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Airships / Blimps / Dirigibles (Lighter-Than-Air Craft)

This story must be a classic of forgotten history. An absolute sizzler!
They didn't just look like sausage skins. :lol:
Wurst luck – how Zeppelins hit German sausage-eaters

Quantity of cow intestines used in manufacturing airships was so enormous that making of sausages was temporarily outlawed in Germany
The Guardian, Sam Jones. 23 August 2013

Although Winston Churchill dismissed them as "enormous bladders of combustible and explosive gas" before the first world war began, the leviathans that loomed out of the night skies to drop their bombs on England nearly a century ago exploded the illusion of civilian safety on the home front for ever.

To millions of sausage-starved Germans, however, Zeppelins were perhaps less harbingers of a new kind of warfare than colossal reminders of the culinary sacrifices required by the fatherland.

According to a new documentary, the quantity of cow intestines used in manufacturing the airships was so enormous – and the military appetite for the dirigibles so strong – that the making of sausages was temporarily outlawed in Germany and allied or occupied parts of Austria, Poland and northern France.

With the guts from more than 250,000 cows needed to produce the bags that held the hydrogen gas in each Zeppelin, the German war machine had to choose between long-range bombing and wurst. It chose the former.

A document prepared in 1922 for the US National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics shows just how important cow guts – also known as goldbeater's skins – were to the military effort.

"The collection of the goldbeater's skins was very systematic in Germany during the war," it reads. "Each butcher was required to deliver the ones from the animals he killed. Agents exercised strict control in Austria, Poland and northern France, where it was forbidden to make sausages."

Dr Hugh Hunt, a senior lecturer in engineering at Cambridge University who looked into the airships for the Channel 4 programme, Attack of the Zeppelins, said he was as surprised as anyone by the intestinal and legal revelations.

"Everybody's been interested in the sausages," he said. "But without supplies from their allies, Germany wouldn't have had enough sausage skins."

To understand exactly how the guts were used, Hunt and his colleagues visited a Middlesbrough factory to see how sausage skins are made. It was there that they realised that by wetting the skins, stretching them and allowing them to dry again, they could be bonded to make perfect hydrogen holders.

His professional curiosity, however, was more drawn to the physical strengths and weaknesses of the giant airships than to questions of bovine supply and demand.

"The most interesting thing is that you would have thought that a big bag of hydrogen would be easy to shoot down and set light to," he said. "But for the best part of a year and a half, it was impossible to shoot Zeppelins down. They built 140 of these enormous airships over that period and it was only at the very end of that – towards the end of the war in 1917 – that we finally worked out how to shoot them down."

Hunt also discovered that some of the credit for finding the best way to down the dirigibles is owed to his great uncle, Jim Buckingham, the designer of the incendiary bullet. The British eventually realised that the resilient airships could be destroyed by firing explosive bullets to breach the skin and allow the hydrogen to mix with oxygen, and then following up with incendiary bullets to create an explosion.

"I remember my father talking about an Uncle Jim who had worked on tracer bullets later, in world war two, but for some reason I had never made the connection," he said.

"It wasn't until I was chatting to my cousin about it that it clicked, and I realised that we were talking about the same person."

After hours spent researching the Zeppelins – which were dispatched on bombing raids that killed 1,500 people between 1915 and 1917 – Hunt feels hydrogen-filled airships would eventually have proved popular, safe and effective had interest in them not ended with the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. He also takes issue with Churchill's uncharitable appraisal of the Zeppelin.

"I think that's fine in principle but in practice, they're not explosive at all," he said. "I think it was a bit of a soundbite."

Attack of the Zeppelins is on Channel 4 at 8pm on 26 August
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http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/23/wurst-zeppelins-german-sausage
 
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Hooray! I want to travel on it.

World's longest aircraft unveiled in UK
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26372277

The longest aircraft in the world has been unveiled at an airfield in Cardington, England, from where the great airships of the 1920s flew.

