My attention has been called to a still finer distinction which was thoughtfully drawn by Edward Pevzner, of Aeroscraft in Montebello, California, when he spoke as one of the principal presenters at Airships to the Arctic V, the fifth in the series of those first-rate conferences conceived and produced by Dr. Barry Prentice, faculty at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
Pevzner distinguishes the source of lift for Aeroscraft --- his firm's airships --- from other hybrids. One can't do better than quote from that segment of his "Airships to the Arctic" Power Point presentation entitled "Combined Lift Air Vehicles (sic) Concepts" . Aside : Like most scientists and engineers (S & E) educated in Europe, he does very significantly better in English than most American S & E's would do in the non-English literature. A Danish woman of our acquaintance used to define "illiterate" as someone who could speak or write fluently in only one language.
He explains that --- as we all presumably know --- our normative idea of an airship generates lift through the buoyancy of entrapped lighter-than-air gas (Archimedes Principle). It's the same lifting force experienced by a boat in the water, where it is called a floating force.
Our conventional idea of a hybrid airship adds to that "floating on air" static lift the aerodynaic lift provided by Bernoulli's Principle, which requires air to travel over a curved surface affixed by design onto the airship, either through the shape of the craft (the iconic "Deltoid Pumpkin Seed") OR by an alar --- wing-like --- surface affixed for that purpose to the airship.
Pevzner accurately distinguishes the design of the Aeros (although he brilliantly dances around any sort of disclosure of his company's proprietary Intellectual Property concept) by explaining that the Aeroscraft is a new approach using derivative airship concepts and a suite of technologies integrated to control lift at all times, independently of off-board ballast."
This achieves greater utility and fewer operational limitations.
Our technical people must confess that his explanation leaves them none the wiser as to the basic principles or techniques utilized by Aeros. As his firm begins to further delineate these methodologies, we'll be sure to sharpen up our explanations to our readers.
The advantages that Pevzner points out include elimination of the need to take on ballast during or after off-loading the payload --- always a pain in the assumption ; eliminating or minimizing infrastructure ; the ability to operate from unimproved landing sites ; and finally lift control so fine that the Aeros can essentially perform vertical take-off and hover maneuvers.
All this arises from the application of the Systems Approach (which they refer to as the "Systematic Approach", a very reasonable variant translation of our in-house phrase), and which we uniformly and enthusiastically endorse .
Sounds good ; it is clearly evincing interest by all aspects of commercial and governmental transportation, especially those in hostile environments dominated by severe weather conditions; impossible, impassible roads ; lack of High-Speed Rail ; or the occasional .50 bullet flying by . As they used to say in the old-timey adventure serials on the radio, stay tuned.
Tomorrow's (more or less) Blog will tread lightly around the geopolitical minefields of who-owns-what in the areas surrounding the North Pole. This is evoking major interest in light of significant discoveries of mineral resources and in light of the fabled "The Northwest Passage", a new path between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans which can influence every aspect of international trade. Does the name "Panama Canal" ring a bell ? Maybe Denmark's legitimate claim to Greenland-and- environs no longer leads to a hand over one's mouth to suppress a chuckle in polite company.
"Global Warming" ? Nonsense ... except for the uncomfortable evidence in high-altitude photographs of those clearly visible navigable lanes between the melting ice. Even sailboats are making their way through ! Maybe there's more to this Airships [in the] Arctic business than complacent, geographically illiterate Americans realize.
Maybe those Airships to the Arctic people can be persuaded to move their conference to the comfortable climate of Florida's Gulf Coast, where it will attract (on the order of) ten times as much attention ---including Internet Pundits and the all-important world press, as well as its usual cold-hardened S & T attendance. As I recall they used to have a Professor Richard P. Beilock from the University of Florida (yes, we know that the U of F is not located on the Gulf Coast!) on the staff . More to come ...
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