Airships.net

http://www.airships.net is a great resource to learn about the airships, both the technical aspects and the life on board. It seems every article's comments is a discussion about whether and that we should ot could start building Zeppelins again. Makes one wish to be in a position like Elon Musk.

Airships has a load great information on the USS Macon and the USS Akron. http://www.airships.net/us-navy-rigid-airships/uss-akron-macon

Helium is a non-renewable resource drilled out of the ground, of which there is a global 'crisis' shortage[1]. Hydrogen is easy to make in vast quantities and cheaper. But more importantly, while they have similar lift capacities on paper (Helium ~90% of Hydrogen), in practice they don't - https://www.airships.net/helium-hydrogen-airships/ has an explanation and calculations. Hydrogen lift airships set off fully inflated and vent Hydrogen along the way for control of altitude and to stop their lift cells expanding too much as they rise into lower pressure air; Helium is too expensive to vent casually, so they have to start less inflated to protect the lift cells, and other concerns so Helium lift ends up with half the payload carrying capacity, less fuel, shorter flight distances. And, nb. the deadliest airship disaster was the USS Akron which was was a Helium lift airship which crashed in a storm with 73 deaths and 3 survivors. It's not as simple as Hydrogen = danger, Helium = safe. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/omerawan/2022/11/10/the-helium-crisis-how…

Airships are a concept which is inherently attractive given their theoretical simplicity, but highly impracticle on closer examination. They're not impossible, but they're far less viable than would first appear. Heavier-than-air powered aircraft were largely a result of powerful engines and energy-dense fuels. Emergence of mass-produced automobiles and the first aircraft occurred within a few years of each other. Materials science (duraluminium) was another major factor. Aeronautical engineering was largely secondary and likely would have emerged with experience regardless. For airships, the key enabling factors are lifting gases and materials, in this case the gas-bag envelopes. For early-20th-century airships, the material of preference was ox intestines, glued together. One airship required the entrails of ~800,000 oxen. See EngineerGuy’s video (accompanies his book) on the doomed British Airship R-101: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ixxXhZVFXxQ There are some factors which might help, and others which still work against, airships. Rather than hydrogen, a "hot helium" design might offer greater flexibility. There's actually some research of such concepts: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1987STIA...8748646R/abstract Materials science might allow for improvements in gas-bag design. Plastics made mid-century blimps possible, and modern Zeppelin semi-rigid airships rely on PVF (polyvinyl fluouride), principally. Graphene or other monatomic sheet materials…

From another page on the site: "The passenger accommodation aboard Hindenburg was contained within the hull of the airship (unlike Graf Zeppelin, whose passenger space was located in the ship’s gondola)." https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/

Even the hindenburg had a smoking lounge! Included a bunch of extra tech to make that less dangerous in a giant explosive balloon. https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-smoking-room/

Just avoid the ads and go to the source https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/

You could smoke on the Hindenberg. Yes. On a dirigible held aloft by hydrogen, they had a smoking room:(https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-smoking-room/.

That's what I was thinking too. Seems to be an ongoing issue: (May 2022) "Helium shortage 4.0" https://qz.com/2171115/the-world-is-facing-helium-shortage-4-0 The major uses include for cooling magnetic resonance imaging equipment at hospitals, and for weather balloons (critical data for short-term weather forecasts). However, small drones may take over from weather balloons for data collection soon. Lab research and manufacturing processes seem to be in third place. I suppose if airships can hang onto their helium long-term, it'd be less of an expense. Interestingly hydrogen though flammable provides more lifting power... maybe hydrogen-filled drone airships would be an option for delivering goods, if not people. https://www.airships.net/helium-hydrogen-airships/

Zeppelins still fly out of Friedrichshafen, their original home! Those of you who lived on the SF Peninsula 10-15 years ago may remember seeing the Airship Ventures Zeppelin NT. That company eventually went out of business and the Zeppelin was dismantled and taken back to Friedrichshafen, but I got to ride on one of their last Bay Area flights. It was the coolest thing ever. I posted a couple of comments here in recent years with more information and links to my photos from the Airship Ventures flight and information about their current operations in Friedrichshafen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21662645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18897492 Airships.net also has an article about the Zeppelin NT used in the Airship Ventures and Friedrichshafen flights: https://www.airships.net/zeppelin-nt/

> By comparison, bloody Concorde transported up to 128, with a crew of 3, in 3.5 hours, at lower prices. Pretty sure the crew of Hindenburg included a whole bunch of waiters, cooks, etc. just like the Concorde had flight attendants on top of its flight crew of 3. Hindenburg was basically a small cruise ship in the air. https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/ has some nice drawings/photos about the interior. Basically traveling on it was more like a nice sleeper train with cabins and a good restaurant than a modern airplane.

