Putin Pushes Plan for Airships in Siberia.

I remember that Igor Pasternak said that he is on Putin's bad list (a sad thing to hear), but love him or hate him both Igor and Putin seem to be on the same page when it comes to airships and their potential to exploit Siberia.

The sanctions and Russia Phobia Sentor McCain keeps spewing over the annexing of Crimea, may be justified, but I hardly feel this is a realistic long term strategy.

Now we must consider that Putin, Tyrant, Dictator, or Statesmen (however you feel,) is presenting a seriously good solution to Russia's highly inadequate infrastructure to further growth in Russia.

If we believe we are in the right, and we probably are, the USA needs to lead by example.

We really need to compete with Russia on this front. Instead of building more war machines to fight some hypothetical war that will only end with everyone on the face of the earth dead or dying, A better way is to win on a cultural level by providing more prosperity to the world at a better rate.

Putin is going to build a fleet of Hybrid Airships and they will give untold benefits to not just the Russian economy, but his friends and allies as well.

This includes Iran.

Think about it...

Do we really want the Muslim world to see Iran as a nation of prosperity with Flying Machines that would seem almost like magic to them, before they see us doing it first?

The Tech is sound, the plan is logical and we ~Need~ to be first.

We need to beat Russia culturally by building Bigger Airships with More Cargo capacity to impact the world on a cultural level and have a deeper impact on cultural affairs then they do.

The more Airships we fly and the bigger they are, the more the people of the world will see the US as a force that they should ally with, and the more they will listen to us in world affairs.

CO2 emissions go down, globule prosperity goes up and we all benefit.

On top of this it fulfills our geo-strategic goals as it's an effective weapons platform in and of itself.

The problems in Crimea will hopefully be solved by having more prosperity for all people globally, and airships allow us to do just that.

I'm not saying that the Annexing of Crimea was justified, the "election" hardly seemed fair, but trying to compete with Russia in another Cold War is just going to send both our economies into the tank even more, and that inevitably leads to war.

There is a better way.

We really need to start thinking about what's best for us as a globule citizen. Dictators and Tyrants will fade when the people are free to live their lives the way they see fit. And the only way for the people of the world to do that is with economic mobility.

Airships can do just this, and in a lot of ways fulfill the ideological destiny of freedom our nation was founded on.

Yes, Putin may be as bad as they say, but nobody I know today says Iraq is better off with Saddam gone.

We cannot compete with Russia Militarily, everyone will end up dead.

We can compete economically and culturally.

Hybrid Airships will allow us to do just that. We should do it.

Are Battle Blimps Practical Now?

I have a lot of ideas swirling around my head. Mostly around the idea I talked about in my last post about the Anarchistic Mobility of the Airship.

As you may or may not know, Airships are a highly durable platform on the battlefield. They can take a lot of bullets before they will lose any noticeable amount of helium. Hybrids are even more durable then that, because even if they lose a good amount of helium they can just point the nose higher to compensate for the loss of lift and keep flying.

I have pushed for the idea of the Government spending military funds on acquiring a Battle blimp in the past. But at the time, it was pointed out to me that the big problem would be in the maintenance costs of maintaining an envelope that keeps getting filled with holes on a regular basis.

No one questioned that it would be a good asset on the battlefield, but that it would be too costly to operate compared to an A-10C in the long run.

Well, as you may know from looking at my post about a week ago, Lockheed Martin has solved this issue with their spider repair bots. This make's me wonder, is the Hybrid Battle Airship feasible now?

I think the answer is, Yes!


These spider bots really open the door for allowing the envelopes of these blimps to take a beating and still grantee that a day or 2 later they will be back and ready to fight again with far cheaper maintenance costs.

This capability could allow the Military to transfer about 200 troops at a speed of 125 knots to an active war zone, maintain all the capabilities of an AC130 for CAS when they get there and, on top of that, it can have improved anti-air capabilities over the AC130 as it has more volume for defensive weapons compared to airplanes.

Combine this with it's extremely long loiter times and we are talking about a game changer in the way the a tactical battlefield is operated.

Plus operating costs are cheep, in the area of about $600-$2000 an hour to operate. Compare this to the $15,000 per hour cost of flying an A-10C and I think we can see why the Airship really is a game changer.

Right now the Air Force is talking about how they are going to replace the A-10c. In the game of close air support, it and the AC130 are sitting in the Kings Throne for keeping our solders alive when they are being suppressed by the enemy on the ground.