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Originally developed for the US military, the helium-filled hybrid Airlander project was scrapped owing to budget cuts.

Now the giant aircraft is being brought back to life by a British company which plans to build hundreds of the environmentally friendly craft for passengers and cargo.

BBC News visited the headquarters of Hybrid Air Vehicles in a massive hangar at Cardington to see the inflatable leviathan being put together.

Stop/Start is a series of video features for the BBC News website which follows both new trends that are beginning and old traditions that are coming to an end.
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Just down the road from me.
 
I travel past those hangers often. They're impressive, like relics from a more majestic age.
 
Those sheds are immense. There's room for two of those airships in one of those things. The Airlander, the longest aircraft in the World today, is 300 ft long. The R100 was just over 719 ft long and the R101 ended up at 777ft long.
 
Long article:

Airships: is the Titanic of the skies about to rise again?
The British-made Airlander 10 is the world’s biggest aircraft and most advanced airship, and the countdown to her maiden domestic flight is approaching
By Neil Tweedie
7:10AM BST 16 Apr 2014

....

This article has already failed a test set by Mike Durham, Britain’s foremost designer of airships. “I’m going to give a prize to the first journalist to write about this project without mentioning the Hindenburg,” he says. “I’m sure I won’t have to award one.” 8)

Mr Durham is talking about the huge, white, whale-like creature behind him in Cardington’s Number One Hangar. At last, the spiritual home of British airship-building is back in business.
At 300 ft long, the Airlander 10 is the world’s biggest aircraft and its most advanced airship. A creation that could one day revolutionise aviation, it is, amazingly in this day and age, made in Britain.

“The technological problems with airships that have stopped them ruling the skies have been gradually ticked off,” says Mr Durham, technical director of Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), which makes the Airlander. “Advances in materials, avionics and aerodynamic design mean that we have overcome the lion’s share of these obstacles. This craft is part airship, part aircraft and part hovercraft. We have taken the best aspects of each machine and combined them in one hyper-efficient vehicle. Let me tell you, this isn’t the Hindenburg.”

The Airlander 10 is not an airship in the classical sense, in that the (non-inflammable) helium within its envelope supplies just 60 per cent of its lift, the other 40 per cent being provided by its wide, wing-shaped hull. The craft therefore requires a rolling start to get airborne, but can land without having to be dragged down to earth by large groups of people. Its cushion undercarriage means it can touch down on the sea, tundra, anything.

The prototype will make its maiden flight in Britain later this year and is intended to be the first in a family of airships that could one day carry hundreds of tons of cargo point to point, requiring no runway and costing far less to operate than a conventional aircraft or helicopter.

“This test vehicle can lift 10 tons but we can easily scale up,” says Mr Durham, who designed aircraft and satellites for British Aerospace before catching the airship bug a quarter of a century ago.
A future design called Airlander 50 will lift 50 tons of cargo, five times more than a Chinook helicopter, but costing less. And while a typical military helicopter needs two days of maintenance out of every seven, the Airlander requires one day a month. The new airship is also friendly to the environment, doing the same job as a conventional aircraft on a quarter of the fuel.
“A lot of people think we could destroy the transport helicopter market,” says HAV spokesman Chris Daniels. “This is a disruptive technology, a development that could snatch away business from the conventional aviation industry.”

...

The Airlander’s hull is made from super-strong fibres developed for the sails of America’s Cup yachts. A four inch-wide strip can support a family car. “Materials technology had to come of age before you could make this kind of aircraft,” says Mr Durham. “Vectran, which is one of the materials we use, is similar to Kevlar.”

...

“The other plus is that it can run on just one of its four engines. In the extremely unlikely event it lost all its engines, the effect would be rather less dramatic than on a Boeing 747 – it would simply glide down to earth.”

