available. Except for one thing...
3) ... we'll never get to that point. Because any gases from the ground will always be significantly more helium rich than the atmosphere, so we'll always use them as our source. Even if today's helium resources do get depleted (not likely anytime soon, see #1), it just means a steady progression to less helium rich gases (including virtually limitless volcanic ones) as the source. It will never approach the price of gases like neon, even in the worst case.
Also, from the summary:
Um, no, it's not. Blimps don't work that way. Loads are distributed at the very least by catenary curtains and cables.
If you want a small scale example, take a garbage bag, blow air into it, and tie it off (blimps only have a couple hundred pascals overpressure, they're not like party ballons). Now hang a weight from it. Notice how horribly it deforms. You need catenary curtains to distribute the weight of your load across the fabric, to maintain your desired (aerodynamic) shape. You also need ballonets, so that the blimp doesn't explode when you change altitude.
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Now that is a convincing argument.... bottom line is to go ahead and use as much helium as is economically viable and don't worry about imposing balloon bans or silly restrictions.
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You sound like you know something, what are you doing on Slashdot?
How does this airship stay on the ground? In the videos I've seen it doesn't look like there are any cables, does it have a way of adjusting lift or do they try to make it more or less neutrally bouyant?
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Um, no, it's not. Blimps don't work that way. Loads are distributed at the very least by catenary curtains and cables.
The outer envelope does that job on smaller ones. Here's some pictures:
http://www.anabatic.aero/ [anabatic.aero]
No cables inside or curtain inside. I worked on a project with one of the blimps back when the company was called minizepp, and we had an 8m long version. The construction had an impermeable bag on the insid and a ripstop nylon outer. Th gondala is velcro'd and then tied with ropes to the envelope
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First off, typo on your specs page that you might want to fix (Lenght -> Length) :)
What's your internal pressure? The higher the internal pressure, the less the deformation without internal reinforcement, and the smaller the envelope, the easier it is to bear a higher pressure. You often see superpressure balloons at small scale, but rarely at the large scale. I'm betting no ballonets either? Superpressure balloons have a degree of inherent altitude maintenance by resisting volume change (you'll note
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First off, typo on your specs page that you might want to fix (Lenght -> Length) :)
Nice try, but no. I was a happy customer of http://minizepp.com/ [minizepp.com] who went out of business or sold to those guys. The minizepp guy (it was one guy) basically adored blimps and made these wonderful ones. I think like many people in his position, business considerations were limited to "the bare minimum I need to continue making blimps", which is sadly not terribly sustainable.
What's your internal pressure?
Pass! I mean I lit
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There's a lot to like about them. With modern fabrics, helium leakage is extremely low - and venting generally isn't needed on a hybrid. Speeds are faster because the reduced buoyancy requirements mean a lower cross section. Landing is easier because of easier buoyancy control and, again, a smaller cross section. It's just in general a nice platform concept.
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The problem with the Army doing R and D is they are constitutionally limited to a 3 year funding cycle. It often takes longer than that to spec out requirements for bids.
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Because if you access helium without reserving it first then you get a segfault.
Re:Waste of helium (Score:4, Funny)
Sure beats those non-portable aircraft!
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I am correct in my understanding that none of those are currently mobile, right?
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Why do we "waste" a lot of our resources?
How much rubber and fuel is burned up on a "indy 500" race just so people can drive around in a big oval for hours? That fuel could have went to better uses.
Humans waste things for much less, this is a portable aircraft with a good carry capacity.
I think you wil find that the amount of fuel "wasted" in an actual Oval race is less than the fuel used by all the supporters who flock to watch said race.
Motorsports, at least at the top level, used a negligible amount of fuel compared to other fuel uses.
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this is a portable aircraft with a good carry capacity.
The new version of the Russian Mi-26 heavy-lift helicopter can, reportedly, lift 25 tonnes, significantly more than the Airlander. Existing models of the Mi-26 can carry 20 tonnes of cargo, land on large ships, don't need lots of prepared ground to operate from etc. There's talk of an evolutionary new version to be developed jointly by Russia and China which would be able to lift 33 tonnes but it's still on the drawing board.
