Airships Will Never Be Part of Our Transportation Infrastructure : Oh, Really ?!

There's an on-line posting

(Helium Hokum: Why Airships Will Never Be Part of Our Transportation Infrastructure By Joseph Dick , May 2011 Scientific American)

that states --- and proves beyond a shadow of the author's doubt --- that lighter-than-air craft (dirigibles, blimps, Zeppelins, etc.) are unusable, unsustainable, and unmanageable, and so are off the table when discussing transportation technology.

OK, try these assignments on for size, using any other means of transportation besides an airship :

1. You have 200 Tonnes (Metric tons at 2240 pounds per tonne) of cargo. Carry it from the Midwest to the North Pole. Make that 6,000 miles (more or less) in one trip, in less than 4 days.

2. Take off from Laredo, Texas and stay on patrol with a field of view of ten square miles; stay there for ten days, non-stop

3. Travel from Biloxi, Mississippi to Chicago carrying 100 tonnes of cargo at a time when the Mississippi River is in flood stage ... Now do it when the River is nothing but mud and snags  ... Land on Great Slave Lake, when the entire lake is frozen solid.

4. Transport an entire battalion of troops, including heavy artillery and supplies for two months, from an Air Base in Germany to the middle of the Sahara Desert. Uh, length of runway in the Sahara ?  None !

5. Hover in silence at night for six hours over the reported rendezvous point of a criminal group.

6. Now go back and perform all these missions in absolute silence.

Having a little trouble now ? Think LTA or Hybrid airships. 

   

Hybrid Air Vehicles May Help Conquer the Arctic

(Image: HAV)
Travelling through the Arctic is notoriously difficult and climate change is making it even harder. But there may be a way to literally rise above the problem: the latest generation of lighter-than-air vehicles, or more accurately, Hybrid Air Vehicles. Discovery Air, a Canadian company, has contracted with Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) to for an order on the order of magnitude of 45 new airships based on this new technology, to be used across the Northwest Territories of Canada.
Possible uses range from carrying cut timber out of the forest or bringing supplies to settlers in remote villages, transportation in Arctic Canada has proven to be an extrememly daunting process. Most transportation is either by air transport or bush pilot, whose carrying capacity is limited; by boat, whose access is extremely limited; or by ice road, which is limited in time frame to periods of frozen roads over arctic lakes.
Rising winter temperatures, due to climate change, are likely to make Canada's ice roads less stable and reduce the amount of time in winter in which they can safely be used.
HAV says the vessels are technically neither airships nor blimps. To achieve a large part of their lift, they  make use of non-flammable helium --- often mixed with air --- they also get a substantial portion of their lift from the aerodynamic design of the outer envelope, the airship's equivalent of a fuselage.
HAV already has a major contract for hybrid vehicles with the US Defence Department for long-endurance airships to be used for ISR : Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance.
The airships that Discovery Air has ordered are HAV's model 366, which HAV spokespersons say can carry 50 tonnes if they take off horizontally like an airplane and about 30 tonnes if they take off vertically. Not even the largest helicopters in the world can match that, they explain.
One hundred and ten metres (360  feet) long, the vessels can reach altitudes of almost 3000 metres (9800 feet) and can take off and land almost anywhere. Smaller cargo can fit in the fuselage or can hang beneath the airship for shorter ones. The possibility of remote operation, using radio control much like a model airplane or the latest military drones, is an interesting future possibility.

AIRSHIP MISCONCEPTIONS

Do you think with the Vapid Majority that

1. Airship use stopped cold in 1937 with the Hindenburg disaster ?

Here are some statistics on blimp use by the U S Navy in World War II,

1941 - 1945,  significantly after the fatal flight of the Hindenburg :

Number of airships: a significant increase : From 16 in 1942, 148 in 1945

Total Flight hours: 545,527

Sorties (number of missions) : 57,710

Ships safely escorted: 80,038 with no losses

2. They only fly in good weather, don’t they?”

Probably no more or less than airplanes do

3. They need an enormous ground crew to handle the airship when it takes off and lands, isn't that true?

In the old days, given airship design and construction of that time, that may have been true. Current airship design has cut this requirement radically, especially regarding hybrids, which do much of their own, unassisted ground handling because of these design modifications :

the ability to land almost anywhere unassisted --- on land, on water, and on ice and snow --- using new shapes of their envelopes which are essentially flat.

        In addition, many of the new airship designs have vectored thrust     using movable ducted fans that can be pointed in any direction to move the airship about.

4. Think of the cost! 20 or more guys in hotels and on per-diem for 6 months! Who can afford that?  

I suppose they're talking about the ground crews. An airship crew consists of no more than an airplane with a similar mission.

5. They must be very vulnerable to attack or damage

People think that they can be shot down easily because they picture them   like the simple rubber balloons they see at children's birthday parties, a rubber covering containing gas. The facts are that airship skin is much tougher than a simple balloon; it is made of composite materials not dissimilar to bulletproof vests, AND the interior is not one giant space, but is divided into separate ballonets, so that even if one gas space is compromised, the others remain undamaged. Finally, the gas pressure is very little above the ambient air pressure. a true puncture would slowly fizzle out over a long period of time. We have seen photographs of damage trials that show an airship moving back to base under its own power after hundreds of penetrations by bullets in carefully staged and measured firing. Slower, but inexorable progress.

... and yet we still read comments by uninformed people that think they can be brought down by a BB gun. Proven not true, not even by small arms or machine gun fire.

6. They need a hangar all the time in case of bad weather.

Possibly true.  A minor point. We imagine that everyone would feel a good deal better if ALL transport equipment were sheltered from bad weather, and damage by vandals and careless ground-handling equipment, including airplanes, buses, locomotives, and railcars.

We recall the painful period in New York transit history, when almost every bit of subway equipment was covered by graffiti, and there was significant damage to bus and subway car seating by young bloods equipped with sharp knives.