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/greene ... again.html
 
They do really seem to be tackling the biggest problem with large airships, which is their vulnerability near or on the ground. Most airship accidents actually happend at very low altitude or they were destroyed by high winds when moored.
 
Isn't one of the problems with airships the fact that helium is a finite resource on Earth? I've read that at current usage, helium supply will last maybe 50 years or so.

It's main use seems to be cryogenics for superconducting electromagnets such as are used in the Large Hadron Collider, MRI scanners.

From Wiki
According to helium conservationists like Robert Coleman Richardson, the free market price of helium has contributed to "wasteful" usage (e.g. for helium balloons). Prices in the 2000s have been lowered by U.S. Congress' decision to sell off the country's large helium stockpile by 2015.According to Richardson, the current price needs to be multiplied by 20 to eliminate the excessive wasting of helium. In their book, the Future of helium as a natural resource (Routledge, 2012), Nuttall, Clarke & Glowacki (2012) also proposed to create an International Helium Agency (IHA) to build a sustainable market for this precious commodity.
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We'll think of something else :)

I've more faith in the inventiveness of the human race than those who keep wailing we will run out of this and that. There's a big universe out there, it will take a very long time for us to use it all up, especially as there is the possibllity of finding parts that generate new matter. (White holes).

It won't be in my lifetime, which is a pity, but we will eventually reach the stars unless we wipe ourselves out in wars first. Running out of natural resources seems to be a much lesser threat than humankind's periodic lust for violent confrontation.
 
Cochise said:
... Running out of natural resources seems to be a much lesser threat than humankind's periodic lust for violent confrontation.
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Wars are easier than controlling our greed.
 
ramonmercado said:
Plenty of helium on the moon.
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Is there? I didn't know that. Maybe if the airship idea takes off then we'll get space exploration going sooner than I thought.

At a tangent, it is very hard to get any sort of alternative technology going.

I'm seriously impressed by the Russian ekranoplans, which would seem ideal load carriers for short-haul like across the Channel or on the Great Lakes, but there seems no interest in them in the west, and development has ceased in Russia too. If I was a multi-millionaire I'd be tempted to start an ekranoplan shipping line.
 
Cochise said:
ramonmercado said:
Plenty of helium on the moon.
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Is there? I didn't know that.
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It's Helium-3, apparently.
Mind you, there is no real proof that there are vast reserves of it all over the moon.
 
Helium is the second-most common element in the universe, so we shouldn't really run out of it, assuming that we can gain access to the resources on the rest of the solar system. For the moment, most helium is extracted from oil and gas wells, so we should stop flaring gas off on the oil rigs.

The helium on the Moon is very thinly spread, so we wouldn't get much there. It may be economically viable to mine lunar helium if we can get the isotope He3 for use in fusion reactors, but that is a much more profitable use of the gas than filling balloons.
 
eburacum said:
Helium is the second-most common element in the universe, so we shouldn't really run out of it, assuming that we can gain access to the resources on the rest of the solar system.
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The problem with helium is that it escapes out into space, where it loses its concentration. It's not particularly reactive, so it can't be trapped here by reacting it with other elements (hydrogen is trapped here on Earth because it has chemically bound with other elements). The only reason why any helium is here at all on Earth is because it is trapped underneath an impermeable layer of rock, stopping it from percolating out into space.

So...it being a common element in the Universe isn't particularly useful to us.
 
Mythopoeika said:
eburacum said:
Helium is the second-most common element in the universe, so we shouldn't really run out of it, assuming that we can gain access to the resources on the rest of the solar system.
Click to expand...

The problem with helium is that it escapes out into space, where it loses its concentration.
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Helium doesn't escape to space as fast as hydrogen, though. All we need to trap it is more gravity, which we can find on Jupiter and Saturn.
A gas giant is a massive planet with a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_giant#Description
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And we've sent several space-craft out there already. It's probably not past the wit of man to devise some means of 'mining' the jovian atmosphere - the hydrogen would be good rocket fuel, with the helium a useful by-product!
 
