Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

I've often wondered when the first mega-wealthy individual would commission a private "air-yacht" based on the zeppelin.

You wouldn't have the same usable living space as an ocean going yacht but you wouldn't be limited to staying on the Ocean, either.

A good design would also allow for an open air upper deck on top of the thing as well.

I'd buy one. Well, I'd buy one if I qualified as "Mega-Rich".

Posted by Fuloydo at November 23, 2007 11:08 AM

I thought the sensitivity of dirigibles to bad weather was a showstopper.

Posted by Paul F. Dietz at November 23, 2007 11:11 AM

There was a company in South Africa someone told me about that was developing a "cruise ship" dirigible for safaris. Seeing the big animals from 100 feet up, with white-coated waiters bringing me drinks, strikes me as a fine way to travel. Count me in.

There's probably an interesting counterpoint you can make to Space Tourism, Rand - I'm surprised you refrained from doing so. It's sort of the opposite - slow travel, close view - to the suborbital tourism alternative.

Posted by Jane Bernstein at November 23, 2007 11:12 AM

The bad weather problem arose in the wearly days of rigid airships primarily because nobody understood metal fatigue in those days, and the airships tended to be underpowered relative to their size and surface area. These probelms could be remedied these days. Also, we have much better weather monitoring and prediction. The US Navy operated smaller nonrigid airships extensively for decades and had very few weather-related losses (or losses of any kind, in fact.) Also, the absolute numbers of rigid airships were very small. The Germans built and operated over a hundred; nobody else operated more tha a handful. So the Germans developed a set of empirical rules of thumb for operating rigid airships that were never entirely reduced to handbooks or passed on to other nations; they tended to be part of the corporate knowledge of the army and naval airship services. The US experience was interestingly similar to the Shuttle experience -- they could only afford five of the big, expensive buggers and so never really learned how to fly rigid airships the way the German did. Four of the five crashed; the only one that didn't was (tellingly) the German-built ZR-3.

In looking at the green benefits, it's important to look at the total life-cycle energy costs. Here the low utilization compared to fast heavier-than-air craft may work against them. (Just as the Hummer H-3 beats the earth-raping Prius.) OTOH maybe they should be compared to ocean cruise liners, where they would probably be way ahead.

Posted by Jim Bennett at November 23, 2007 11:25 AM

airships are very ground wind sensitive.

The Guys at JP Aero are relearning this the hard way

Posted by at November 23, 2007 11:27 AM

Seeing how constrained our rail systems are becoming, I wonder how practical Zepps would be for point to point hauling of heavy and or bulky cargo?

It would be nice to be able to double our track guages but we are victims of our previous sucess. To do so would cause huge disruptions.

Posted by Mike Puckett at November 23, 2007 11:33 AM

One problem with a using a zeppelin as a private "air yacht" is that you'd need your ground crew to arrive at your destination ahead of time to set up your portable mooring tower.

If I were a mega-wealthy individual I'd go with a Buckminster Fuller Cloud 9 as a mansion: Build a giant geodesic sphere. As a sphere gets bigger, the volume it encloses grows much faster than the volume of the enclosing structure itself. Heat it by one degree higher than the outside temperature and it becomes airborne.

I'd put a mansion or villa in one, and moor it someplace scenic.

Posted by Roger Strong at November 23, 2007 11:56 AM

I usually travel cross-country to visit my parents; I go two or three times a year, and I stay at least a week. I'd be happy to make the trip on an airship, even if it took a full day; I already give the trip a full day, and on an airship I could presumably carry more stuff (plenty of clothes, both my cats, etc.)

Posted by DensityDuck at November 23, 2007 12:19 PM

(Just as the Hummer H-3 beats the earth-raping Prius.)

I very seriously doubt this is the case.

Posted by Paul F. Dietz at November 23, 2007 12:20 PM

I have worked as a ground crew member for a blimp. I like blimps. But such craft are at the mercy of the winds. All you have to do is stand on the flight line at Mojave and watch a blimp struggling for an hour to get thru the 12 miles from the Tehachapi pass down to the Mojave airfield, and then not able to take off for a day until the winds drop below 35 kts.
Certainly blimps and hot air balloons are fun and a great way to see things at a nice slow pace, but as dependable transportation -- not yet.

Posted by Aleta at November 23, 2007 12:23 PM

We're referring to dirigibles here (rigid), not blimps (which are balloons), Aleta.

Posted by Rand Simberg at November 23, 2007 12:44 PM

(Just as the Hummer H-3 beats the earth-raping Prius.)

I very seriously doubt this is the case.

