To be fair, blimps have all the same drawbacks you listed, yet they’re fairly stable with a mostly good safety and reliability record in recent decades. They’re largely impractical for other reasons such as the expense of storage, maintenance and the big ground crew, which would be exponentially larger for a rigid airship.
I got to ride in the Goodyear blimp once and it was pretty keen.
One thing I hadn’t thought about until boarding was that the pilot doesn’t have anything resembling a flight stick or yoke. Steering is done exclusively with rudder pedals, so most of the time you’re flying hands-free.
The Royal Navy flew them during the Korean War, one even shot down a Mig-15.
Later when they were retired from British service, some were sold to Cuba. During the revolution they became part of the Fuerza Aérea Revolucionaria, and during the Bay of Pigs attack, they successfully shot down several B-26’s.
So although they weren’t used in WW2, they fought on both sides of the ‘Cold’ War.
Really? It’s practically the only thing Canadian aircraft geeks talk about!
You’re right, it’s a bit like companies writing all product documentation in English now. It makes licensing and manufacturing way easier.
Last year I’ve visited neon museum in Warsaw and it was really cool, with incredible amount of neon signs from bygone era:
Sadly I’ll have to wait for pandemic to end, right now it would be irresponsible. I haven’t even visited any shopping centre or used public transport (I walk everywhere) since moving back to Warsaw.
I bet it’s probably easier to walk in an old city like Warsaw, since the place has been around well before cars even existed. Also, good exercise, too!
There’s one there, but it doesn’t do all that much. It adjusts pitch and roll, but the engine doesn’t have that much impact on rate of climb. Mostly, the yoke is needed only until the pilot has the blimp trimmed out.
If memory serves, thrust doesn’t do all that much, pitch control doesn’t do much either, and you control rate of climb/sink mostly with the ballonet.
I used to watch the blimps being tested in Goodyear, Arizona, back around about 1980 or so. Each one did some impressive ‘wallow about in the air’ manoeuvres, either because it was out of trim, or because the test program required qualification at unusual attitudes.
Their big drawback is that they need nearly calm winds. Otherwise, they have a way of simply getting blown backwards with their engines turning full blast.
There are applications for which dynastats or rotastats look as if they might be attractive, but nobody’s been really successful with them.
I believe that depends on the blimp model. Some of them definitely do have them, but I’m pretty sure this one did not. Had a conversation with the pilot about it, plus I can’t see one in the photos I have.
I really like public transport here too, my flat is near one of the tram loops so it’s before pandemic it was really easy to get everywhere. Driving a car on the other hand is horrible due to traffic and how aggressively other drive and I’m happy not owning one
Not much, if it was whole APU I’d start it just for fun, but like that it just sits on a shelf.
Both engineering and build quality is really impressive, especially how precisely cast the compressor is (probably some titanium alloy, but I’m now sure).
The build quality really dropped in the 90’s and never really improved after that. Before 80’s for military and aviation parts it was amazing. I have lots of Soviet and Polish aircraft instrumentation from 40’s to 70’s (like gyroscope and autopilot mentioned before), and it’s really clockwork quality (sometimes literally, like ruby bearings inside a pressure transducer). On the other hand products for civilian market were never really all that good.
Notice that his ship wants to float nose up in his shop? That is why you need multiple gas cells in a long rigid airship. The lifting gas is going to slosh around in the inner envelope. Subdividing the interior into shorter individual cells limits that. I tend to suspect that one of the probems with the R101 was that the loosened the netting between the frames to get space for a little more hydrogen, but that would allow more sloshing of the gas cells.
Yes, it did have a pitch wheel to control the elevator, although it didn’t require you to keep your hands on it most of the time. There was also some kind of non-joystick controls for the ballonets to adjust pitch. I really don’t think it had roll control though. Gravity and the location of the gondola pretty much handles that.
Fun fact: if you’ve got a bunch of helium filled balloons in the back of your car and quickly accelerate forward, the balloons will rush to the front of the car because the denser air want to go to the back. Physics is fun! I wonder how that phenomenon would affect a hypothetical high-performance jet-powered airship.
The pitch stability* problem with rigid airships is similar, to that of watercraft that have partially full tanks or have taken on water. Once the vehicle tilts the fluid flows to the lower side (the lifting gas flows to the higher side) and that tends to tilt it even more in that direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_surface_effect
as otherbrother pointed out, roll stability pretty much takes care of itself
There’s a reason blimps like that are limited to football games, tourism, and marketing though. They can only fly in ideal weather. That’s the whole problem and why they never worked as general transportation.
Every 10 years or so another start-up tries to revive the idea and leverage the one theoretical advantage of airships: extremely high lift-to-fuel-consumption ratio. Some engineer does the math on that, gets excited, starts a heavy lift cargo company around blimps or airships, and they never get past sea trials. Because it’s a fundamentally flawed idea and probably always will be.
Kind of beats what’s on my shelf: An attitude indicator from a Spitfire. Stenciled along its side is “HANDLE LIKE EGGS”.
(On my desk for a couple of years at work was a rather ‘handsome’ shaker table magnesium mounting tool; small, pyramidal in shape, and pocked with bolt holes: perfect for use as a pencil holder… which was how I used it. A shake n’ bake graybeard saw it one day and (not unkindly) suggested that it really, really belonged in a stockroom. Goodbye, fancy pencil holder.)
The aforementioned gang also noted that most of the Russian engineers they worked with were drunk.
Hahaha, guilty as charged. This is the aviation version of how every Canadian will tell you all the famous people who are Canadian within an hour of meeting you.
CoughCargoliftercough…
I wasn’t solvent at the time, otherwise I might have burned some money on this. Their brochures were spectacular.
(I guess that if you’d build an airship with enough engine power to handle strong winds you’d end up with a craft with so much power that it wouldn’t need any gas cells for lift… like a wingless helicopter or something like the Rotodyne. Or the world’s largest jetpack.)
Anyway, next time I’m in the area I’ll try to make some time to visit the tropical theme park in the converted hangar. That building is a really neat bit of civil engineering.
