Re: it will probably be an expensive @ Jess
There are a few Scots who think they can leave Europe & the UK without a Tug Boat.
Good news for airship fanciers this week, as it appears that the world's first rigid airship since the 1930s will soon take to the skies for flight trials: and better still, this ship has a new piece of technology which could actually change the existing landscape and permit the leviathans of the skies to return. Rigid ships …
@AC 14:25
Sorry, off topic but WTF? Two down votes for what? Has the geography knowledge of elreg commentards suddenly dropped?
Actually, they're probably down voting because they wish England wasn't so physically close to France. Or they're angry at Putin for the small island comment...
Traveling time would go up by a factor of 5, I guess. But space would not be an issue. You'd be able to walk around or sleep. England to Europe would be fine.
Not sure it would be so onerous, London to New York would be around 35 hours if they could get it going at around 100mph (The Zeppelin's could do 80 I think).
I'd happily take a sleeper in preference to cattle class on a plane.
Once we have even just a few of these forging an established place in aeronautics Phase 2 can be implemented: Die Überluftschiffe or megadirigibles.
Huge airships that are small cruising cities and do not normally attempt to land. Passenger boarding and resupply by small aircraft or airships that come up to meet it. I can see it now. Time for some Kickstarter trawling.
Because there has been little research into the technology,
the great thing is that advances in other areas really make this a possibility now..
Lighter/Stronger composite materials,
Lighter more efficient & powerful motors (Brushless digital things) enabling the compression.
the idea itself is not new, its just the implementation is now possible!
The Hindenburg disaster killed off the Airship as a means of transport (even though the only people that died were killed by the fuel or jumping before it touched the ground... No one died as a result of the Hydrogen fire itself... And with modern flame retardant materials I am sure a Hydrogen airship could be built segmented enough that even a gas bag exploding would not destroy the whole ship)
The Hindenburg and the very public US Navy airship failures all combined to kill off the technology. Look up pictures of the Akron (I think it was anyway) ground crew member dangling from the mooring lines (he falls right after the image was captured. He dies.) as well as the twisted wreckage with human limbs poking out. Those pictures got a lot of press and scared everyone off.
I am sure a Hydrogen airship could be built segmented enough that even a gas bag exploding would not destroy the whole ship)
ISTR that they used that logic with the TItanic, too. Interestingly, they reckon that if the captain had just ploughed straight into the iceberg the ship wouldn't have sunk. As it happened, the evasive action gouged all along the side, breaching many bulkheads in series. I can imagine that an airship pilot would probably take the same sort of evasive action in similar circumstances.
Now if they had something like an aerogel with the ability to absorb a lot of hydrogen in the case of a leak ... though maybe not (since the resulting fuel/air mix might actually make any explosion more potent than pure Hydrogen).
" I can imagine that an airship pilot would probably take the same sort of evasive action in similar circumstances."
Not sure there are *that* many icebergs floating around at a few thousand feet... I've been in and out of a cloud or two, but never met a flying iceberg!
I've been in and out of a cloud or two, but never met a flying iceberg!
And I hope you do not! To paraphrase Pratchett, you have to be careful when flying through clouds as they might have rocks* in them.
* Rocks of this nature are more typically referred to as "mountains."
The Hindenburg burned anyway. It didn't explode. Filling a soft envelope (or envelopes) with pressurized flammable gas in a daily use machine is dumb. The Nazis didn't even want to use hydrogen, they wanted helium but we wouldn't share.
Besides the lift advantage at all but very high altitudes is fairly minimal with Hydrogen vs Helium. At airship scale, at intended altitudes and combined with safety concerns all sum up to mean Hydrogen is an unnecessary risk with little real advantage; other than availability and this technology appears to mitigate the availability/cost concerns as well.
I didn't know that everyone didn't know the Hindenburg was a Nazi aircraft. Two guys at work didn't believe me and I had to find pictures. Isn't it odd how things get swept under the cultural rug when they turn out really embarrassing? It isn't actively hidden, just nobody talks about it, then everyone forgets.
The British are Ok to have a beer with or maybe go to a match with, but you really can't trust them. Besides, the helium hoarding era was completely the doing of the then nascent Party Balloon Insustry. The unimaginable scale of horror and slaughter of WWII was the only thing that stopped them. Party balloons just weren't popular during rationing then recovery from the war. Another unintended, but happy, side effect of global conflict.
What I don't quite understand is, when the helium is compressed in a tank it is taken out of the hull. The hull being rigid maintains its volume so the helium taken out of it must be replaced (I can't believe that it could resist low pressure), probably by air. Is there some sort of diaphragm within the hull to separate helium from air or how does it work?
Rigid airships are essentially just a load of weather balloons stuffed into a vaguely aerodynamic frame. The outside "skin" is just to stop things blowing around etc. It doesn't hold in gas, that is stored in interior "cells".
So having air vents etc isnt really a problem.
Great article, lots of knowledge imparted there, thanks!
If the lighter than air gas is in cells, how about strapping a cell to each item of cargo (person) of a size that doesn't quite counteract the cargo's (person's) weight.
That way you don't even have to land, you just open the trapdoor under them and let them gently waft to the ground. That'll definitely work.