December 21st, 2012 The Age of Airships?

So the world did not end yesterday. I imagine, like the rest of you, I was not surprised that nothing happened. However, I should state that I did want to believe that something would happen; Jesus comes down and saves us all, Man-Eating Reptilians from planet X invade or some such nonsense. As such, I was perhaps mildly disappoint that seemingly nothing happened, but again, not surprised.

I guess, I think it would be cooler to live in a world with dragons, and epic adventures like in the Lord of the Rings, then it is to live in the world we currently live in, which is filled with a lot of pain and suffering, and not a whole lot of fun for the underclasses.

So it was just perfect this morning to wake up and find, that for me at lest, the Mayan prophecy came true in a very personal way, but in a way that effects us all. As you know, I'm a huge fan of airships, their like my favorite thing. Something about having a ship that can fly appeals to me greatly. It offers that same kind of feeling of adventure that one might get if we lived in a world with dragon slayers or something cool like that. You can go anywhere, land anywhere, and take all your belongings with you, thus, allowing you to live a whole different kind of lifestyle, that is unimaginable without such capabilities.

That's just so fantastic that the only place Airships have existed, aside from small blimps here or there in the last 50 years, is in fantasy video games mostly. If your a regular reader you know this has been changing for quit some time now, and we are now living in the world where the fantasy of having a ship that can fly is becoming reality!

So what happened yesterday and what's it all got to do with airships and the Mayans? Aero's the company building the highly anticipated Aeroscraft, which has what could be called the holy grail of airship technology, completed it's prototype and it's now ready for flight testing.

Check out their facebook announcement: Link

I think it's just perfect that Aero's completes their prototype on December 21st, 2012, because for me personally, I can now say the Mayan's were right!

3 second off astrological clocks, I knew you wouldn't fail me!

And just like Cortez where they still argue whether he fulfilled that prophecy (Which is a fact, Cortez did fulfill the prophecy.) People just don't like to admit he fulfilled the prophecy, because they understood how his technology worked, and thus to them, he was not a god. Yet the effect was the same, what the prophecy predicted, and what Cortez accomplished, it was the same thing, thus wasn't the prophecy fulfilled?

The Aeroscraft is much the same, it's a technology that we understand, so there's no magic about it, Yet 15 years ago, the idea of having an airship that could hull 20 tons of anything, land anywhere, control ballets, go for 3000miles on one tank of gas, need no ground crew, etc. It was unthinkable, and it existed only in minds of children's fantasy and the drawing boards of visionaries like Roger Munk, where it was believe it would remain forever. So if we look at it from the prospective of people 15 years ago, it really is magic, from that prospective, because it was unthinkable! Yet, now it's reality! It's so real you can tuch it.

So even if the Native Americans didn't understand that Cortez had technology like cannons and that's why he could shoot fire from the sky and blow up houses, that didn't matter to those people, because to them the effect was the same, he was a god, it didn't matter to them ether way because even if you didn't call him a god, they still had to deal with his god like powers. And just like those Native Americans, people 15 years ago thought Airships where just a bad idea, good for fantasy, football, and nothing more. Now, the fantasy has become reality, and the effect is no different from magic in my opinion. That's at lest, the way I see it.

Airship Outlook: Hybrid's no good for spying.

Unfortunately the military seems to be in a sad state these days. Military contractors always do one of two things, they overstate the capabilities and expected delivery of their product or they undercut the projected costs to fractions of the real costs that ultimately the taxpayer ends up paying. Everything is made by the contractor that overstates their product's capabilities and flat out lies about the costs to the point of fraud. It would seem telling the truth about your product's capabilities and real costs to develop said capabilities is a type of ritual suicide in the defense world, and thus never happens.