The Airlander folks have
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Airlander's range when fully loaded is 2 1/2 times that of the Mi-26 in ferry configuration. That's more than a little bit of a difference. Airlander can hover in place for long periods (for example, skycrane-style applications); Mi-26 can't. Airlander can land in water, boggy ground, highly uneven surfaces, and other challenging environments; Mi-26 can't. I imagine its maintenance costs are quite a bit lower as well, running just a few small fans (combined with 1/10th the power output of a standard Mi-2
Re:Yes! Solid and lighter than air... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not exactly a cube/square scaling. Because the larger you make it, the larger the tensile loads per square meter, meaning the stronger the envelope needs to be. Without upgrading to a higher tensile envelope, this means increasing thickness.
If you want to view it from a cross-section perspective, tensile strength is measured in pascals - aka newtons per meter squared (cross section). If we're taking a 1-meter slice, it's newtons per ~meter thickness. Pressure is likewise pascals - newtons per meter squared (area). From the same a 2d slice perspective, that's newtons per ~meter (perimeter). The higher the perimter, the higher the number of newtons force. But the number of newtons the envelope can withstand doesn't have perimeter in its divisor, it has thickness in its divisor. So thickness and perimter cross section must increase in accordance.
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No. To sum up, it's cube/cube scaling. Volume goes up by r cubed, area goes up by r squared, thickness goes up proportional to r, envelope mass goes up by area times thickness, aka r cubed. So r cubed to r cubed.
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That is, of course, if you don't simply go to stronger fabrics instead. Which is usually the goal rather than increasing fabric thickness. Look to vectran (like this airship is using) - not just incredible strength, but also amazingly low gas permeability, comparable to something like EVOH without the water sensitivity. Also extremely low creep. It is however like a lot of plastics UV sensitive, so it has to be protected. Another option is high tensile fiber-reinforced plastics with a biaxially oriente
Manned versus unmanned. (Score:3)
If it can carry tons of cargo, why the huge difference in time for manned (5 days) and unmanned (2 weeks)? ... Is it perhaps the size of the portapotty needed for the bricks people on that thing will lay during the voyage?
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Re: Manned versus unmanned. (Score:2)
But space can't take tons of cargo, so I don't see which way the math turns into 3x.
If it was filled with passengers, then it would add up, but just crew?
Re:Manned versus unmanned. (Score:5, Informative)
This is 300 foot long. The Graf Zeppelin of 1928 was 776 feet long with a useful lift of 60 tonnes.
The Hindenberg was even bigger.
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They knew people were going to smoke, so they gave them a designated area where it was safe to do so.
Much smarter than posting signs all over the place saying "ACHTUNG RAUCHEN IST VERBOTEN" all over the craft and then going up in flames five minutes after departure.
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Same as manned spaceflight - the glory days have gone. This is 300 foot long. The Graf Zeppelin of 1928 was 776 feet long with a useful lift of 60 tonnes. The Hindenberg was even bigger.
Material science and strength calculation complexity was a lot less advanced in the 1920s. You could build a better airship today if you wanted to, but it probably wouldn't make sense. Cargo airplanes are likely more cost efficient. Fuel-wise, the airship might be favorable, but the financial impact of an expensive asset taking 3 days to travel 6,000 miles vs 12 hours for a plane is a large consideration. The 747-ERF freighter can carry 248,600 lb (112,760 kg), nearly double the Graf Zepplin. And it ca
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Right now, people are willing to wait weeks for a cargo ship to cross the ocean; those ships hold thousands of containers. But the expensive assets are unavailable during the journey. If you need them faster, your only choice is to load them on a plane, and you can have them in a day. But what about the middle ground? Is there no market for cargo that needs to arrive in three days instead of three weeks, at one tenth the price of air freight? I'm thinking that half of Amazon purchases could be shipped
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Previous articles I've read on airships have typically focused on their ability to operate without an airport, or even a simple airstrip. They can pickup and transport large, heavy equipment directly to where it's needed regardless of most terrain. It seems like a nice capability, but I don't know what the market for that really is.
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I spoke once to a engineer that built motors for ships. His problem was that the motors were just too big to be transported from where he was (Bavaria) to where the ships were being built (Hamburg). They just didn't fit in the roads between these two places. So he had to build only the "small" motors (four meters high, ten meters long), while the really big stuff was built in China and shipped by ship (or just used for ships built also in China).
This Zeppelin would be the perfect solution for him. The carry
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Not as much as you would think.