7. And let's all hold off on hydrogen being a gas too flammable and too dangerous to use as a lifting gas. The jury may still be out on that one. Consider, please, that the gasoline in our cars is many times more explosive (read "dangerous") than hydrogen, yet we allow our teenagers to handle it with impunity.   

Is it true that Anyone Can Fly a Blimp ?

Reprinted from "Popular Science" magazine, July 1931

By ANDREW R. BOONE

This is a first-hand account of a novice at the controls of an airship. You will find it particularly interesting because, while airplane travel has become commonplace, comparatively few have ridden in airships.

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SMITTY stuck his head out of the port window. “Give us a weigh-off,” he shouted, raising his voice to get it past the roar of the two engines.

The ground crew, stepping back from the car, slackened all ropes. Instantly the Volunteer began to rise from the Goodyear air dock. And as suddenly all hands grabbed the ropes and the rail running around the bottom of the car.

Across the field came one of the more distant crew members, a canvas bag, heavy with sand, clutched in each hand. Through the starboard door he swung them onto the floor of the car.

“Now we’re in equilibrium,” Smitty explained. “With this wind (it was blowing eight miles an hour from the southwest) we can fly her off.” The blimp held steady, neither rising nor settling down on its lone air wheel. She had just enough positive buoyancy to help her up when the motors began to roar.

“Ready?” asked Smitty.

“O K”

His gloved hand waved to the ground crew. Two of them ran in with the long ropes and coiled them in two-dump boxes near the nose of the car; four on the car shoved upward. The motors roared and up we shot, at an angle no pilot would be silly enough to try with an airplane.

Five degrees, ten, fifteen. I was fascinated. It had been thirteen years since I had been aloft in a blimp, the Navy’s old B-18, an open-cockpit hydrogen-filled ship. In the B-18 I had my first trip aloft. As I climbed into the cockpit one of the officers standing on the ground pointed to a rope that trailed down alongside the cockpit.

“Grab it and jump if anything happens,” he shouted.

On the top end of the rope was a parachute. Untrustworthy as it may have been, it was better to clutch the three- quarter-inch manila than to ride a burning hydrogen bag down. In these modern blimps, however, there is no fire hazard. Helium will not burn and for that property blimp owners pay $60 for each thousand cubic feet. It costs $4,500 to fill her with 76,000 cubic feet of helium, and nearly $100 a month to replace in the envelope the helium that seeps through the rubberized fabric. [Ed. Note 1931 prices] .

Here we were, comfortable in upholstered chairs, looking out from an enclosed five-passenger cabin, suspended beneath a gas-filled bag that, barring some nearly-impossible accident that would tear a great hole in the top, would bring us to earth under any circumstances. No parachutes here : no need for them.

WERE the blimp to become disabled, the motors to stop, Smitty would merely free-balloon her down again on some level spot, deflate the bag if necessary, and wait for help. These blimp pilots, you see, must become pilots of free balloons before they’re entrusted with one of the six in the Goodyear fleet.

That's eleven hours in a free balloon, including night ballooning and solo, before they can begin to qualify as blimp pilots. This airship and her five sister ships are non-rigid blimps, balloons shaped to give them the ability to be steered and carrying motors to give them forward movement.

WHILE flying a blimp is much simpler than flying an airplane, these pilots must fly them 200 hours before being turned loose with the public. But here I was, ready to learn how to pilot a blimp in one easy lesson. After a few jerks and near-stalls [Ed. note :We are not convinced that a blimp can stall], I did manage to keep her on an even keel. Therefore, in all logic, I may say I can fly a blimp.

As Verner Smith, Smitty to his staff and crew, rolled the elevator wheel back and the tail controls caught, our nose rose and we climbed steeply out of the field and over the high tension wires that cross every block in an industrial district. From Long Beach, twenty miles away, a fog had rolled in earlier in the morning, but now the sun was showing in patches here and there.

We were glued [not literally glued] to our seats. The engines, while not running as fast as motors turn to pull airplanes out of small fields, forced the blimp upward at a lively clip : possibly twenty-five miles an hour. I glanced at the altimeter  : 300 feet. How high are we going?”

As I shouted the question into Smitty’s ear the noise suddenly stopped. Instinctively I grabbed the window sill, looking over the side for a landing place.

The airship pitched gently back and forth. In a moment we were riding on an even keel. Smitty grinned. Then as the wind blew us gently toward downtown Los Angeles while the engines idled, he told me of experiences with airplane pilots.

ONE day several months ago he took Ernie Smith, who, with Emory Bronte, flew across the Pacific,  up for a “blimp hop” at Oakland. Smitty shoved the nose up and cut the engine at an altitude of one hundred feet. Ernie took one glance at the instruments, then began looking for a landing place.

“Invariably,” Smitty explained, “people accustomed to airplanes expect the blimp to nose down and spin when the engines are idled. But you can’t spin one of these critters [... aha, we thought so]. And you can’t loop-the-loop or stall them.”

He proceeded to demonstrate. He turned the elevator wheel backward. The green column of liquid that indicated the angle of climb moved upward. Ten, twenty, thirty degrees, and the column hit top. An early airplane, climbing at an angle as steep as that, would have fallen off on one wing and spun earthward. But the blimp merely continued to climb at the rate of 1,200 feet a minute, until Smithy throttled the engines and the ship leveled off in easy flight. “But,” I said, “if you nose dive this ship and pull her up sharply, why can’t you come close to looping the loop?”

For reply he put the blimp in a steep dive; steep, that is, for a blimp. The controls lifted the tail just so far and no farther, for the weight of the car, hanging amidships, prevented the tail going higher. After sliding down a couple of hundred feet, he rolled the wheel back again and we swung forward like a big pendulum as she lumbered upward. Again the green column passed the thirty-degree mark, but we did not go on over. In fact, it’s impossible to turn these “flying cows” on their back. And therein lies one of their greatest factors of safety.

