
World's largest aircraft looking for investors to give it liftoff - ghosh
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/30/worlds-largest-aircraft-looking-for-investors-to-give-it-liftoff
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AlexMuir
The insurmountable problem so far on these cargo airships is ballast. It's
what killed off the Cargolifter Project (as I read while sitting naked under a
palm tree in its former hangar. [0])

Their killer use case is moving heavy stuff to inaccessible areas. Wind
turbines being the flavour of the moment. They combine the long distance
capability of a plane, the hovering of a helicopter and the lift capacity of a
crane...

However, once the 160 tonne payload has been dropped, the ship either needs to
take on 160 tonnes of ballast or jettison helium (not an option since it's so
expensive). The Cargolifter idea was to just pump up water if I remember
correctly, but for land-based tasks that meant being met by ten tanker lorries
at the drop site, thus negating all the benefits and meaning you might as well
stick the cargo straight on those trucks.

I'd love to see it work out, but so far these projects have been nothing but a
wipeout for investors. Coincidentally back in 2006 I worked a couple of desks
over from people managing the liquidation of Skycat, which was basically the
same thing, also built at Cardington. It may even have been the same team.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort)

~~~
rpenm
Compress the helium into tanks and use atmosphere as ballast. Ballast can be
dropped by directly purging with helium. Alternatively, contain the ballast in
bladders that vent as helium pressure rises. Designing flexible bladders that
don't leak too badly would be an engineering problem. A terribly inefficient
option would be to allow the gasses to mix and just use fractionation to
separate the heavy elements when dropping ballast.

~~~
JulianMorrison
It exists. [http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-
cargo-18...](http://rt.com/news/aeroscraft-revolutionary-airship-cargo-187/)
(Feb 2013)

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danbruc
Failed German attempt CargoLifter [1] with up to 160 tonne payload that
finally gave us a swimming pool in a ridiculous large hangar [2].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort)

~~~
AlexMuir
:) I used to go to Tropical Islands every weekend when I was sleeping in a van
in Berlin. It's an amazing place from an engineering point of view. And the
spa is the best I've ever been to.

~~~
darklajid
Celebrated one of our wedding anniversaries (or whatever you'd call that)
there.

Crap if you want to swim, but quite amazing to relax and fun to stay over
night.

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digerata
That's funny. I immediately thought that this guy had a FEVER. And the only
prescription was more AIRSHIP.

But apparently there are two Bruce Dickinson's in music:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Dickinson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Dickinson)

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blakeyrat
World's largest aircraft? The Hindenburg was 245m long.

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Gia...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Giant_Aircraft_Comparison.svg/2000px-
Giant_Aircraft_Comparison.svg.png)

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sschueller
What is the practicality of that aircraft? It can't lift near as much as a
Antonov 225 (545,000lb (247,000kg) vs 22,050lb (10,000kg))

Size comparison:
[https://golong16.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/pic10808-1.jpg](https://golong16.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/pic10808-1.jpg)

~~~
msandford
The 225 burns 16 tons of fuel per hour while flying.

This airship has 4x 325 HP V8 engines. Roughly speaking they each use about
150lbs of fuel per hour to generate 325 HP. That's 0.3 tons per hour between
the four of them.

Now of course the 225 will do 5x the speed of the Airlander 10, so where the
225 would use 16 tons to go 500 miles, the 10 would use 1.5 tons.

Here's where things get interesting, though. The frontal surface area tends to
dominate drag, where as the volume is what gives you lift capacity. You can
scale volume much faster than frontal area and that means 10x (or 100x) the
lift capacity might only be 2x (or 10x) the fuel consumption.

Big-Oh(airship) is potentially interesting.

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codewithcheese
Here's the link if you want to 'invest'
[https://www.crowdcube.com/investment/hybrid-air-vehicles-
lim...](https://www.crowdcube.com/investment/hybrid-air-vehicles-
limited-18450)

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leroy_masochist
Wow. Bruce Dickinson is nearly unrecognizable in the photo that accompanies
this article.

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anigbrowl
This looks much more civilized than regular air travel. To the pleasure barge!

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briandear
I would love to see how this aircraft would function at high altitude such as
in Nepal. This could have a huge positive impact around Everest, especially
with white knuckle Lukla airport.

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jnye131
[http://www.hybridairvehicles.com](http://www.hybridairvehicles.com)

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azinman2
Umm the world is running out of helium and there's no good way to make more.
Not sure how this will be viable.