Those same age-hardened aluminium alloys are in use in aircraft today and solid mechanics calculations haven't really changed since then, we can just do it a lot of calculations a lot quicker with computers. Techniques like finite element analysis are about applying those same old calculations to much simpler geometries to do a vast number of simple operations instead of a few difficult o
Re:Manned versus unmanned. (Score:5, Interesting)
Same as manned spaceflight - the glory days have gone.
This is 300 foot long. The Graf Zeppelin of 1928 was 776 feet long with a useful lift of 60 tonnes.
The Hindenberg was even bigger.
As soon as I saw the picture of it, that's exactly what went through my mind as well. They claim in the write-up that they're some kind of revolutionary fusion of different technologies...it's just a modern blimp with turbofans for thrust and some fins for directional/pitch control. Nothing new to see here, and not even very big when compared to craft of similar nature.
Even more importantly, it's a solution in search of a problem. They originally built it for the military...which means "we thought they'd buy it from us, but they just laughed so we need someone else to give us money now." Note the prominent "Invest in Us" button at lower right.
Also, 10 tons of cargo is NOT a lot of capacity for something of this size. That's 20,000 pounds...while a C-17 can carry 169,000 pounds. A lot of that cargo capacity will be consumed by holding crew and the things needed to support them, as well.
So...in short, what you have is an airship that cannot be parked outside (you would not believe what wind will do to something this big but this light), that cannot go very fast, that cannot carry very much, that probably (given the pervasive use of carbon composites and Vectran in its construction) costs a shit-ton of money to build and repair, and that is made by a company that probably won't be in business much longer. Waaaaaaa hoo.
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It is very different, IMHO.
The Zeppelins were rigid, true lighter than air craft with bladders used to control buoyancy and maneuvering engines.
This is a heavier than air craft with no bladders, only using aerodynamic lift like an airplane. And it doesn't have a rigid envelope.
Basically "flies like a plane" vs "flies like a blimp" is the big difference and what makes this a hybrid airship. It should also make this thing MUCH easier to handle.
Sam
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Obviously, with unmanned, you don't need to worry about pilot unions and strikes.
It's tiny compared to airships of the past (Score:5, Informative)
Airships of the past were much bigger. The Hindenberg was 803 feet long (245 meters), more than twice the length of this midget.
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More recently, the hangars have been used for various film sets including Batman and Star Wars.
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My Dad grew up in New Jersey. He said when the Hindenberg flew by, the teacher let them look out the window. Even though it was miles away they could clearly see it I guess. The Washington Monument is a mere 555 feet tall. The Empire State Building is 1250, not including the spire. So try to imagine more than the WM, and more than half the ES floating by low on the horizon, perhaps with the swastika visible. The implications weren't fully understood yet--a few years later my Dad and all his brothers w
International Units please (Score:3, Insightful)
when will US posters finally stop using imperial manner and units when posting, translating foreign information into their own old-fashionned sick measurment units ? is it a flying ship or a myriapod ? (300 feets ... !! )
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Never, and people who complain about it are hypocrites. It's not incumbent on others to deal with your inconveniences.
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There is something nicely retro in knowing that an acre was a measure of how much land an ox and a farmer could plow in one day; that the plowed in a straight line for 1/8 of a mile (a furlong). Even knowing that a mile was the measure of a 1000 paces (a pace is two steps- left, right).
You want to be objective? Then I suppose you want us to use Kelvin for temperature? Ah, isn't this a nice 300 degree day?
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when will US posters finally stop using imperial manner and units
Right after they start using coins bigger than a quarter-dollar, implement universal health-care, give their streets names, stop believing in God, replace grid-iron with soccer, and drive on left.
Aerospace is still entrenched in imperial units (Score:2)
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when will US posters finally stop using imperial
We'd have to start using them first.
A) America uses American customary units, which were derived from colonial era English units. British Imperial units share a common heritage, in that they were derived from those same English units as well, but the Imperial system was created in 1824, after America's independence, so the two countries diverged, resulting in the two systems having a number of differences [wikipedia.org].
B) Brits still use miles in everyday practice, so feet are consistent with the system already in common
No internal structure? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is that a good idea? Sure, it saves weight, but if it ever suffers partial deflation in the air there will be a total loss of control preventing them even attempting a crash landing as the aerofoils and props start pointing in random directions.
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That's a stunning revelation!
You'd better contact the Goodyear company ASAP. It looks like they've been putting people in incredible peril for over 90 years now with their fleet of deflatable blimps. You've got to stop them!