LEMV now unfortunately appears to be one such endeavor. MAV6 had posted a scientific study about the likelihood that LEMV would be able to stay in the air for 21 days on their blog. The study concluded that LEMV was unlikely to stay in the air even 5 days and that the Blue Devil 2 was more likely to achieve it's projected 6 to 7 days because it was a traditional LTA craft. It did state that Hybrid Airships would still be undoubtedly better at cargo operations then LTA airships but the stated 21 day surveillance was highly questionable because there would never be enough fuel to carry the fuel needed to stay in the air for 21 days.

Well, now LEMV is apparently 6 tons overweight, and somehow, as if by magic, this changes it's projected operational duration from 21 days to 3 or 4 days (Source: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/blimp/)

This seems to be rather convenient, especially when we consider that the real projections done by a scientist concluded that the 21 day endurance was probably the result of inflating the blimp with super-powered-ego-particals created by Northrup broad members. This indicates to me that Northrup lied to get the contract in the first place.

This is a clear and present danger to the United States Of America. We now live in a country where government contractors who lie are rewarded for their lies and government contractors who tell the truth are shown the door. When do the higher ups in the military plan to correct this problem? Shouldn't there be some type of good conduct initiative? Where contractors who live up to their contracts are rewarded with more contracts and contractors who don't are penalized by not participating in the next set of contracts?

I have been critical of the military for picking the Grumman/HAV team over the Lockheed team because Lockheed already had a working prototype that was much bigger then the Grummen/HAV team. They also showed a great amount of initiative by building the prototype P-791 on their own dime. Realisticly the Army should have picked Lockheed, but because Grummen had overinflated their projections to something beyond reality, Grumman won the contract. And now we are paying the price.

The Army is thinking of flying LEMV at 16,000ft where it might be able to stay up for 16 days. But I would not count on the 16KW of electrical power for that whole time, something tells me they probably got that one wrong too.

Fortunately this is not a deathblow for the airship program as a whole. Hybrid airships are still the most efficient option for transporting air-cargo, they just aren't as good at surveillance as the military had hoped for. And when we consider the ever growing police state we now live in, that might not be a bad thing.

Aeroscraft has a retractable cockpit.

A new article in BBC came out about the Aeroscraft that has some facts I was unaware of. Interestingly enough the Aeroscraft has a retractable gondola that holds the cockpit. This explains some design flaws I had thought existed in the Aeroscraft that can now be explained away.

My Sky Tug

I am most definitely an Airship enthusiast. So much so that when no simulator out there has a hybrid Airship to train with, and it should, I take it upon myself to rectify that.

X-plane if you don't know is an aviation simulator that uses blade element theory to figure out how any given object will fly. It has a lot more bugs then Flight Simulator X due to a smaller development team, but what it can do that FSX can't is tell you how any object is going to fly based solely on it's physical dimensions, it's a very nice drafting tool for aerospace engineers, and it's a good simulator for training too.

Usually, I have found, that one dose not need to get into aircraft development in order to fly almost whatever they want in X-plane, as almost every aircraft that one can imagine has been made for X-plane by someone somewhere.

However, I found there to be an exception to this rule, and that's when it comes to airships. There is probably something like 3000 to 10,000 Airship enthusiasts world wide. This is defiantly noticeable when one tries to dig up historical records on airships only to find that barely anyone cares enough to keep these records intact and assembled, save a few museums and even they have trouble getting all the information. Airships are already part of the niche world of aviation enthusiasts, and thus represent a niche within a niche. So if your reading this blog, you can pat yourself on the back knowing that you are a member of this small elite group of airship enthusiasts.

This I do believe will change in time, as the general public starts to realize the potential of emergent airship technology and just how easy these ships are to fly. However in the mean time, pilots need simulators to train with new hybrid airships, and before I made this Sky Tug for X-plane 9.7, the only option was the dynalifter to train pilots in hybrid airship technology. This was good for demonstrating the advantages of the Hybrid Airship concept, but it did not have all the capabilities that airships like LEMV, Sky Tug and the Aeroscraft have or will have, namely VTOL capabilities.