AFTER Smitty had throttled the engines down to idling speed he told me how so much strength has been built into these bags. It was interesting, especially because the bags keep their shape by the pressure of the gas. There are no cross members to strengthen them, as in the Graf Zeppelin and the giant blimps that were built for the Navy.

He explained “This airship carries 96,000 cubic feet of a helium-air mix. In the bottom of the bag is a smaller, oval cell we call a ballonet. It contains about 20,000 cubic feet of air. When we go up into thinner air, the helium’s pressure rises. Then it presses against the ballonet and forces air out through a valve. In this way the pressure on the bag does not increase and we keep all our helium. One of the air scoops, which faces into the propeller blast, remains open to keep a little pressure in the ballonet, and when I come down for a landing I open the other. That increases pressure in the ballonet, which presses upward against the helium compartment and keeps the entire bag rounded out.

“Of course, when we’re flying fifty miles an hour, which is near our top speed, the bag would collapse were it not for the twelve balsa wood braces that radiate from the nose backward. In fact, the bag does wrinkle a bit at the rear end of the braces when we’re flying fast.”

Except in the dive we did not move faster than thirty-six miles an hour, just cruising around so I could get the “feel” of the ship. We passed through little wisps of fog, driven away from the large fog bank by the mounting sun. It occurred to me we were sitting in a car that might rip off. I craned my head out and looked up at the bag. Apparently the car was merely glued on to the fabric.

Smithy laughed at my fears when I asked him about that.

“TF THIS car falls, the whole thing will go boom,” he said. “The car hangs from sixteen steel cables passing from the top down through two sleeves in the ballonet. So we really are suspended from the top and not from the bottom of the blimp.

“And,” he added, “you needn’t worry about this bag leaking and plopping us down on one of these factories. There’s about a mile and a quarter of fabric in it, but these panels are put together in two thicknesses. The outer fabric, which resembles in weight and texture the cloth that goes into a fine broadcloth shirt, is impregnated with rubber, forced in under high pressure. The inner fabric, of the same material, is painted with a paraffin solution that will not crack. After the two are sewed together and the bag tailored, the outer surface is painted with aluminum.”

“Did you say the bag is tailored?”

“Yes, sir! These ships are tailored to order, custom made. We never have to stretch them into shape. When the panels are put together and the bag ‘blown up’ it looks just as it always will appear.”

The ballonet, Smithy explained, provides a cushion on which the helium rides. When the gas expands an enormous pressure is built up. It is then the ballonet flattens out as air passes out through an automatic eighteen-inch valve. When the blimp reaches its ceiling, about 9,000 feet, and ceases to climb the ballonet lies flat on the bottom of the bag.

Here’s how it works out practically. One day, early in the winter, when up about 1,500 feet Smithy stopped the engines to clean out a gas line. During that time the blimp settled about 100 feet. Naturally, as the helium contracted in volume, the bag lost its tautness and became flabby. Under those conditions a pilot cannot control the blimp’s elevation and direction. It was then that sandbags proved their value. Overboard poured the sand from a single sack, and slowly the “rubber duck” rose until expanding gas filled out the bag again. Then Smitty started the engines and flew on. Had he attempted to fly with the bag flabby and in folds the sudden blast from the propellers might have torn the fabric.

FFORTUNATELY for the novice there are no involved controls in the blimps. You can kick hard left rudder or roll the wheel back sharply with hardly even a thrill resulting. Several times Smithy has turned into a wind while flying fifty miles an hour. The Volunteer would “skid” possibly three city blocks, to the enjoyment of her passengers, but the cabin would swing very little out from a vertical line.

After I had observed the operation of the ship for half an hour, I decided I could fly the thing.

” ‘Speed’ Holman was wise, too,” Smitty observed. Holman, who has flown every type airplane that boasts a landing gear, went up with him one day. Smitty offered him the controls as soon as they had ascended 200 feet. Holman declined, though, and waited twenty minutes while Smithy put the blimp through various maneuvers. When, at last, he took over the controls he flew the ship as though he had been flying blimps all his life.

“Any advice?” I asked.

“Just forget you ever were in an airplane,” Smitty said. “Don’t pick out some object on the horizon and try to fly the ship by that. Try to ‘feel’ the blimp for an even keel.”

That constituted my only verbal instructions. Smitty took his feet off the rudder pedals and removed his hand from the elevator wheel. He settled back in his seat to enjoy the scenery as it bobbed up and down and swung away from the blimp. Or was it the airship that was doing the bobbing?

I glanced at the twenty instruments, gages, clocks, and whatnot, and decided they would be of no help. All I needed to do was to close my eyes, “feel” the ship riding on an even keel, and keep her headed south. Easy. Hardly had I taken the wheel when I felt a tremor that seemed to originate in the nose and slide down the bag to the cabin.

Smithy looked at me, grinning, and soon I understood. We had hit a bump, an up-current of air, and instead of riding through it as a fast plane would have done, the current took us by the nose and pointed the blimp upward at an angle of about fifteen degrees. I rolled the wheel forward to correct the movement, and in a trice we were sliding downgrade at the same angle. Then I understood.

In a blimp you anticipate movements from those slight tremors. You roll the wheel back to climb, and almost before the ship’s vertical angle is changed, you roll the flippers back into neutral again. You don’t need training to be a blimp pilot; you must be psychic. And after a few attempts I got it, roughly speaking.

Having conquered the up-thrusts and down-drafts, I put my mind to straightaway flight. Toward the southern limits of Los Angeles we flew. I glanced at the altimeter. Eleven hundred feet. Along we sailed. After a few minutes my glance again rose to the altimeter. Thirteen hundred feet.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Smithy.

“Common mistake for beginners,” he shouted. “Look at the rate of climb indicator.”

I had the nose of the ship pointed upward at an angle of five degrees.

“Everybody does that,” he said.

CONSCIOUSLY, then, I began to fly the ship at what seemed to be a slight angle of descent. I watched the rate of climb indicator and the altimeter closely and after waggling the wheel back and forth a few times finally achieved an even keel!

