
Airlander 10: Maiden flight at last for longest aircraft - rwmj
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-37111527
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Animats
This is a lot like the Lockheed hybrid airship, the P791 [1]. Looks like it.
The Skunk Works built that prototype for DARPA in 2007. Works fine, but DoD
didn't have a use case for it. Lockheed offers a version for sale.[2]
Straightline Aviation bought $480 million worth, for delivery in 2018.

Lockheed's Skunk Works finally solved the landing problem. Landing large
airships has been a huge problem as long as there have been airships. The
P791's big "feet" work like hovercraft. They land the thing on a runway and
taxi to the hangar. In windy conditions, they can run the fans in vacuum mode,
suck the craft down to the runway, and keep it there.

With enough steerable fans and computer control, airship maneuverability today
is reasonably good. The Zeppelin NT was the first airship to have this, and it
could be landed without a ground crew hauling on lines. They just needed a big
field and a heavy truck with a mooring tower. But it still had to be towed
into the hangar.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3n5cUaG5fg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3n5cUaG5fg)
[2]
[http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/HybridAirship.html](http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/HybridAirship.html)

~~~
civilian
Oh damn the SPIDER is really cool. It checks the bag quality of the airship:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86EAzvXrESg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86EAzvXrESg)
It's like a cross between a roomba and those magnetic scrubby brushes you use
for fishtanks.

~~~
anamoulous
Oh man when it showed multiple spiders operating on the ship, it went from
cool to _freaky_ and cool.

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baggers
For a little historical context, this craft is 92m (301ft) long, the Graff
zeppelin was 236.53m (776ft) and maxed out at 128km/h with 60 people on board.

Obviously these very different beasts with different goals, but the sheer
scale of the old zeppelins never fails to make me happy.

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abakker
Does anyone else here find the idea of using an airship for surveillance
ridiculous?

It is very hard for me to countenance any military use for a giant, slow,
fragile aircraft in the era of microsatellites and UAVs. The risk / reward for
both engineering and personal seems way too high.

Personally, I'd love to use this to tour around the rocky mountains, but it
seems more of a novelty.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I don't find it ridiculous, but recognize that the military chose a different
direction (hence this became an orphan project).

Airships are very well suited for surveillance over uncontested and nominally
"friendly" skies. Places like cities and towns at home. The DARPA (now
unfortunately named) "ISIS" project was just that. Persistent long duration
surveillance allows you to identify changes in a neighborhood or area which
are nominally invisible without a history of the place. It works like this,
you record the ingress and egress of people from a common place, over time you
have people who are there again and again, and people who are "new". The
longer you do that the more you can see which people are there for the first
time and which people have been there before. Now when an "event" happens
somewhere, you can identify the "new" people who aren't regular users of say,
the train station, and focus your attention on them, perhaps quickly
identifying fleeing perpetrators.

The overall scheme is called the "mosaic effect" according to someone in the
intelligence community that attended a MacAfee hosted briefing I attended. By
eliminating the periodic things that are always there, the outliers stand out.

[1] [http://www.darpa.mil/program/integrated-sensor-is-
structure](http://www.darpa.mil/program/integrated-sensor-is-structure)

~~~
azernik
Most US military campaigns these days are against guerrilla insurgencies, so
uncontested skies. I posted this article in response to the parent article,
which describes the use of aerostats in Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan
during the height of the US presence there:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/world/asia/in-
afghanistan-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/world/asia/in-afghanistan-
spy-balloons-now-part-of-landscape.html)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Syria continues to be an interesting case.

~~~
azernik
Well, particularly with aerostats (tethered to the ground) you really need to
be on the ground, not just engaged in an aerial bombing campaign like in
Syria. Though I am surprised the Syrian government doesn't use these - I
suspect the electronics and software might be a limiting factor.

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wibr
Reminds me of:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter)

They went bankrupt witout a having built single aircraft but the huge hangar
is a tropical theme park now.

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Brendinooo
Looks interesting. Wikipedia says that its cruising speed is "148 km/h (92
mph; 80 kn)" \- certainly faster than a car when coupled with a straighter
flight path.

I wonder what the relative costs of operation for this are? If it ever becomes
viable for passenger use, I could maybe see it being used for short commuter
flights.

~~~
6DM
"Its cost of operation is apparently between 10 and 20 percent of that for a
helicopter, and it only loses 10 percent of its helium per year." [0]

Not bad, especially if you consider there's 100 paying customers on it.

[0]
[http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/8/5880061/airlander-10-photo-...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/8/5880061/airlander-10-photo-
essay)

~~~
Animats
Only losing 10% of the helium per year is a big improvement over the Zeppelin
NT. Airship Ventures, which used to fly sightseeing trips from Moffett Field,
had to quit when the price of helium doubled.

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bladedtoys
longest currently existing aircraft maybe. 20th century zeppelins regularly
reached nearly triple that length.

~~~
dingaling
Indeed, it's not even the largest non-rigid. That goes to the US Navy's five
ZPG-3W of the late 1950s, at 404 feet long and 1.5 million cubic feet volume.

In comparison the Airlander is 302 feet and 1.34 million.

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Trisell
Anybody intrieged by the idea of taking a train like overland voyage in one of
these that wouldn't explode? The airship travel ideal has always facinated me.

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funkyy
Wouldn't be wise to put lightweight solar panels on top of that? Seems like
there is enough space to generate quite a good amount of electricity...

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yyhhsj0521
Can we make a cruise airship out of it?

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jlebrech
what this is missing is a top deck, imagine people travelling from one inland
city to another and sunbathing along the way there and then doing some
shopping then coming back with the view of a sunset.

getting the benefits of a holiday while travelling.

~~~
Pamar
Well, you have to take in account that exteral temperature decreases with
altitude:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapse_rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapse_rate)

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aetherson
What is the current envisioned use for this aircraft?

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buro9
Imagine a group of trucks, that could cross seas and oceans, forests without
roads, deserts of high dunes and rock, and reach anywhere in the world.

The price to operate and the capacity is similar to having a few trucks at
hand. Except this can do 90mph in a straight line to anywhere on Earth.

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Bitedge
> The company hopes to be building 10 Airlanders a year by 2021.

And I hope to wake up tomorrow morning as starting QB for the Dallas Cowboys.

~~~
EliRivers
Do you have millions of dollars already invested in your goal towards this,
with a large number of people working towards it and a number of technological
waypoints already met? Or are you all talk?