Your comments are filled with misinformation: The gas-bag and paint theory is debunked: https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-paint/ The "nobody died from the hydrogen" line is debunked: https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/myths/#advocates That the craft is made out of flammable material is debunked: https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/myths/#flammable-cover

So like I think the claim about the thermite coating could be wrong. That is my only concern you can't have the ship burst into flames in a minute. I don't know the truth of the hindenburg but it does seem like you could mitigate the flammability risk under good conditions but like security also comes to mind what if these things get hijacked. Like they do move slow but are basically a moving ball of death if they light on fire. https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/myths/

Aluminium must be really exotic material in airspace applications? Also: The truth is that the dope used on the Hindenburg was specifically chosen for its low flammability, and the composition of the dope had almost nothing in common with the formula used to make rocket fuel. https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-paint/

From another person's post: > The truth is that the dope used on the Hindenburg was specifically chosen for its low flammability, and the composition of the dope had almost nothing in common with the formula used to make rocket fuel. https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-paint/

I recall seeing a previous documentary where they found evidence that the paint on the exterior of the balloon was new, never used, and highly flammable. Perhaps that, combined with this latest capacitor theory, full explains what happened. Update: nvm, just found this: https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-paint

Oh the humanity, and all the passengers! https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/oh-the-humanity-herbert-m…

There's an oft-debunked [1] theory that the paint on the Hindenburg was the issue. It was the hydrogen. https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-paint/

> The outside of the Hindenburg was made of solid jet fuel (which also happens to be decent airtight paint) No, it wasn't, and no, it doesn't. (The usual, but also wrong, story is that it was coated in solid rocket fuel.) https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/myths/#rocket

They were much bigger than it seems, with cabins inside the main structure of the airship itself: https://www.airships.net/lz-130-graf-zeppelin/

Cruising speed in an A380: 560 mph (900 km/h) [1] Cruising speed of the Hindenburg: 76 mph (125 km/h) [2] That's a multiplier of 7.2, though the shorter the flight the more pronounced an airship's time to reach cruising speed and come back down from cruising speed will factor into the overall ratio. And this assumes we can't make airships go faster than the Hindenburg (is 155mph/300km/h unreasonable?). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Specifications [2] https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/size-speed/

I doubt you could put swimming pools on a craft that size and still have it be lighter than air. Look at how small of a livable space there was on hindenberg-class airship: http://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/ Materials science has improved, but not that much.

Url changed from http://www.airships.net/blog/tuberculosis-hospital-airship to what appears to be (a copy of) the original source.

More info on "blimp" vs. "zeppelin": http://www.airships.net/dirigible A zeppelin is a rigid airship manufactured by a particular company [...] A blimp (technically called a “pressure airship”) is a powered, steerable, lighter-than-air vehicle whose shape is maintained by the pressure of the gases within its envelope. A blimp has no rigid internal structure; if a blimp deflates, it loses its shape.

I think the distinction was that it was a zeppelin, not a blimp. Google does not seem to be involved in its development, you can just pay to take a ride in it. Relevant article: http://www.airships.net/farmers-blimp edit: the currently mountain view based blimp's official site, http://www.airshipventures.com/

Another place where airships might be useful for transportation is Africa. Lots of resources that need to be moved around, (mostly) terrible road and rail infrastructure. And there the airships wouldn't have to be very high-tech to be safer than road transport. The cost of helium presents a problem, though. Hydrogen is cheaper and provides more lift, but is combustible. http://www.airships.net/helium-hydrogen-airships