Having “mastered” this fundamental I decided it would be great sport to turn the blimp suddenly. In the blimp in which I had previously flown, when we turned suddenly into the wind while flying out over the Pacific, the gondola had swung far out to the side. Too far for the comfort of mind of a novice. But this airship  did not act like that.

True, I was flying her only thirty-five miles an hour, but in airplanes when pilots with whom I have flown have “kicked her hayl over,” pressed the rudder pedal far forward, a violent maneuver has followed. In the blimp there was no “stick” to press over in the direction of the rudder movement, and soon after I had “kicked” left rudder, as the airplane boys have it, we turned gracefully, fairly slowly, skidded possibly 200 feet, and went on in the reverse direction. Nothing to it.

I continued at the controls for half an hour. I nosed the Volunteer up, nosed her down, turned left and right, and called it a day. Easy up to this point, but from my experience I realize that blimp pilots need to know much before taking out these $60,-000 bags and accepting responsibility for four passengers. They must be weather experts, free balloon pilots, blimp pilots, and they should have the experience of flying heavier-than-air machines as well. The last for comparison, at least.

PLANES and blimps are two entirely different kinds of birds. A heavier-than-air ship must achieve considerable forward speed, from fifty to sixty-five miles an hour, before it will be lifted off the ground. A blimp can go off without any forward speed. The rubber ducks are supposed to so balance the pull of gravity that the pointing of the nose up or down when moving forward will change the altitude.

Airplane pilots wait until one wing sinks lower than the other or the nose tilts upward before correcting the fault. Blimp pilots work ahead of the movements, by feel and a considerable amount of intuition. The car and engines on the Volunteer weigh a little more than a ton, enough to keep the bag always right side up. The center of buoyancy is directly above the car.

A vast difference between flying in an airplane 150 miles an hour and enjoying cool thirty-five-mile-an-hour breezes from a blimp. After I had finished my “lesson” Smithy took the controls again and we started in a circle south and east from the field, to swing into the wind and drop down over the wires for a landing. At 500 feet we ran into gusty currents. The Volunteer bobbed like a cork on a mill pond. Smithy reached for the second air scoop release. Pressure rose in the bag.

Like an airplane pilot coming in for a landing, Smithy nosed the duck down and slowed the motors. We swayed gently in cross currents. Three city blocks from the field he leveled off at 200 feet. Air speed thirty miles an hour, wind about ten miles an hour from the southwest. That made our ground speed twenty miles.

On the ground the crew of seven had arranged themselves in a big V, nose into the wind, with Walter Massic, the co-pilot, standing at the apex holding a wind sock. Our speed dropped to twenty-five, to twenty. We crossed the power lines. Smithy rolled the wheel forward. Down tilted the nose. Again he leveled off, the car possibly fifteen feet above the ground.

“Say when, Smithy.”

“Kick ‘em!”

I kicked the plunger, the trapdoors opened, and the two nose handling lines that had been coiled ready to drop into eager hands fell from their places. The crew pulled us down and soon the car settled on the lone air wheel, ready for its great steel dock.

Hybrid Air Vehicles in the News : How Goes the Watch ?

On the minds of many people with faith in the future of Hybrid Air Vehicles is the issue of "How're we doing?" or, in the old English military phrase "How goes the watch?"


There are engineers and dreamers all over the world working on projects to build a successful Hybrid Air Vehicle --- sorry, that's the best descriptive name until the imagination of some skilled writer-artist comes up with a clever short, less dull name for that still-developing mix of Lighter-than-Air craft and heavier-than-air plane that may prove to be the transport of the future and the solution to many of the problems raised by difficult-to-impossible terrain.
(Think Ice Road Truckers and the tundra and frozen lakes they travel over, OR think a trip through the Amazon Rain Forest OR through the Himalayas).

The --- let's see, what can we call them ? workshops ? laboratories ?  corporate offices ? --- hangar-cum-work-areas of the designers, experimenters, and builders dedicating themselves to constructing workable, working prototypes of HAV's that are safe, efficient, and aerodynamically sound are located worldwide and vary enormously in size, equipment, and financial  corporate backing, so it's hard to generalize, even if information on all of them were available .

One typical setting for a project of that type is a secret one in an industrial park in England, working on the Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), a Hybrid Air Vehicle --- that's their trade name for the expected outcome of the project that apparently looks like a spacecraft and (hopefully) will be used for air transport.

A 70-foot long gondola or cabin hangs underneath the huge envelope containing the lifting gas --- a mixture of helium and air. The HAV will be loaded with remote-sensing and photographic equipment; it is being designed and built secretly because its ultimate use is expected to be with American Defense Forces in the Middle East. Three of them will be built under the terms of a contract which serves as a sound basis for this new company's future.

The Chief Executive Officer holds a Master's degree in Business Administration, so one can be assured that they did not proceed unless they assured themselves and their financial backers that its financial underpinning is solid.

The LEMV (why do I keep reading that as "Lunar Excursion Module Vehicle"?) itself has a very low internal pressure, so that if the envelope were to be punctured by small arms fire, the vehicle would not (as we have witnessed some airship detractors theorize) go whizzing around the room like a toy helium balloon punctured by a hatpin in a similar situation. The gas mix inside the Hybrid, at 0.1 pounds per square inch, would just very slowly leak out with plenty of time for the HAV to gently and safely lower itself to the ground. Even if the non-flammable mixture of helium and air were ignited by explosive or incendiary projectiles, it would not burn.

The builders of many of these hybrids design-in an essentially flat under-surface, allowing it to land on either snow, ice, or water; the ability to hover can be conferred by ducted fan propellers that will swivel in any direction for precise control. These capabilities are essential in ny vehicle operating in the harsh conditions of the Arctic or the desert, with basically no infrastructure such as roads or runways available.
    
So much for the comment I saw on one forum that an airship on a battlefield was sheer nonsense, as it could be "brought down by a fat blind man with an airgun".