How would you get anywhere near a planet like that without getting sucked down into its gravity well? Or being killed by hard radiation?
I guess you could send a robot ship in a fast orbit round the planet, and put down a very long pipe to suck some of the atmosphere...but that would create a huge engineering challenge.
 
A bit of forgotten history...
A curious British airship experiment
By Justin Parkinson BBC News Magazine
_80904189_r100.jpg


Britain was seen to lag behind other countries during the global airship-building race of the 1920s and 1930s. But a quirky scientific experiment 85 years ago briefly gave a boost to the image of the giant aircraft.
As airship R100 crossed the Atlantic on its maiden voyage, the captain stuck his arm out of the window. In his rubber-gloved hand was a round piece of glass.
Every three hours during the trip from England to Canada, Squadron Leader Ralph Sleigh Booth, or another member of the 44-man crew, repeated the action, for five minutes at a time.

A couple of thousand feet below, a passenger on a steam ship heading in the same direction, Lester Dillon Weston, watched with great interest through a telescope pushed through his porthole. Booth was carrying out an experiment aimed at ensuring the human race could continue to feed itself. The piece of glass was a Petri dish designed to pick up spores released by a fungus known as wheat rust, which had destroyed large areas of crops in North America.

Cambridge University scientist Dillon Weston - a man with a passion for aviation - was keen to find out whether spores could cross the Atlantic. He decided to use airships, still at the experimental stage as passenger craft, to aid his research.
"It wasn't just Dillon Weston who benefited from this," says Ruth Horry, a researcher at Cambridge University's history and philosophy of science department. "People were suffering a sort of airship fatigue in Britain. The government had spent lots of money on developing them and nothing seemed to be coming out of it.
"So the fact they could be used to aid scientific endeavour was very useful for publicity. That's why the captain took part in the experiment. It was excellent PR." :cool:

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31291791
 
The monster airships that could carry 66 tonnes
Watch the world’s largest aircraft in the video above.
Could the airship be finally ready for a comeback?

In 2013, the Aeros Corporation, based near San Diego, demonstrated a tethered flight of Dragon Dream – an airship measuring 90m (295ft) long and 27m wide.

As big as this airship is, it is still only small prototype – the final design could be more than 169m long and be able to carry a cargo of 66 tonnes.

In the video above, BBC Click's Spencer Kelly finds out what it takes to build an airship on this humungous scale.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150828-the-monster-airships-that-could-carry-66-tonnes?ocid=twfut

Vid at link.
 
The Army made clear last year that its pair of massive spy blimps designed to float at 10,000 feet and scan the skies for air and missile threats would “be tethered to the ground at all times.”

But the service should have known not to make such a definitive assurance. Wednesday’s incident in which one of its pair of "aerostats" came loose at a base north of Baltimore isn’t the first time the Army has tried to get control of the runaway project.

In 2010, high winds caused a commercial blimp at a facility in North Carolina to “break loose,” as the Pentagon’s inspector general put it, crashing into an Army blimp and destroying it. That collision was just one in a series of mishaps for a $2.8 billion program that’s suffered from cost increases and performance issues and is now a national laughingstock as Twitter users and cable-news outlets marvel over how one became untethered — forcing the Pentagon to scramble two F-16 fighter jets and the FAA to reroute some airline flights before the large white dirigible came down in Pennsylvania farmland, taking down power lines with it.

The latest incident could be the death knell for the Raytheon-built Army spy blimps — formally called the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, or JLENS — a program that was already on life support after years of problems.

The whole situation kind of speaks for itself,” a congressional aide who’s tracked the program closely offered in a candid assessment. “The program had a previous accident with another blimp that was destroyed due to bad weather, so a second incident would seem to suggest that ‘system reliability’ may be wee bit of a problem.”