Here's the reference.

http://www.reason.org/commentaries/dalmia_20060719.shtml

Posted by Jim Bennett at November 23, 2007 01:03 PM

Just as the Hummer H-3 beats the earth-raping Prius

Rubbish. This has been completely debunked. No matter, go ahead and believe it if you wish.

Posted by Offside at November 23, 2007 01:26 PM

G'day,

Have any of you actually been in an airship? I have worse case of motion sickness ever. No one is getting me in one of those things again.

Ralph

Posted by Ralph Buttigieg at November 23, 2007 01:49 PM

Zeppelins are _almost_ as cool, as monorails ;) but not nearly as practical.
High-altitude zeppelins with thin-film solar cell coating on the surface that stays above low-altitude clouds most of the time would be really cool. Some people have proposed similar designs as terrestrial broadband antennae stations.

Posted by kert at November 23, 2007 01:51 PM

"Just as the Hummer H-3 beats the earth-raping Prius

Rubbish. This has been completely debunked. No matter, go ahead and believe it if you wish."

Issues like this are not a matter of belief, but of argument and evidence. The idea of using dust-to-dust total lifecycle analysis seems eminently sensible to me. Do you have a reference for your claim or are you just outgassing?

Posted by Jim Bennett at November 23, 2007 02:00 PM

One problem with a using a zeppelin as a private "air yacht" is that you'd need your ground crew to arrive at your destination ahead of time to set up your portable mooring tower.

If I were wealthy enough to buy the zeppelin in the first place I would probably consider multiple ground crews. A full set at each of my mansions, at least, and one mobile crew in a cargo plane to fly ahead to any other destinations I might choose. I'd also look into having mooring towers placed on skyscrapers in the larger cities (the buildings I had a financial interest in for sure) that I knew I was likely to visit.

I'm not sure what the FAA would have to say about mooring towers on skyscrapers in these modern times but I'm pretty sure they had them back in the day.

It's not a trivial problem to be sure, but compared to the initial cost of my "yacht" not really one to stop me if I felt I wanted one.

Posted by Fuloydo at November 23, 2007 02:15 PM

I'm not sure what the FAA would have to say about mooring towers on skyscrapers in these modern times but I'm pretty sure they had them back in the day.

Wishful thinking born of to much Hollywood. Should have googled before I shot my mouth off. (my keyboard off?)

Posted by Fuloydo at November 23, 2007 02:19 PM

The Empire State Building was completed on time and under budget. Yet for such a well-thought-out building, it was remarkably unprepared for its role as aviation pioneer. Granted, the building's framework was stiffened against the 50-ton pull of a moored dirigible, some of the winch equipment for pulling in arriving ships was installed, and the 86th floor was readied with space for a departure lounge and customs ticket offices. The builder's lawyers even prepared a thick brief, arguing, amongst other things, that owners of neighboring buildings could not sustain a claim of trespass when they found dirigibles overhead. But no one worked out one other problem: wind. The steel-and-glass canyons of Manhattan are an airship captain's nightmare of shifting air currents. Raskob and Smith were inviting the unwieldy craft to come in low and slow, over hazards such as the menacing Chrysler Building spire, and somehow tie up without use of a ground crew. Then, too, if the crew released ballast to maintain pitch control, a torrent of water would cascade onto the streets below. And once secured, a dirigible could be tethered only at the nose, with no ground lines to keep it steady.

Passengers would have to make their way down a stinging gangway, nearly a quarter mile in the air, onto a narrow open walkway near the top of the mast. After squeezing through a tight door, they would have to descend two steep ladders inside the mast before reaching the elevators. "Can you see some of the 75-year-old dowager doing that?" asks Alexander Smirnoff, the current telecommunications director of the building, as he stands on that walkway.

Confronted with such daunting realities, Smith dispensed bland assurances that "there must be some way to work that thing out." He insisted that the US Navy was a partner in the project and its dirigible Los Angeles would dock at the mast. But the navy remained mum. The most it did was allow one of its smaller airships to hover nearby one day at the request of a newsreel company.

Passenger airship service was the province of Germany's Zeppelin Company, and its head, Hugo Eckener, did not hide his skepticism. That's fortunate for New York. Just imagine if the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg had exploded over midtown Manhattan instead of Lakehurst, New Jersey.

Eventually, the press' initial enthusiasm for the docking scheme began giving way to concerns about risk. A Philadelphia newspaper wrote, "Basically the proposal to dock transatlantic airships...hangs on the highly dubious contention that the saving of an hour's time to thirty or forty travelers is of more importance than the assured safety of thousands of citizens on the streets below."