~~~
monort
Natural gas has up to 7% of helium:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Modern_extraction_and_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Modern_extraction_and_distribution)

~~~
fit2rule
Yeah but it's eventually going to run out, is the point. Helium doesn't like
to stay on Earth.

~~~
monort
World reserves are 40 billion cubic meters, yearly production is 175 million
cubic meters. It seems we have 200 years supply. And it's a renewable resource
(produced during radioactive decay), and universe has a lot of helium, 23% of
its baryonic mass.

~~~
fit2rule
Yeah, we can all quote from Wikipedia. Here's another interesting quote about
Helium:

*Moses Chan, Evan Pugh Professor of Physics at Penn State, explains that the world's supply of helium is a byproduct of natural gas production, with the Texas Panhandle arguably being the helium capital of the world. However, says Chan, "Very few natural gas wells in the world have enough helium in the well to make it economical to separate helium from natural gas. The gas wells with the most helium have only about 0.3 percent, so it is in short supply." In response to the element's scarcity, the United States has been stockpiling helium since the 1960s in a National Helium Reserve called the Bush Dome, a deep underground reservoir outside of Amarillo, Texas. By the mid 1970s 1.2 billion cubic meters of the gas was stored there. The current reserve is approximately 0.6 billion cubic meters, or roughly 4 times the current world market. But, Chan notes, in 1996 the Helium Privatization Act mandated that the Department of the Interior sell off all the stockpiled helium by 2015. "As a consequence," he says, "the United States government is selling the equivalent of 40 percent of the world market of helium at a below-market price." This action discourages the active exploration of helium," Chan explains, "since companies can buy it from the United States at a cheap price and sell it at a premium."

Read more at: [http://phys.org/news/2013-04-probing-
helium.html#jCp](http://phys.org/news/2013-04-probing-helium.html#jCp)

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
So?

Currently helium is being sold off at a below-market price. When the reserve
gets low, people will look at it and go "huh. We could make some money off of
helium when the reserve runs out", and look for other sources.

We already did the same sort of thing for oil. We didn't panic when the
initial wells and types of wells started to go dry - we found other sources.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Infinite Earth.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
I don't get the reference, if that is one.

If you're trying to point out that the Earth is finite, although you are
correct, the scale is... large. Everything that decays via alpha decay
ultimately makes helium.

Not to mention that a) worse comes to worse, we can always make our own, and
b) it's literally >20% of the universe's (baryonic) mass.

The question is whether it's economic to use, not if it will run out.

~~~
jsprogrammer
It's only a reference to what was implied in your post. Nothing more.

a) Even though you may be able to decay the entire Earth into helium, it is
only produced at a constant rate. If the rate of use is higher than the rate
of production, you will still run out.

b) Which we have 0 access to.

c) You won't be able to always just "find other sources" of finite resources
(I'm thinking more than just helium [unless you plan on becoming a pure helium
lifeform]) and the Earth will become uninhabitable long before our resources
are exhausted.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
a) Not true. As I said: worse comes to worse we can always make our own. Alpha
decay can be induced with particle beams, etc. Now, it's horridly inefficient,
etc, etc. But it's possible.

b) What don't we have access to? The rest of the universe? True, for now.
However, we don't "even" need to go interstellar for it.

c) No, we won't be able to forever. However, the thing is: with helium at
least, the sources _known now_ are sufficient, in raw quantity at least, until
so far in the future that good luck predicting what our needs will be. It
makes someone before the rise of automobiles calculating what the horse manure
removal would have to be in 2100 look shortsighted.

~~~
azinman2
What is 'sufficient'? How long a view are you taking on this?

With small percentages of natural gas containing helium (0-7%), much of what's
currently coming up isn't being captured or is only now starting to be in
Qatar and Russia. The rest is just let go, and once helium get's into the air
it's over.

Luckily, as you suggested, prices going up means people are starting to build
helium recycling systems. However congress made them artificially low and thus
speed up unnecessary wastage of this precious resource.

If you're only concerned about the next 200 years, can you imagine if that was
the same attitude in the 1600's? What would we have now?

Now imagine if we really are all flying around in giant helium aircraft
because oil has run out or is too expensive... how much helium is getting used
up for that purpose alone? There's far more natural gas/oil than helium.