The North American Aerospace Defense Command announced Wednesday one of its two JLENS systems tethered high above Maryland had “detached” from its mooring station at Aberdeen Proving Ground, an Army testing facility. The blimp drifted to Pennsylvania, before coming down in a rural county.

The embarrassing mishap was nearly two decades in the making.



Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/defense-blimp-flying-loose-215272#ixzz3puZGlHr5
 
I guess this can go here:
Google's Project Loon internet balloons to circle Earth
By Leo Kelion Technology desk editor

Google believes it is on course to have enough internet-beaming balloons in the stratosphere to form a ring over part of the world next year.
It told the BBC the move would let it trial a continuous data service to people living below the balloons' path.

The declaration coincides with the announcement that three of Indonesia's mobile networks intend to start testing Project Loon's transmissions next year.
One expert said the plan had benefits over other solutions.

Sri Lanka previously signed a separate agreement signalling its wish to be another participant in the giant helium balloon-based scheme.

Google first revealed its superpressure balloon plan in June 2013, when about 30 of the inflatable plastic "envelopes" were launched from New Zealand.
Beneath each lighter-than-air balloon are hung:
  • two radio transceivers to receive and send data streams, plus a third back-up radio
  • a flight computer and GPS location tracker
  • an altitude control system, which is used to move the balloon up and down to find winds that will take it in the desired direction
  • solar panels to power all the gear
The original set-up provided 3G-like data speeds, but the kit can now supply connected devices with about 10 megabits a second to connected devices via antennae on the ground. For comparison's sake, the average 4G connection in the UK is 15Mbit/sec.

There have also been other advances.
"In the early days, the balloons would last five or seven or 10 days. Now we have had balloons that have lasted as long as 187 days," Mike Cassidy, vice-president of Project Loon, told the BBC.

"We've also improved the launch process.
"It used to take 14 people an hour or two to launch a balloon, now with an automated crane we can launch a balloon every 15 minutes with two or three people."
If all goes according to plan, he added, the experiment should achieve one of its goals in 2016.
"[We need] about 300 balloons or so to make a continuous string around the world," he explained.
"As one moves along with the wind out of range, another one comes to take its place.
"We hope next year to build our first continuous ring around the world, and to have some sort of continuous coverage for certain regions.
"And if all goes well after, then after that we will start rolling out our first beta commercial customers."

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34660205

This loony project seems like a waste of helium, a non-renewable resource. Told you Google is evil!
 
Helium Dreams
A new generation of airships is born.
BY JEANNE MARIE LASKAS

Igor Pasternak started thinking about airships when he was twelve. Back then, in the nineteen-seventies, he loved rockets. One night, he was curled up in the soft green chair that doubled as his bed, in the two-room apartment where he lived with his parents, his little sister, and his grandmother, in the city of Lviv, in western Ukraine. He was reading a magazine aimed at young inventors, and he came across an article about blimps. He saw old photographs of imposing wartime zeppelins and read about another kind of airship, which had never made it off the drawing board: an airship that carried not passengers but cargo. It would be able to haul hundreds of tons of mining equipment to remote regions in Siberia in one go, the article said—no roads, runways, or infrastructure needed. Just lift, soar, and drop.

Igor wondered what the holdup was. He read the article again and again. He spent the summer in the library, studying the history and the aerodynamic principles of blimps. One day, on the way there, he looked into the sky, and the emptiness seized him.

Where are all the airships? he asked himself. The world needs airships.
.
His parents, civil engineers, thought that he would move on to more practical interests. Instead, Igor drew pictures and worked on equations. In high school, he formed an airship club and was invited to present his designs to a gathering of aerospace engineers in Moscow; at Lviv National University, where he studied civil engineering, he established an airship-design bureau. By 1986, he had started a business manufacturing tethered blimps for advertising—one of the first private aerospace companies permitted under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/a-new-generation-of-airships-is-born
 
I'm glad that thing never flew.
 
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