Lighter-than-air ships have been in essentially unbroken use by  military forces from the beginning. It's easy for some critics, severely under-educated in history, to forget --- if they ever knew   --- that blimps operated by the U.S. Navy in World War II proved to be very effective in anti-submarine warfare.

The specifications for these particular HAV's call for them to have the ability to hover at an altitude of 20,000 feet (6,100 meters)without refueling for 21 days; their payload --- over and above crew, fuel, and weight of HAV --- is set at 2,500 pounds (1135  kilograms).

We understand that final testing and assembly is expected to take place in the United States sometime before the end of this year.
In the immortal tagline uttered by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the film "Charlie Wilson's War", ... "We'll see !".

Until that time, work on a simulator is taking place so that pilots qualified on the controls and instrumentation of this aircraft will have the basics under control in time for deployment some time after that.

You ask whether this HAV will be used solely for military purposes. We understand that Canadian interests are expected to place a substantial order for them, possibly to be used in Canada's far northland for heavy freight shipping under potentially very lucrative civilian contracts. Given the mineral wealth being discovered in the circum-polar regions, and the need to transport equipment, personnel, and all their support gear, this could satisfy a major need for safe year-round transportation when the ice roads melt.

Apparently, although intellectual property rights (legal terminology for design, patent rights and information, and copyright) will remain in England, it is expected that manufacture of the parts and actual assembly will take place in the Western Hemisphere.

 My only regret, as an American, is that some entrepreneurs in the United States didn't step up and offer their facilities for this project. I do understand, of course, about multi-naional corporations and cooperation, but where are the Wright Brothers of the Hybrid?

Chinese Involvement in Lighter-than-Air Craft Research

Here are some interesting figures for comparison between China's involvement with Lighter-than-Air craft (airships) and ours, adapted from articles in Defense News :

Chinese companies, universities, military units, and organizations conducting research on Lighter-than-Air craft :

        Aircraft Flight Test Technology Institute

        Air Force Engineering University

        Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

        Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics and Electricity

        Donghua University

        Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

        Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

        National University of Defense Technology

        Units of the Peoples  Liberation  Army in Shandong

        Wuhan Huazhong University of Science and Technology

        Suzhou Fangzhou Aeromodeling Company manufactures an airship for        police and military use.

        Hua Jiao manufactures an airship for "surveillance, minesweeper, and        special operations" , including anti-terrorism, riots, forest fires, and     hostage rescue.

        Beijing Buaa Lonsan Aircraft Company produces a surveillance   platform airship equipped with camera, infrared thermal imaging,     radar, and a signal relay.

        Aerospace Life Support Industries produces an LTA airship that can    carry four personnel and a variety of sensor payloads.

        The Chinese Academy of Surveying, together with the China Special   Vehicle Research Institute, has developed  an unmanned airship,         helium LTA. with a practical ceiling of 3,250 feet capable of         surveillance missions for "counter-separatist"  campaigns.

... with calls for greater research and development of LTA's in the future.

Let's contrast that with Texas A & M, which to our knowledge is the only American college that includes LTA airships in its undergraduate teaching and research efforts.

Dr. Rajkumar Pant, an Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, arguably one of the finest engineering and technology college-level schools in the world, has set up a laboratory at Texas A & M in which student teams learn to design, build, and fly LTA airships. This past summer, Texas A & M students in the Aerospace Engineering Department, guided by Dr. Pant, are becoming familiar with the advantages, issues, and difficulties of airship construction and operation. The culmination of this first course will involve the remote control of these small scale airships by flying them indoors at the Space Engineering Research Center (SERC) lab .
The small airship, 11 feet in length and 5 feet (presumably) in diameter, has been designed to carry a camera, a wireless transmitter, and a smart phone to simulate an actual operational mission. Larger airships will be able to carry out more complex missions, such as disaster response, homeland security, and communications relay. Dr. Pant and his colleague, Dr. Girimaji, plan to build a curriculum in airship design at Texas A & M , and conduct research into other payload possibilities as well as high altitude operations.
We are pleased to see this effort taking root at an American school, and would like to see similar programs enacted at, for example, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Florida, and other engineering schools with an aeronautical turn of mind across the country. We are familiar with similar programs taking place with remotely-operated underwater vehicles ("robot submarines"), which have led to the establishment of permanent curricula in the field, and to secondary school competitions between teams from schools nationwide, culminating in a sort of underwater World Series . This has resulted in the healthy development of significant national interest in the subject in North America. We hope these programs succeed and flourish.

AIRSHIPS --- APHORISMS TO LIVE BY

An aphorism is a brief, memorable phrase which provides wisdom and guidance, such as "Early to Bed, Early to Rise, Makes a Man Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise". Even the people who coin these phrases often don't live by them; we understand that Ben Franklin, who first offered that advice, was a bit of a late night skirt chaser. Still, it's often good advice for those of us venturing into unfamiliar fields.

Here's an example by Voltaire, a famous French writer, of value to those in technological fields :  "The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good" . It may well summarize the difficulties that airship professionals are having getting the field moving, getting it accepted, transforming theory into practice.

Airship producers need to do a real job of marketing, not just design and manufacture .

We can imagine the underlying frustration when, after Dr. Barry Prentice produced several successful Conferences , everyone looked at each other and agreed, "Yes, yes, that's what needs to be done" ... but we still don't see a sky swarming with airships.

Worse, we still have people writing comments to Internet blogs that say "If blimps were any good, someone would have built them by now"... OR "What about the Hindenburg disaster?"... OR "Yeah ! Huge moving targets that can be shot down by a blind man with a BB gun" ---- actual quotes within the last year or so in Forum Comments.

Although conventional aircraft, after 100 years of development, are understood to still be vulnerable to accidents, any one of which leave more people dead than the 35 people who perished in the Hindenburg, there is still the general understanding that "I'm not going up in one of those things; you burn to death, don't ya know"... or the distinction between hydrogen and helium is totally ignored, or the assurances of a highly qualified German engineer that "During the (World Wars), there were more hydrogen-filled airships built than helium. During the war more helium airships were lost to fire than hydrogen airships !"