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You moron. Its not a blimp - its part airship, part aircraft. Try engaging your brain before you post next time.
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So what? If the blimp deflates, it also becomes uncontrollable sinks.
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Given the effects of scale, a leak should be a ton less dramatic than most people would imagine. Even on a car or bicycle a leak can be very slow, it'd be more like that than what happens humorously in cartoons.
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preventing them even attempting a crash landing
Don't worry, no one has ever failed to make an attempted crash landing.
Butt (Score:2)
It's also the largest flying butt in the air. That's what my kids would say, especially the 6 year old boy.
... like a floating cruise ship ... (Score:2)
Obligatory Snow Crash Quote... (Score:2)
"When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into
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There is lots of Helium. It is a by product of oil and gas extraction and a huge amount was discovered recently in Africa.
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Who said it was a helicopter?
The summary right there at the top of the the page said it.
Part airship, part helicopter, part plane, the 300-foot long aircraft is about 50 feet longer than the world's biggest passenger planes.
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Fair point, Is suspect someone got confused by the statement:
"The largest aircraft currently flying uses innovative technology to combine the best characteristics of fixed wing aircraft and helicopters with lighter-than-air technology to create a new breed of hyper-efficient aircraft."
and thought that "best characteristics of ... helicopters" meant it's part helicopter, rather than it has some of the abilities of one (i.e. sustained hovering over a location). That's what you get when people don't understand
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Part airship, part helicopter, part plane
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But in the pictures and video we can see the front rotors can swivel and point up or half way up. They might be used to move up and down in some fashion.
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But the lift is not generated by the rotor. That is a big difference.
"Minor setback"? (Score:3)
Hydrogen is cheaper and more abundant, but because of one minor setback 80 years ago the idea has been senselessly abandoned.
You have a very curious definition of "one minor setback".
Imagine the same principle was applied to other aircraft and we abandoned the whole idea as soon as one thing went wrong
The problems with other aircraft had solutions. The problem of using highly flammable hydrogen gas is an irreducible hazard. Helium can work as a substitute but our supply is limited on Earth [theweek.com] and getting more will be expensive.
Engineering and design methods have improved considerably in 80 years, and we could now likely make a very safe hydrogen airship, but people have an unfounded fear of the idea.
Really? We've solved the problem of hydrogen gas being highly flammable? When did that happen?
Economic availability (Score:2)
The supply of hydrogen is limited on Earth also but since it's the most abundant element in the universe it isn't a big deal
The supply of hydrogen on earth is effectively unlimited. We have literally oceans of it plus vast amounts of hydrocarbons as well. Compared to the amount of helium available economically to us we have all the hydrogen we are ever likely to need.
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe... So meh.
Doesn't matter how abundant it is if you can't get it economically.
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Why airships fell out of favor (Score:2)
If you're referring to the Hindenburg...
The Hindenburg was merely the most spectacular airship disaster. It was FAR from the only one [wikipedia.org].
So, the answer here is to try hydrogen again as a lift gas, not to abandon it due to a minor accident caused by paint.
You seem rather fixated on a single accident. Airships fell out of favor because they routinely blew up, crashed, can't handle bad weather, burned, etc in addition to being economically noncompetitive and comparatively slow. I disagree that the Hindenburg was a "minor accident". Nothing that kills 35 people is a minor accident. If that was the only accident ever then perhaps you would have a point but it wasn'
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A quick check gives a list of disasters, the last ones before Hindenburg I copy-pasted. They feel pretty horrible. Dumb shit happens.
http://www.airships.net/hydrog... [airships.net]
Roma (February 21, 1922)
The United States Army airship Roma (built by Umberto Nobile) ignited when it hit high-tension electrical wires near Langley Field at Hampton Roads, Virginia, killing 34 of the ship’s 45 crew members. After the Roma disaster the United States government decided never again to inflate an airship with hydrogen.
Dixmu
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Yes, most everybody. The Brits are calling it the Big Bum.
BOW-CHIKA-WOW-WOW (Score:2)
They should totally do a remake of this advertisement. [wikimedia.org]
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So can someone explain what the point is?
It targets two major use cases, neither of which can be serviced by a conventional cargo jet or a road vehicle:
1) Ferrying heavy cargo (and possibly people) to or from a land-locked location that lacks a suitable runway or road/rail connection. This is of special interest to the military, but also has civilian applications.