One small airship did drop a a long rope to the mast and held on from a distance for a precarious three minutes, and another delivered a bundle of newspapers by rope. After that, the effort was quietly abandoned. But the mast remained, and it eventually became an asset, turning out to be a spectacular radio and television transmitter. It also provided two popular and lucrative observation decks. And it gave the Empire State Building an unforgettable profile.

Finally, the mast became an enduring symbol of human folly. John Tauranac, author of The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark, called the airship plan "the looniest building scheme since the Tower of Babel."

Posted by at November 23, 2007 03:19 PM

The article you reference contains obvious howlers, for example:

As for Hummers, Spinella explains, the life of these cars averaged across various models is over 300,000 miles. By contrast, Prius' life – according to Toyota's own numbers – is 100,000 miles.

This is rubbish. Toyota guarantees the batteries for 100,000 miles; it doesn't say the vehicle itself will only last that long.

Also:

But the biggest reason why a Hummer's energy use is so low is that it shares many components with other vehicles and therefore its design and development energy costs are spread across many cars.

In other words, all the R&D expense of Toyota's hybrid program is included in the energy cost of the vehicles sold so far. The proper comparison would be to ignore such sunk costs. The author excuses this with

It is not possible to do this with a specialty product like hybrid.

In other words, failure of the hybrid car approach is assumed, with no future generations over which development can be further amortized.

Posted by Paul F. Dietz at November 23, 2007 03:39 PM

Jim, on that "hummer is greener than prius, dust-to-dust", do a short google on "CNW Marketing". Their "research" has been indeed debunked six ways to sunday.

Posted by kert at November 23, 2007 03:41 PM

I have to agree with Paul with this one. That Hummer vs Prius tome makes a bunch of assumptions skewed favorable to the Hummer and skewed against the Prius.

Posted by Mike Puckett at November 23, 2007 03:45 PM

Rand, there's little operational difference between blimps and rigid airships- both have aerodynamic shapes, are lighter than air, and have airbreathing propulsion. Blimps use a slight pressurization to place their envelope under tension, while rigids use an internal structure to hold their shape. Blimps are much more mass-efficient, since they are inflated tension structures without parasitic mass.

The key problem with all airships is that they are _air_ships_ -by definition only about as dense as air. Thus they are at the mercy of winds and gusts regardless of their internal construction. While thrust vectoring and fly-by-wire with INS/GPS feedback can improve controlability, common weather can overwhelm those controls.

Lovely idea, but inherently limited by the physics. In good weather it could be a wonderful tourist vehicle, but the dispatch reliability would be poor.

Posted by Doug Jones at November 23, 2007 03:52 PM

I wonder - could you make the airship solar-powered?
Is there any cell technology which would make that possible?

Posted by jv at November 23, 2007 04:35 PM

While there are similarities, there are also differences. Top speed of a blimp (if the Goodyear is any example) is a little over forty knots, and cruising speed much less, so as Aleta notes, it would be fruitless to attempt to fly in a high wind. But the top speed of the Hindenburg (as another example) was about eighty mph, so it might manage it. The stiffer structure does provide better aerodynamics at higher speed, and better control. With modern propulsion/structure, the differences would be much greater.

Posted by Rand Simberg at November 23, 2007 05:10 PM

For specialized applications, I do believe they make a lot of sense now. Technically speaking, many of the problems have been solved or are solvable in the very near term. My team is working one such application.

For general passenger transport, I'm not convinced yet. Wind is an issue, that is true, but the real problem is the economic one. They would compete with other modes of travel that are well established and well subsidized in the sense that society has helped pay for a great deal of infrastructure like roads, airports, and so on. Passenger rail in each of its forms is in a similar bind.

As far as them being green, I think it would depend a lot on the design and application. They spend most of their operating lives off-grid, so designers have to conserve everywhere they can. However, the commercial requirements are likely the biggest drivers on fuel usage, battery technology, and component life cycles. For passenger flights, I think they will have to be green for the same reasons aircraft are being forced in that direction too. Non-green (non-conservative) approaches can wind up killing profitability over the long haul.

I think the most likely (profitable) applications for these vehicles won't involve passengers in the near future. However, I think the best path to making them profitable is to diversify into each of their possible markets even if that means taking a few initial losses.

Posted by Alfred Differ at November 23, 2007 06:08 PM

Rand is guilty of a little semantic confusion here, I'm afraid. "Dirigible" simply means "capable of being steered" and originates in the Latin dirigere - to direct. All blimps are dirigibles as they can be steered; the term merely separates the lighter than air craft into balloons, which can't be steered, and dirigibles, which can.