The Air Force has presented a plan of buying some A-29s for the short term and then building a whole new air frame or updating the A-10 or the OV-10 Branco. In fact the OV-10 has come out of retirement and been used in Afghanistan recently for CAS.

I do really like the idea of getting cheaper turboprop multi-role fighters like the A-29 or OV-10 with low operating costs to replace the A-10, but the Battle Blimp really represents a game changer and could make the whole process unnecessary if we invested in that over building a new air frame for CAS alone.

Still, I gotta admit, those A-29s look damn sexy to me:

Airlander 10 has Arrived!

At long last, Airlander 10 is out and about, ready for takeoff. It felt like Brexit woes might have slowed things down, but the political shock has passed, and the sky didn't fall...

Interesting how all these world changing events seems to happen around the same time. I think the explanation for this phenomenon lay in understanding the intricacies of fractal geometry; The cause and effect nature of reality.

Perhaps, in that sense Airlanders rise is symbolic for Brexit. The Airlander 10 takes to the skies with new capabilities, definitively it is a vehicle that can solve the problems of world hunger. What if Brexit is a manifestation on that same token? It was fundamentally after all, a question of freedom that was the deciding factor in the vote.

In areas of the world where rebel groups or petty dictators are committing ethnic cleansing by starving a seb set of people, doctors without borders or other altruistic groups can't help those people in need because the government wont let them in, or the rebels will kill them if they try to help.

The Airship allows for a certain level of anarchistic mobility. That is to say, it's a self contained system for supporting people in a country that it isn't allowed to be in. Troops armed with anything less then truck mounted fifty caliber machine guns will be able to do little to stop it. Even then, the Hybrids are highly durable.

Think about Johnny Quest the cartoon where the main hero would fly around on a jet that could land anywhere. The Hybrid Airship allows you to do that in real life, not in the fiction of a cartoon.

In a sense, the Airship is the ultimate underground railroad for a peaceful world wide revolution in libertarian expression. The more I think about it the more I am confident that the British very well may be leading the charge of spreading freedom on the backs of Hybrid Airships like Airlander to all the petty dictatorships of the world.

If the government shoots them down, most likely the crew will survive, and the government that shot them will look horrible in the eyes of the international community. It's basically a way that a nation can peacefully Harass bad actor nation, essentially,  Strategic Airship Harassment also know as the Gandhi way.

I'm feel a very high degree of confidence in saying this, but it is my belief that in the next 30 years the Britsh will have a cultural renaissance in libertarian ideology that, barring some major catastrophe (like a Hindenburg 2,) will muster a massive Armada of Airships that will rival the fleets of British yesteryear. Like during the age of sail, or the industrial revolution.

Maybe I am being overly optimistic, but if my theory about the fractal nature of reality holds true... we will see Britain rise again as a world empire, but this time it will be a peaceful empire of the clouds, not a tyrannical empire of the sea.

We will see, but if I'm right, Britain is going to be a powerhouse of job creation in the coming years. Just as it was in the industrial revolution. The EU will look like it's stuck in the stone age by comparison, and changes to the nature of the eurozone itself will be an outright necessity at that point, as the contrast between the UK in the EU and the UK out of the EU will be so vast that the political elites in Brussels will be seen as complete failures in the eyes of the public making change inevitable.

Time will tell, but things are looking up.

Lockheed Just Solved one of the Biggest Issues Facing Airships Today

Lockheed is very serious about kick-starting the Second Golden Age of Airships. Lockheed just announced that they have developed an new drone for repairing Airship Envelopes:

As you can see, this little drone will greatly decrease the time needed to fix Airship hauls by scanning the outside and inside to find little pinholes that need to be repaired, and then automatically repairs them.

You don't really think about little holes on airships that much (honestly I didn't think about it until after watching this video), but one of the big advantages of these new airships over the old ones, is their ability to only lose a fraction of the helium in their envelope every year.


In the past Airships would need to top off the Helium every year as they would lose about 20% to the sky gods. These new airships only lose about 0.03% a year, meaning there is no need to top off at any point during the airships life circle...  in theory.

However tiny pin holes put a hole in that theory, requiring huge amounts of maintenance in order to solve a seemingly tiny problem.

With these new drones Lockheed has solved this problem, showing that they are committed to bringing Airships back and that with a little pioneering innovative thinking you can solve seemingly impossible problems!