Apparently the standard for these new-fangled (still, after 150 years of development) contraptions is much higher than for most other forms of transportation. The public's co-efficient of patience is much lower for airships.

Hearing about dozens of examples of high technology examples operating faultlessly in combat zones; in military operations against submarines off our coasts all through World War II; providing security for recent Olympic Games; being deployed in law enforcement uses by many countries world-wide; NONE of that registers (good descriptive word, that) with the General Public.

Another aphorism "Cui bono?", who benefits. We can truly say here, "No one benefits". Then why is this still such a mystery to the public; why is this not accepted yet? Why is some still-wet-behind-the-ears, shaggy-haired youngster accepted overnight as the New Singing Super Star, BUT people still don't accept blimps as anything more than an advertisement  for automobile tires... and often still get the name of the company wrong ?

It would probably take a more perceptive group of psychologists and marketers than are currently operative to answer those questions. It is frustrating. However, I have some suggestions, if you will hear me out:

1. We tend to look to the past --- There are many more historic maritime museums than those given to public understanding of maritime transportation. Nostalgia "sells". Almost all airship museums and organizations relive the past Glory Days of the Great Zeppelins.

2. The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good --- we tend to want instant perfection of any new invention, not realizing how long the process of correcting all the small imperfections in anything we use every day has taken.

3. Military services are practical. Lives are at stake, and they work with the most advanced technologies possible, without regard for nostalgia. They leave that to the veterans' organizations. That's why they are providing the leadership --- along with DARPA --- in adopting these new technologies. But funding --- determined by our legislators --- fails to follow suit.

4. You'll notice that newsstands in airports don't carry magazines that feature articles with titles like "Great Airplane Disasters of the Past Twenty Years". I frankly don't know whether they pull all newspapers with headlines like that immediately after a crash, but we wouldn't be surprised.

5. These same newspapers don't carry articles on "Significant Advances in Dirigible Technology" . That doesn't blend easily with the advertising they're trying to sell. They would much rather expend valuable column space on Lindsay Lohan's latest escapade or the Octomom.

6. Our education system --- such as it is, such as it tries to be --- rarely puts history into perspective. This may be a function of the education (training?) that teachers get.

Well, you get the idea. I say, "Respect the past, but look to the future". Maybe we need to design the computer games that captivate young kids to portray airships as exciting vehicles of the future, with all the pertinent explosions, gore, and muscular heroes attending, and we may be on to something.

"Airship excitement; your trip to the future at your local airport" ---- now there's an aphorism worth repeating.     

Is it true that Anyone Can Fly a Blimp ? A 1931 Article, mildly edited

Reprinted from "Popular Science" magazine, July 1931, with emendations and redactions by the Editor, re-published now as it's past the 75th-year of copyright protection.

Is it true that Anyone Can Fly a Blimp ?

By ANDREW R. BOONE

[Editor's Note: This is a first-hand account of a novice at the controls of an airship. You will find it particularly interesting because, while airplane travel has become commonplace, comparatively few have ridden in airships].

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SMITTY stuck his head out of the port window. “Give us a weigh-off,” he shouted, raising his voice to get it past the roar of the two engines.

The ground crew, stepping back from the car, slackened all ropes. Instantly the airship began to rise from the Goodyear air dock. And, just as suddenly, all hands grabbed the ropes and the rail running around the bottom of the car.

Across the field came one of the more distant crew members, a canvas bag, heavy with sand, clutched in each hand. Through the starboard door he swung them onto the floor of the car.

“Now we’re in equilibrium,” Smitty explained. “With this wind (it was blowing eight miles an hour from the southwest) we can fly her off.” The blimp held steady, neither rising nor settling down on its lone air wheel. She had just enough positive buoyancy to help her up when the motors began to roar.

“Ready?” asked Smitty.

“O K”

His gloved hand waved to the ground crew. Two of them ran in with the long ropes and coiled them in two-dump boxes near the nose of the car; four on the car shoved upward. The motors roared and up we shot, at an angle no pilot would be silly enough to try with an airplane.

Five degrees, ten, fifteen. I was fascinated. It had been thirteen years since I had been aloft in a blimp, the Navy’s old B-18, an open-cockpit hydrogen-filled ship. In the B-18 I had my first trip aloft. As I climbed into the cockpit one of the officers standing on the ground pointed to a rope that trailed down alongside the cockpit.

“Grab it and jump if anything happens,” he shouted.

On the top end of the rope was a parachute. Untrustworthy as it may have been, it was better to clutch the three-quarter-inch manila than to ride a burning hydrogen bag down. In these modern blimps, however, there is no fire hazard. Helium will not burn and for that property blimp owners pay $60 for each thousand cubic feet. It costs $4,500 to fill her with 76,000 cubic feet of helium, and nearly $100 a month to replace in the envelope the helium that seeps through the rubberized fabric. [Ed. Note 1931 prices] .

Here we were, comfortable in upholstered chairs, looking out from an enclosed five-passenger cabin, suspended beneath a gas-filled bag that, barring some nearly-impossible accident that would tear a great hole in the top, would bring us to earth under any circumstances. No parachutes here : no need for them.

WERE the blimp to become disabled, the motors to stop, Smitty would merely free-balloon her down again on some level spot, deflate the bag if necessary, and wait for help. These blimp pilots, you see, must become pilots of free balloons before they’re entrusted with one of the six in the Goodyear fleet.

That's eleven hours in a free balloon, including night ballooning and solo, before they can begin to qualify as blimp pilots. This airship and her five sister ships are non-rigid blimps, balloons shaped to give them the ability to be steered and carrying motors to give them forward movement.