So after a year or so of on and off development I have finally completed my Hybrid Airship to a point where I do consider it complete. It's based on Lockheed Martins Sky Tug concept which I am somewhat in love with when I look at the picture in my last post.

You can download it here:http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=20206 (Link Works Again 7/30/2014)

You need X-Plane 9 or 10 to run it, but it will also work with the demo. If your thinking about buying X-plane 10, I would hold off until they fix more of the bugs. It's had a rocky development cycle.

Edit: You can no longer get this airship from the Org as I have been banned, but you can get it here

Edit:The Sky Tug now has it's own website at www.skytug.webs.com

SkyTug Still Tugging Along

I was reading this article that was mostly talking about Aero's is aeroscraft and how that project is coming along nicely. But at the end of the article they had an update about Lockheed Martin's Sky Tug airship that I had thought was full of hot air at this point. Apparently it's still on track to be finished by the end of this year, and start it's FAA certification process.

This is great news as the Sky Tug is completely designed for non-violent, non-Big Brother type Cargo Transportation Missions. It's a peace time going airship which can't really be used for empire expansion or enforcing a police state as effectively as it will excel at reducing the cost of air cargo transportation, humanitarian aid, search and rescue, air cranes, and other peaceful missions.

This, in a way, was a long standing dream of the father of aviation, Alberto Santos-Dumont who envisioned that his technology would bring about world peace by rendering international borders and trade disputes irrelevant. That unfortunately never happened during Dumont's lifetime, but perhaps his dream was more prophecy then fantasy? Who knows what wonders this easy access to the 3ed dimension will bring, world peace?

Only time will tell...

Aeroscraft Update

Interesting story in the Los Angele's times about the Aeroscraft, with video.

Populer Mechanics has some nice shots of LEMV

Check them out.

No Commitments to Build any Airships from Arctic Workshop

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like any companies made any deals to fund airship projects for Alaska at this years workshop (Source.) Everyone who attended the meeting agreed that Airships were an ideal solution for many of the problems facing Alaska's transportation network, however no one seemed willing to spend money to fund airship projects in-order to address these issues, and no big announcements were made.

It seems to me that the fundamental problem here is the economic situation. It's simply not a good time to make risky investments, and airships are undoubtedly a risky investment. This is very unfortunate, because although the technology has come a long way and is now ready for wide spread use, the economic situation has the potential to keep this technology from taking off.

If the economic situation doesn't improve soon, not only will it increase the likelihood that airships will never get off the ground, but we could be headed for a complete and utter economic meltdown, which wouldn't be good for anyone. Lets keep our fingers crossed and our minds focused on the prize, hopefully this will all blow over real soon.

Alaskan Airship workshop this week

This week Alaska will yet again host a workshop for the development of Airships to haul cargo in the undeveloped northern regine.

This workshop will be critical to the devlopment and widespread useage of Airship technology in the future as it is an area of the world where there seems to be no other practical form of transportation other then airships for delivering cargo. If Airships can't get a foothold in Alaska then they cannot get a foothold anywhere and this would surely be detrimental to the future of Airships.

Lets hope we hear some real good news out of this workshop by the end of the week. Once a good ideas time has come, it usually doesn't go away.

LEMV has it's own Theme Song!

Not officially, but the song is called LEMV.

More LEMV Videos

Some more videos on LEMV have popped up on YouTube.

World Airship Race

CNN just did a story on a possible world airship race, The idea is to race blimps around the world. If we are truly at the dawn of the next Golden Age of Airships, maybe this could become an annual thing?

The Battle Blimp

Commenter jjames129 inquired as to why I think Hybrid Airships would be a better replacement for Helicopters in combat missions. I have actually been thinking about this topic for some time, as I have a passion for aviation technology both on and off the battlefield.