Blimps are a special case of dirigibles, and rigid frame airships are another. They're different design choices for different requirements - I assume blimps are there to minimize parasitic mass and dirigibles are to allow higher speeds or better maneuvering or something, as Doug said above.

Posted by Jane Bernstein at November 23, 2007 06:57 PM

Jane, most in the industry use my terminology. "Dirigibles" are rigid framed, by definition. If you can find an example of one that is not, and is described by that word, rather than some French etymology, please provide it.

Posted by Rand SImberg at November 23, 2007 07:03 PM

I was attempting the precise usage (and my etymology was Latin, not French, thank you). From Wikipedia:

In modern common usage, the terms zeppelin, dirigible and airship are used interchangeably for any type of rigid airship, with the terms blimp or airship alone used to describe non-rigid airships. Although the blimp also qualifies as a "dirigible", the term is seldom used with blimps. In modern technical usage, airship is the term used for all aircraft of this type, with zeppelin referring only to aircraft of that manufacture, and blimp referring only to non-rigid airships.

I assumed that such a stickler for proper English grammar would prefer the precise usage. All blimps are dirigibles. The confusion arises from the similarity in sound between "dirigible" and "rigid" I suppose.

Posted by Jane Bernstein at November 23, 2007 07:19 PM

"Hybrid Airships" -- craft deriving only some percentage of their lift from bouyancy, and the rest from aerodymanics - may, depending on the design, be able handle winds better than traditional airship, particularly upon approach to the ground.

Posted by Hillary-Supporter at November 23, 2007 07:52 PM

That's the key. The high-wind hybrids look more like a wing than a fuselage. Dynamic lift reduces the need for buoyant volume which permits non-optimal surface to volume ratios.

There are some neat ideas out there, but I'm not so sure that passenger airlines are a growth industry right now. 8)

Posted by Alfred Differ at November 23, 2007 09:28 PM

If I was trying to operate a Zeppelin in this day and age, I would not try to land it. Day to day operation should be done with the Zeppelin kept safely away from the dangerous edges of the sky. Plan on using more nimble planes or helicopters to move people and cargo, to terra firma.

Posted by Joe at November 23, 2007 09:29 PM

Crazy thought but what would happen if you tethered your airship to a train going in the right direction (assuming the tether could be dumped in an emergency of course). I know the train would have to work harder to pull the extra load but I have to wonder if there would be some energy savings.

Anyway, I think it would be nice to go from South to North California and have my car go along with me. If they could make a derigable that could handle passengers and cars like a floating ferry boat I think they'd have a good thing.

Posted by rjschwarz at November 23, 2007 10:39 PM

One application is ultra-heavy lifting. Airships are a good way of getting very large and heavy loads (such as power station boilers) around, without months of planning and massive road congestion.

Posted by Fletcher Christian at November 24, 2007 06:08 AM

Hybrid designs have a lot of advantages. Consider the Lockheed Martin P-791 prototype. It has air cushion landing gear that would allow it to operate on any horizontal surface and may be reversible to suck the vehicle to the surface. It also has pivoting engines for vectored thrust. This greatly increases maneuverability and reduced the difficulty of ground handling. Here's a video of a test flight.

Posted by Larry J at November 24, 2007 07:46 AM

the issue for any airship is cross-wind.

Assuming any reasonable factor for directional variance makes ground handling a real challenge.

trust vectoring helps, but, the measure of concern
is sail area. zeppelin's are worse then blimps for
this.

a zeppelin or dirigible is optimized for speed,
a blimp for hang time, but consequently a zeppelin has a much larger cross wind sail area.

when the wind chooses to shift direction,
the ground crew is faced with an enormous
challenge.

There were good and sound reasons they were
abandoned, and there is little reason to bring
them back.

Unfortunately the author knows very little
about airships

Posted by anonymous at November 24, 2007 08:01 AM

8) Intentional dig there at the end, huh?

Cross winds are handled on the ground with a mooring mast and a circular landing zone. As the wind shifts, the air ship pivots around the mast to stay nose forward into the wind.

This method works for relatively slow changes in direction, but I wouldn't trust it when a strong front passes through. That's when you go hide in the hangar.

Posted by Alfred Differ at November 24, 2007 10:50 AM

"Crazy thought but what would happen if you tethered your airship to a train going in the right direction (assuming the tether could be dumped in an emergency of course). I know the train would have to work harder to pull the extra load but I have to wonder if there would be some energy savings."

Bridges and tunnels come to mind.

If you could re-work the rail line to that extent, you would be better off just doubling the guage.

Posted by Mike Puckett at November 24, 2007 11:42 AM

I believe forestry services have made extensive use of airships for a while.

Posted by Josh Reiter at November 26, 2007 12:56 AM

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