WHILE flying a blimp is much simpler than flying an airplane, these pilots must fly them 200 hours before being turned loose with the public. But here I was, ready to learn how to pilot a blimp in one easy lesson. After a few jerks and near-stalls [Ed. note :We are not convinced that a blimp can stall], I did manage to keep her on an even keel. Therefore, in all logic, I may say I can fly a blimp.

As Verner Smith, Smitty to his staff and crew, rolled the elevator wheel back and the tail controls caught, our nose rose and we climbed steeply out of the field and over the high tension wires that cross every block in an industrial district. From Long Beach, twenty miles away, a fog had rolled in earlier in the morning, but now the sun was showing in patches here and there.

We were glued [Ed. note: not literally glued] to our seats. The engines, while not running as fast as motors turn to pull airplanes out of small fields, forced the blimp upward at a lively clip : possibly twenty-five miles an hour. I glanced at the altimeter  : 300 feet. How high are we going?”

As I shouted the question into Smitty’s ear the noise suddenly stopped. Instinctively, I grabbed the window sill, looking over the side for a landing place.

The airship pitched gently back and forth. In a moment we were riding on an even keel. Smitty grinned. Then as the wind blew us gently toward downtown Los Angeles while the engines idled, he told me of experiences with airplane pilots.

ONE day several months ago he took Ernie Smith, who, with Emory Bronte, flew across the Pacific,  up for a “blimp hop” at Oakland. Smitty shoved the nose up and cut the engine at an altitude of one hundred feet. Ernie took one glance at the instruments, then began looking for a landing place.

“Invariably,” Smitty explained, “people accustomed to airplanes expect the blimp to nose down and spin when the engines are idled. But you can’t spin one of these critters [... aha, we thought not]. And you can’t loop-the-loop or stall them.”

He proceeded to demonstrate. He turned the elevator wheel backward. The green column of liquid that indicated the angle of climb moved upward. Ten, twenty, thirty degrees, and the column hit top. An early airplane, climbing at an angle as steep as that, would have fallen off on one wing and spun earthward. But the blimp merely continued to climb at the rate of 1,200 feet a minute, until Smitty throttled the engines and the ship leveled off in easy flight. “But,” I said, “if you nose dive this ship and pull her up sharply, why can’t you come close to looping the loop?”

For reply he put the blimp in a steep dive; steep, that is, for a blimp. The controls lifted the tail just so far and no farther, for the weight of the car, hanging amidships, prevented the tail going higher. After sliding down a couple of hundred feet, he rolled the wheel back again and we swung forward like a big pendulum as she lumbered upward. Again the green column passed the thirty-degree mark, but we did not go on over. In fact, it’s impossible to turn these “flying cows” on their back. And therein lies one of their greatest factors of safety.

AFTER Smitty had throttled the engines down to idling speed he told me how so much strength has been built into these bags. It was interesting, especially because the bags keep their shape by the pressure of the gas. There are no cross members to strengthen them, as in the Graf Zeppelin and the giant blimps that were built for the Navy.

He explained “This airship carries 96,000 cubic feet of a helium-air mix. In the bottom of the bag is a smaller, oval cell we call a ballonet. It contains about 20,000 cubic feet of air. When we go up into thinner air, the helium’s pressure rises. Then it presses against the ballonet and forces air out through a valve. In this way the pressure on the bag does not increase and we keep all our helium. One of the air scoops, which faces into the propeller blast, remains open to keep a little pressure in the ballonet, and when I come down for a landing I open the other. That increases pressure in the ballonet, which presses upward against the helium compartment and keeps the entire bag rounded out.

“Of course, when we’re flying fifty miles an hour, which is nearly our top speed, the bag would collapse if it were not for the twelve balsa wood braces that radiate from the nose backward. In fact, the bag does wrinkle a bit at the rear end of the braces when we’re flying fast.”

Except in the dive, we did not move faster than thirty-six miles an hour, just cruising around so I could get the “feel” of the ship. We passed through little wisps of fog, driven away from the large fog bank by the mounting sun. It occurred to me we were sitting in a car that might rip off. I craned my head out and looked up at the bag. Apparently, the car was merely glued on to the fabric.

Smitty laughed at my fears when I asked him about that.

“TF THIS car falls, the whole thing will go boom,” he said. “The car hangs from sixteen steel cables passing from the top down through two sleeves in the ballonet. So we really are suspended from the top and not from the bottom of the blimp.

“And,” he added, “you needn’t worry about this bag leaking and plopping us down on one of these factories. There’s about a mile and a quarter of fabric in it, but these panels are put together in two thicknesses. The outer fabric, which resembles in weight and texture the cloth that goes into a fine broadcloth shirt, is impregnated with rubber, forced in under high pressure. The inner fabric, of the same material, is painted with a paraffin solution that will not crack. After the two are sewn together and the bag tailored, the outer surface is painted with aluminum.”

“Did you say the bag is tailored?”

“Yes, sir! These ships are tailored to order, custom made. We never have to stretch them into shape. When the panels are put together and the bag ‘blown up’ it looks just as it always will appear.”

The ballonet, Smitty explained, provides a cushion on which the helium rides. When the gas expands, enormous pressure is built up. The ballonet then flattens out as air passes out through an automatic eighteen-inch valve. When the blimp reaches its ceiling, about 9,000 feet, and ceases to climb the ballonet lies flat on the bottom of the bag.

Here’s how it works out in practice. One day early in the winter, at an altitude of about 1,500 feet, Smitty stopped the engines to clean out a gas line. During that time the blimp settled about 100 feet. Naturally, as the helium contracted in volume, the bag lost its tautness and became flabby. Under those conditions a pilot cannot control the blimp’s elevation and direction. It was then that sandbags proved their value. Overboard poured the sand from a single sack, and slowly the “rubber duck” rose until expanding gas filled out the bag again. Then Smitty started the engines and flew on. Had he attempted to fly with the bag flabby and in folds the sudden blast from the propellers might have torn the fabric.