LEMV is really anything but ideal for combat missions. My feeling in my earlyer post was that if LEMV "somehow" got used in a combat extraction mission, as in, that was the only option at the time to save some Marines, and that it "somehow" proved that it was better at combat then helicopters, this would prove the concept of a "Battle Blimp" definitively. That's a rather unlikely scenario, but if it happened the military would probably order a small fleet of hybrid airships designed specifically for combat missions, which in turn would help bring down the price of Airships and usher in another golden age of airships that man has only dreamed about over the centuries.

However the reality is that LEMV is not ideal for these kinds of missions because it's not made for combat, but what if the military developed a true Battle Blimp? A Hybrid Airship designed to go head to head with tanks, airplanes, helicopters, infantry, you name it. What would this type of airship look like?

My idea is that an Airship like this would be based off Lockheed Martin's SkyTug design, but instead of carrying cargo in it's gondola, it would be a medium armored battle station with a tank like undercarriage on a swivel. This undercarriage would be a turret armed with a Bofors 40 mm anti-aircraft gun, a M61 Vulcan mini-gun and possibly some rockets. The Gondola itself would also have the ability to be able to deploy and redeploy troops out the back.

In this way, you are no longer asking for an airship with the ability to deploy tanks on the battlefield, instead the airship IS the tank and is already deployed on the battlefield.

The airship could also have M61's placed precariously on the outside of the ship to give it a full 360 degree force projection. These Vulcan cannons could be used to shoot down incoming rockets and airplanes like they do on Navy ships.

In this way you have a true Battle Blimp. Versatile like a helicopter, devastating like an AC-130, endurance like a drone, and durability like a ship. A true game changer in this modern world of conflict, and ideal for winning the war in Afghanistan.

No longer would the military need to send convoys of tanks and troop transports to any one location, when they could send a few Battle Blimps loaded with troops that would reach the location, deploy the troops, provide over-watch with a much greater endurance then helicopters, and then pick up the troops and bring them back to base when the mission is accomplished.

Hybrid Airships have not been tested in combat, so there is the possibility that the Battle Blimp concept could go up in flames like the Hindenburg. But with no Hydrogen gas to ignite that seems unlikely. The real question is how much punishment can a Hybrid Airship take before it can't fly anymore? Given that it has four engines, and it can fly on one, and that bullet holes cause vertully no helium to escape. That a hybrid airship with engine's as powerful as those on the SkyTug can keep airborne without any helium in it's envelope at all (still inflated with air of course.) That RPGs bounce off because it's essentially a giant airbag, that the envelope is invisible to radar, that the engines don't give off a vary good thermal signatures for rockets to lock on to, that it's much quieter then a helicopter, and that...

I think there is a pretty good chance the Battle Blimp will be able to survive a hell of a lot more enemy fire then a typical helicopter. But the only way to find out is to build one and throw it into a combat situation.

So? From my prospective, why isn't the military building battle blimps? It's not like the Military hasn't been testing experimental equipment on the battlefield since the American revolution. Has helium really become that expensive?

More LEMV and no internet

 

This will probably be my last post for awhile. I have lost my internet connection and I do not know when I'm going to get it back. But hopefully it will be before the next big thing in airships happens... 

which might be real soon:

Army High Res Photos

The Army has some high resolution shots of LEMV in this article they did about the first flight.

Is this LEMV?

It's hard to determine if this is LEMV or an earlier prototype. Anyone have a clue?
My guess is that the Army would be unwilling to do test of this nature on it's first flight.

First Photo but from where?

Al.com has the first photo of LEMV from the army, but I can't find the source

First Footage of LEMV

LEMV is just too big not to be noticed and a family in New Jersey caught the thing on tape during it's first flight.

LEMV Flies! Will the Revolution Begin?

Aviation Week reported yesterday night, that on August 7th 2000 and 12 LEMV underwent it's madden flight out of Lakehurst New Jersey. No pictures or video as of yet, but this is the big moment we have all been waiting for. Finally the United States Military has a vehicle to prove of disprove airship technology in the 21st century, and on top of that, it's the worlds largest flying object.