It's possible to use hydrogen to save helium, while keeping it safe. Even the designers of Hindenburg in the 1930s had in mind a design involving hydrogen enveloped by an outer helium layer to make it inert. But a total ban in US helium exports foiled their plans, leading to risky full hydrogen utilization. See <https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/hindenburg-design-technology/>: "But Hindenburg’s potentially most innovative features were never actually implemented. Hindenburg was originally designed for helium, which was too difficult to obtain and too expensive to be vented to compensate for the weight of fuel burned during flight. To avoid the need to valve helium, several innovative solutions were proposed. One involved a set of inner hydrogen gas cells to be installed at center of 14 of the ship’s 16 helium cells. The flammable hydrogen would be protected inside the larger cell containing inert helium, and when it was necessary to valve lifting gas, hydrogen, rather than helium, could be released. When it became obvious that helium would not be made available by the Americans, and that the ship would be inflated with hydrogen, the inner cells were abandoned, but Hindenburg did retain the axial catwalk at the center of the ship that was installed to provide access to the valves for these inner cells."

Is it possible to make a heavier than air aircraft with terrible enough surface area to weight and power ratios that it will make a blimp seem easy to control in bad weather? Sure, I guess. I wasn't saying you couldn't if you read my comment - I was saying you can make a heavier than air aircraft with a LOWER surface area to weight/power, unlike lighter than air aircraft, so you can avoid being knocked around as much, have less drag, etc. Heavier than air craft are far more versatile in general. You can never get a lighter than air craft to an overall density higher than air by definition, and that is hugely limiting. A 50 foot wide balloon (r=25ft), would have a surface area of 7853 square feet (729 m^2) if an ideal sphere. If you add up all of the wing and control surfaces on a 757 [https://www.b757.info/boeing-757-200-specifications/], you get 3992 square feet. Add another several thousand for the fuselage, and you're probably in the same ballpark. The balloon you're talking about has a volume (assuming a perfect sphere, r=25ft) of 65,449 cubic feet (1853 m^3). Per [https://www.airships.net/helium-hydrogen-airships/], that seems to pencil out at around 4000 lbs of lift for helium, and 4500 lbs of lift for hydrogen (in 'real world' situations), add 20% to be closer to ideal. Or 2.5m^3 of gas per square meter of surface area. But the literal maximum amount of lifting force you can get is 1.01kg/m^3 with helium and 1.2kg/m^3 with hydrogen. That really isn't much lift…

Hydrogen fuel cells on a hydrogen blimp make a remarkably decent amount of sense. I'm not sure if this is quite whats being implied, but I can definitely see loading up supplies, floating to a disaster area, dropping supplies, & spending a while acting as a power station as useful & sensible. This particular mission cycle involves dropping a bunch of cargo before starting to burn your float/power reserves, which makes consuming your float sound less crazy. Not sure how these things work, but alternatively, if it's fixed volume, you're not even consuming your float: you're trying to pull vacuum where you had gas. Not sure how do-able that is! Hydrogen zeppelins could also works around one of the unfortunate down-sides of a potential hydrogen economy, which is that typically one has to (non-recoup-erably) pour a bunch of energy into making the hydrogen one is generating transportable/compressed: here there's a balloon one can fill effortlessly. Attach a hose & open a hatch in the bottom. The article talks about the current fuel cell systems only being 250kW (equal to ~336 HP). For reference, the Hindenberg (unforunate reference point but whatever) used 4 x 890 kW (1200 HP) diesel engines. It does make me think an airship would be absolutely drinking the heck out of it's own float to move, but hopefully the cruise demands are much much lower. Ah, ok: this page[1] alleges the cruise power was 610 kW / 820 HP. Could be worse! [1]…

You post made me wonder about a lot > Unfortunately, the MHC proteins are themselves a highly reactive antigen thahttps://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/t triggers the immune system. Luckily, the body learns during a process called "negative selection" to cull any immune cell receptors that recognize your own MHCs: This is very interesting that this process is split into two separate domains / privilege levels. That way you can't have a fork bomb that would overwhelm the MHC production process. > Unfortunately, your body doesn't know the shape of MHC proteins from donor tissue and can't learn to kill any TCRs that match. Maybe we'll combat this in the future by finding a way to donate or genetically engineer a whole bone from the organ donor, thus having bone marrow matching the donated organ. If we could get localized immune suppression on only those parts, that would be cool. I guess those leukocytes would be attacked immediately. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination Wow.