FORTUNATELY for the novice there are no involved controls in the blimps. You can kick hard left rudder or roll the wheel back sharply with hardly even a thrill resulting. Several times, Smitty has turned into a wind while flying fifty miles an hour. The airship would “skid” possibly three city blocks, to the enjoyment of her passengers, but the cabin would swing out very little out from a vertical line.

After I had observed the operation of the ship for half an hour, I decided I could fly the thing.

” ‘Speed’ Holman was wise, too,” Smitty observed. Holman, who has flown every type airplane that boasts a landing gear, went up with him one day. Smitty offered him the controls as soon as they had ascended 200 feet. Holman declined, though, and waited twenty minutes while Smitty put the blimp through various maneuvers. When, at last, he took over the controls, he flew the ship as though he had been flying blimps all his life.

“Any advice?” I asked.

“Just forget you ever were in an airplane,” Smitty said.[Ed. Note: Interesting  advice, and completely against the grain of the FAA's requirement that you must have a commercial pilot's license in conventional aircraft before you can qualify for a Lighter-than-air pilot's license]  “Don’t pick out some object on the horizon and try to fly the ship by that. Try to ‘feel’ the blimp for an even keel.”

That constituted my only verbal instructions. Smitty took his feet off the rudder pedals and removed his hand from the elevator wheel. He settled back in his seat to enjoy the scenery as it bobbed up and down and swung away from the blimp. Or was it the blimp that was doing the bobbing?

I glanced at the twenty instruments, gages, clocks, and whatnot, and decided they would be of no help. All I needed to do was to close my eyes, “feel” the ship riding on an even keel, and keep her headed south. Easy. Hardly had I taken the wheel when I felt a tremor that seemed to originate in the nose and slide down the bag to the cabin.

Smitty looked at me, grinning, and soon I understood. We had hit a bump, an up-current of air, [Ed. note : a so-called "air pocket] and instead of riding through it as a fast plane would have done, the current took us by the nose and pointed the blimp upward at an angle of about fifteen degrees. I rolled the wheel forward to correct the movement, and in a trice we were sliding downgrade at the same angle. Then I understood.

In a blimp, you anticipate movements from those slight tremors. You roll the wheel back to climb, and almost before the ship’s vertical angle is changed, you roll the flippers back into neutral again. You don’t need training to be a blimp pilot; you just need to be psychic. And after a few attempts I got it, roughly speaking.

Having conquered the up-thrusts and down-drafts, I put my mind to straightaway flight. We flew toward the southern limits of Los Angeles. I glanced at the altimeter. Eleven hundred feet. Along we sailed. After a few minutes my glance again rose to the altimeter. Thirteen hundred feet.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Smitty.

“Common mistake for beginners,” he shouted. “Look at the rate of climb indicator.”

I had the nose of the ship pointed upward at an angle of five degrees.

“Everybody does that,” he said.

CONSCIOUSLY, then, I began to fly the ship at what seemed to be a slight angle of descent. I watched the rate of climb indicator and the altimeter closely and after waggling the wheel back and forth a few times finally achieved an even keel!

Having “mastered” this fundamental I decided it would be great sport to turn the blimp suddenly. In my previous airship flight,     I recalled, when we turned suddenly into the wind while flying out over the Pacific, the gondola had swung far out to the side. Too far for a novice's comfort. But this blimp did not do that.

True, I was flying her only thirty-five miles an hour, but in airplanes when pilots with whom I have flown have “kicked her over,” pressed the rudder pedal far forward, a violent maneuver has followed. In the blimp there was no “stick” to press over in the direction of the rudder movement, and soon after I had “kicked” left rudder, as the pilots of conventional craft have it, we turned gracefully, fairly slowly, skidded possibly 200 feet, and went on in the reverse direction. Nothing to it.

I continued at the controls for half an hour. I nosed the airship up, nosed her down, turned left and right, and called it a day. Easy up to this point, but from my experience I realize that blimp pilots need to know much before taking out these expensive gasbags and accepting responsibility for four passengers. They must be weather experts, free balloon pilots, blimp pilots, and they should have the experience of flying heavier-than-air machines as well. [Ed.: See? But is that overkill?] The last for comparison, at least.

PLANES and blimps are two entirely different kinds of birds. A heavier-than-air ship must achieve considerable forward speed, from fifty to sixty-five miles an hour, before it will lift off the ground. A blimp can rise without any forward speed. The lifting gas balances the pull of gravity so that pointing the nose up or down when moving forward will change the altitude.

Airplane pilots wait until one wing sinks lower than the other or the nose tilts upward before correcting the fault. Blimp pilots work ahead of the movements, by feel and a considerable amount of intuition. The car and engines on this blimp weigh a little more than a ton, enough to keep the bag always right side up. The center of buoyancy is directly above the car.

A vast difference between flying in an airplane 150 miles an hour and enjoying cool thirty-five-mile-an-hour breezes from a blimp. After I had finished my “lesson”, Smitty took the controls again and we started in a circle south and east from the field, to swing into the wind and drop down for a landing. At 500 feet we ran into gusty currents. The airship bobbed like a cork on a mill pond. Smitty reached for the second air scoop release. Pressure rose in the bag.

Like an airplane pilot coming in for a landing, Smitty nosed the ship down and decreased the RPM of the motors. We swayed gently in cross currents. Three city blocks from the field he leveled off at 200 feet. Air speed : thirty miles an hour, wind about ten miles an hour from the southwest. That made our ground speed twenty miles.

On the ground the crew of seven had arranged themselves in a big V, nose into the wind, with Walter Massic, the co-pilot, standing at the apex holding a wind sock. Our speed dropped to twenty-five, to twenty. We crossed the power lines. Smitty rolled the wheel forward. Down tilted the nose. Again he leveled off, the car possibly fifteen feet above the ground.

“Say when, Smitty.”

“Kick ‘em!”

I kicked the plunger, the trapdoors opened, and the two nose-handling lines that had been coiled ready to drop into eager hands fell from their places. The crew pulled us down and soon the car settled on the lone air wheel, ready for its great steel dock.