There is no doubt in my mind now that Airships are coming back, little things like this everyday remind me, we really have solved the issues with Airships:

The Hybrid Design, Thrust vectoring, fly by wire controls, buoyancy control, all of these things seemed impossible to the engineers of the 1920s, yet we have made the little steps bit by bit in the long process of solving these seemingly impossible problems.

I long for the day, that Airships become ordinary, I was born in an era when computers were just becoming a thing, and throughout my teenage years I could just take the technology for granted. I can't wait for the day when Airships are taken for granted, where getting on an Airship is no different then getting on a bus or walking into a casino. I just hope that day comes before I'm 60 years old.

It's sad to think that people like Count Von Zepplin, and so many others, envisioned that world where Airships ruled the skies and knew it was possible when everyone else said is wasn't. Yet those men and woman never got to see that world in it's full incarnation.

We are lucky enough to live in a time when we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It's important to remember the people that got us here, rebels in their own time. They helped get us here, and they should be remembered for that.

Their can be no denying it now, the Second Golden Age of Airships is coming, are you ready?

Lockheed's New Cargo Order

Lockeed has unveiled plans to bring the popular C-130 Super Hercules to the commercial market as part of it's plan of dominating the ever growing global Air Cargo Business. It's part of a two pronged effort to dominate the high end and low end of the Air Cargo business.

The C-130s will cover air cargo deliveries that need to be made quickly or over very long distances. If the range of the destination is more then 800 nautical miles, Airships become less attractive, as the amount of fuel the airship would need to take to move the fuel it would need, makes it's efficiency only slightly better then the C-130 at these ranges with a whole lot lost in time.

However the C-130 is too expensive to operate in the sub 800nm ranges routinely. In that zone the Hybrid Airship is the king of efficiency, while also remaining timely. On top of that each platform can get into landing locations the other might not be able to reach. The Hybrid Airships might not be able to find an open area large enough to land, that might only be serviceable by a small airstrip not large enough to fit the airship but will fit the C-130. On the same token areas with vast open expenses but terrain too rough for the C-130 to land on will be easily accessed by a Hybrid Airship.


Any air cargo business can see why having both of these platforms makes a lot of sense. When you are not in a hurry you have the Hybrid Airships do the bulk of the cargo operations in your area, with the C-130s only flying long range cargo missions where the premiums are not too expensive. Allowing for a maximum of savings without any lose of coverage. However when you need to move cargo quickly you can send out the C-130s for shorter trips and they can still land at almost the same number of locations as the Hybrid Airship.

This allows for any air cargo carriers to have all their bases covered. When business is slow you scale down the usage of C-130s and double up the Airship cargo routs. When Business is booming you fill in the gaps left by the airships with the C-130.

It's a very smart plan that will have wide ranging impacts on the Air cargo industry. Not only is Lockheed increasing the capabilities of Air Carriers to land anywhere, not only are we seeing increased fuel efficiency because of the use of Hybrid Airships, but we will see increased efficiency for the C-130 as well because it will not be delegated to missions that it's incredibly inefficient for.

That is something that will benefit everyone on the planet in the near future and beyond.

Major Set Back for Professor's Hydorgen Airships

Maybe you remember Prof. Barry Prentice, the Professor that had a plan to build Hydrogen Airships for cargo hauling in Canada's North. Well, unfortunately his business venture had a major set back, the Hanger they were keeping the Airships has been destroyed due to a Sand Storm (Full Story.) Estimated damages are between a half million to a million dollars.

Airship hangers have been notoriously finicky throughout history. The Aeroscraft was destroyed by the hanger collapsing just a few years ago, and in the past major Airship endeavors have ended in ruin because of fires and other major malfunctions in airship hangers all through the First Golden Age of Airships.

The conspiracy theorist in me has always found it a little odd that Airship Hangers seem to be so fraught with failure, when all they are functionally is a massive room. However the more logical explanation is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we construct airship hangers. In this case, I'm sure there is a solution to building much more reliable Hangers for airships then what we are doing now, Moffett Field has had no know problems from collapses I do believe, maybe it's a more structurally sound design?

HAV update July 12th

"The biggest disappointment of this Farnborough show must surely be the non-appearance of the Airlander 10. The huge hybrid airship remains confined inside the hangar at Cardington from which it was due to emerge and fly last April. Its maker, Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV, Hall 4 Stand 36) told AIN that no single problem had caused the delay. “We’ve erred on the side of caution, as we’re the first of a new type,” said a spokesman." Full Story