For the military, truck transport through enemy territory is extremely dangerous for obvious reasons - possibly even more dangerous than using an airship, depending on what technology th
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For loitering missions, that's true. However, for cargo - and especially sky crane - missions, I'm pretty sure that a human crew will be required for many years to come. Safely and quickly handling arbitrary cargo while squeezing as much capacity as possible out of the vehicle is a complex task (both mentally and physically) that can't really be automated yet.
Still, at least for the military, the future 50+ ton capacity models should require far fewer crew members per cargo ton-kilometer than ground convoys
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I think that Lighter Than Air vehicles have disadvantages that are very well known.
The Airlander 10 is actually somewhat heavier than air, and relies upon aerodynamic lift to stay aloft. Does this reduction in surface area and buoyancy, combined with modern technology, improve the concept enough to make it practical? I don't know, but it's already been built so there's no need to guess: just wait and see.
The people promoting these are usually True Believers who think those disadvantages don't matter. They are always wrong.
For the record, I am not a "True Believer", nor am I really trying to promote the airships. But, I do object to the idea that airships are strictly inferior to jets and trucks - they have
Re:Solar Powered Flying Butt? (Score:4, Informative)
Would it be at all feasible to cover the top of this thing with thin and semi-flexible solar panels? If Solar Impulse can make it around the planet using just the solar energy hitting its thin little lifting surfaces then surely the surface area of this magnificent flying backside should be able to gather enough energy to shove it across the sky, right?
Going off the Airlander 10 specs [hybridairvehicles.com]:
The vehicle is powered by "4 x 325 hp" diesel engines, for a combined peak power of about 960 kW. Most vehicles do not cruise at peak power continuously, so I will estimate the average power requirement at half of that: 480 kW. (This ratio would be approximately correct for a large subsonic jet; if someone knows what it should be for a diesel-powered lifting-body airship instead, please leave a comment.)
The useful surface area of the Airlander 10 is approximately [92 m long] * [43.5 m wide] = [4000 m^2]. (The exact number depends upon the latitude, the time of day, and the craft's heading, but it turns out that its shape is such that the answer doesn't change much, except near the poles.) Peak solar irradiance (direct sunlight at high noon) at ground level is about 1 kW / m^2, and current thin film solar panels are under 15% efficient. Solar power conversion circuitry is around 90% efficient, and an appropriate electric motor with its controller is about 88% efficient. Therefore, a maximum of [4000 m^2] * [1kW / m^2] * [15%] * [90%] * [88%] = [475 kW] of shaft power could be generated by solar-electric means.
So, a solar-powered Airlander 10 could work - but not very well. Under ideal daylight conditions, it could fly about as well as the hydrocarbon-powered version. However, airships are sufficiently slow and long-range that they are expected to routinely fly through the night. Thus, the average power available must be at least cut in half, to 238 kW. Cloud shadowing (airships can fly over some clouds, but far from all) and dust will further reduce that number.
Additionally, a solar-powered airship needs to carry heavy batteries in order to avoid catastrophic power loss when passing through clouds. One hour's worth of lithium-ion power would mass [475 kW*h] / [86% charge/discharge efficiency] / [200 W*h / kg] / [80% - 20% depth of discharge range limit] = [4600 kg]. As the total mass of the Airlander 10 is only 20 metric tons, it cannot carry much more battery power than that without cutting into the payload.
At cruise, nearly all of the Airlander 10's power is devoted to fighting drag. Since subsonic drag scales with the square of airspeed, a solar-powered version could quadruple its battery-powered run time by halving its speed. (It can't really go any slower than that though, as it needs to be able to overcome typical headwinds to be useful.) Four hours of battery time is still woefully inadequate for an overnight flight though, so a solar-powered version would be limited to daytime flights only, and consequently to overland flights only.
TLDR: A solar-powered version of this airship is possible, but it would be considerably slower and incapable of crossing oceans. Supplemental charging on the ground wouldn't help much at all.
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It's an airship. It doesn't have to maintain power overnight. They can just turn the engines off and bob around for awhile.
Not this one: it's not actually lighter than air. Even at sea level, its displacement is only enough to lift about 94% of its weight. At cruising altitude, 40% of the lift must come from aerodynamic effects.
If all you're trying to do is maintain altitude, it is certainly possible to extend the battery life by flying much slower and lower - but the lower you fly, the more vulnerable the airship is to weather-induced accidents. Maybe you could make it through the night, if the weather was good, but there woul