Strangely enough this happened on the same day that Discovery Air ended it's deal with Hybrid Air Vehicles to build a fleet of 50 ton cargo variants of these airships. Discovery Air said in a statement "we remain excited about this technology's potential and intend to continue working with HAV to promote the commercialization of heavy lift hybrid air vehicles," So perhaps they are waiting to see what the Army dose with LEMV before they buy, all the more reason for us to show our support of LEMV.

LEMV really couldn't have picked a better time (save last year) to take it's madden flight, as NASA had just completed one the most crazy and intense rover landings on the planet mars in human history. On top of that, American's are winning at the Olympics not only in terms of total gold medal count, but in producing the best Olympic athlete in known human history; Micheal Phelps. With all these reasons to be prideful to be an American it is likely that the US Economy will see a measure of rebound, which in turn is good for the Airship business as investors will be more likely to invest in airship technology. Blue Devil Block 2 recently got caned by the Airforce when it was only 95% complete. With LEMV coming out at such an opportune time, maybe the Airforce will consider spending the last 5 million needed to finish the 148 million dollar airship.

But even if that doesn't happen, LEMV is the flagship for proving or disproving the hybrid airship concept that the military will use to judge all future efforts that it invests in airship technology. If LEMV should explode in a ball of fire for no good reason, then the airship industry will most likely never recover, and it will mark the true death for airships as we will be more likely to see anti-gravity technology take hold before anyone is willing to invest in airship technology, and by then it will be too late.

On the other hand, if LEMV should happen to be so lucky as to be used in combat for extracting troops form a hostile environment, and happens to prove it is well suited for combat extraction missions because of it's near invonrability to bullets and Rocket Propeller Grenades. Hybrid Airships could quickly become the military's new best friend complementing or replacing helicopters for the same roles.

Given what good things have happened to us Amaricans in the last few weeks, I feel very optimistic about the future. These big old blimps will revolutionize the way we get around. And although things might seem grim now for the people of earth, the cavalry is coming. Airships have the power to revolutionize the cargo industry, and in-turn, raise the stranded of living for everyone on the planet. Just imagine this scenario, the United States could solves it's economic problems by building cargo hybrid airships for a new globule cargo transportation industry. Not only would it create high-tech good paying jobs, but it would help everyone on the planet get the supplies they desperately need.

This is indeed a great day for airship fans, but it just might be a great day for the world.

Airship Update

It seems things are going well in the airship world. LEMV is scheduled for first flight on the 5th or 7th of June. After that it will fly to Florida to pick up it's surveillance gondola and then head out to some Theater after that (hopefully not Occupy.)  Blue Devil is close to completion and it's first flight will probably take place around the same time. In a recent blog post the head of Mav6 vented his frustration with the Airforce on the continual snowballing of the Blue Devil Block 2 program and their resilience despite said fact. It appears that Blue Devil has come in about 40 million under budget, which when we take into consideration that most military contractors never live up to their promises and almost always go over budget, is no small feat.

Aeros is also getting Congressional funding and plans to have their prototype ML866 Aeroscraft ready by December. As you can see from the picture above they are on their way to reaching that goal.

If this pace keeps up Airships will be here sooner rather then later. Lets hope for the best!

Blue Devil Set for April Compleation?

Mav6 has it's own blog that provides very transparent details into the inter-workings of the Blue Devil Airship. Just after the Wired article was released Mav6 posted this on their blog, indicating that work is still underway on Blue Devil.

Oddly this news came out a day before Wired ran it's story that I posted about before, yet the post on Mav6's blog is dated just after Wired ran it's story. Could it be that Blue Devil is going to be completed before the air force gets a chance to scrap it? It makes sense to me that when something is so close to completion, why wouldn't one just finish it. Mav6 seems to employ an Out of the Box prospective when it comes to deference work. Usually if a contractor isn't being paid, they just stop working, particularly when it comes to defense contractors. Yet this might be an episode of a company's love for a big fat blimp. How could one let something as trivial as politics stop them from achieving their dreams?

