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.