Petition to RECOMMISSION THE RIGID AIRSHIP AIRCRAFT CARRIER PROGRAM.

I have started a petition to recommission the Airship Aircraft Carrier program:
link

Sign it, if it's not too much trouble.

Best photo of Aeroscraft Prototype

It's not every day an Airship is born, this photo captures the moment better then any I have seen so far, and also reminds me of those old photos we would see of airships being built during the first age of airships around the turn of the 20th century.

Thinking about it now, this airship has an uncanny resemblance to that of the Hindenburg. It looks like it's made out of the same materials and it even has the same red color on the lettering "Dragon Dream" which I assume is the crafts name, although I have been told that is not the case.

Maybe this is because airship technology has been stuck in 1936 for so long that when it got picked up again that's all they had to work with; The Technology really got hindered by the Hindenburg (chuckle ^_^)! Thus, maybe it's not surprising that the technology in 2013 looks the same as that of where it left off in history in 1936.

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...