The reasoning behind the termination of the Blue Devil Block 2 comes from inflated operational cost predictions made by the Airforce's Big Safar. They believe that, because of it's slow speed, Blue Devil will come under attack often and require constant repairs to continue operation. The problem is that this is a completely assumed cost based off no real world experience flying blimps over Afghanistan.

How many weapons dose the Taliban have that can reach 20,000 feet? I can defiantly see rebel forces shooting at an enemy spy blimp all day long from their encampments as part of the evenings entertainment. But at 20,000 feet the chances of them hitting it are about as good as a rampaging drunk shooting an apple to shreds from 3000 yards away with a sniper rifle. The bullets will go subsonic before they reach the blimp, greatly decreasing accuracy. And even if they do hit, the impact force will probably be so little they might just bounce off hall.

Heat seeking missiles don't work very well, because the heat signature from the engines is too low, and radar tracking missiles, which I doubt the Taliban has more then a few of,  don't work well ether because the radar signature is too little. It seems more likely that Big Safar inflated the projected operating costs because of some type of unclear bigotry toads this particular airship program. They tried to kill Blue Devil once already, so it's clear they have a grudge.

It would be nice if both LEMV and Blue Devil reached completion at relatively the same time, that way LEMV's advantages could be exemplified as it would be directly compared to more conventional airships with the same mission.

US Airforce spends 140 million to kick rocks.

The US Airforce has just cancelled Blue Devil Block 2. I know I said I didn't care for it but, can I really say I'm happy about this? What's the possibility that LEMV gets cancelled as well thanks to budget cuts and delays? And why didn't the Pentagon get it's act together to not wast 140 million on a project that offers no new benefits over conventional airship technology in the first place? Did they not even look at our past history with airship technology to know that conventional airships are plagued with problems?

The Hybrid Airship design is the future for all airship technology. That's just simple logic. Without some system of ballast control, conventional airships just don't work. They are hard to control, they can't hover, they're giant wind sails, and worst of all they have a chance to lose ballast control and fall out of the sky like the Macron or the Akron, or they can just go flying up into the sky until their balloons pop and then they come crashing down. Hybrids solve all these problems by using the shape of the hull like an airplane to maintain ballast control, which is what gives hybrids the edge they need to bring airship technology to the next level and become a powerhouse of economic growth and market stability. 

The Navy knows all about the intrinsic difficulties with airships from experience, but perhaps that is the problem; branches of the military not sharing information as they should. The Airforce has little experience with airships, so perhaps they where looking to outshine the Navy with the largest blimp they could make. The idea that they, of course, would somehow overcome all the problems that the navy could not solve. Why? Because they are better then the Navy, in their minds. So why would they ask the Navy for help?

This lack of ability for the American military branches to work with each other is a long standing problem in the US, and very well could be the death of this nation if we don't somehow fix it. Why can't we all just get past our own egos and work together? This ego-centric-mindedness is the real killer of this Nation, as much like in public school the military is filed with the ideology that one must be better then someone else when they are right, and to be wrong is to commit the "sin" of stupidity. Yet in the end, the Airforce ends up looking the bigger fool which is regrettable because it was probably just the arrogance of one or two bullheaded generals that screwed this whole thing up in the end, and now the entire Airforce must take the blame for it.

Hopefully we will learn from this. It's time for airship technology to reach new heights, and that path is clearly laid out in the Hybrid Airship design, not in the old ways of the old world. We must work together to survive and we must work together to thrive. If we keep on trying to be better then everyone else, without realizing that we all have different skill sets and we are all individuals, we aren't gonna make it. Respect and peace is the answer.