I was psyched to see this thing poking above a hangar when I was driving by the airport! Timing was perfect cause they were about to launch it right when I pulled up. I’ve only seen a blimp flying around this area one other time in my flying career about 6 years ago. It looked almost like it wasn’t going to clear obstacles at first!
From what I hear, pitch angles of +/-30° aren’t out of the ordinary. They can go even steeper than that, though it’s not advisable.
Their crab angles can also be pretty wild, especially in the Navy:
”Landings were made on the runway nearest to the wind, sometimes necessitating a “crab” angle over
40 degrees. Never in the two years that I ran the project (project Lincoln, studying the impact of icing on airship performance) did a ship drift or get blow off the runway, even with over 40 knots of wind.”
Ha! That’s not even the first time I’ve heard of them pulling that prank.
With LTA Research recently flying the largest new rigid airship since the Grad Zeppelin II in 1938, and larger versions planned for the near future for cargo and tourism purposes, it’s funny imagining a fancy cruise ship-like piano lounge suddenly tilting 40 degrees like something out of The Poseidon Adventure just because the pilot felt like being cheeky.
Those old Lightships are real dinosaurs. No thrust vectoring, still needs a big ground crew, doesn’t even have a bathroom, pretty badly underpowered… I expect they’re not going to be much longer for this world.
Compare and contrast the more modern Zeppelin NTs that Goodyear uses, with fully modern side-stick controls, both vertical and lateral thrust vectoring letting it take off and land like a helicopter, it’s nearly twice as fast as this blimp, requires a ground crew of three, and it has a nice bathroom. Or, if cost is a concern, thermal airships cost a fraction as much as a Lightship and are just as big a billboard (although they’re desperately in need of modernization too).
Eh, they were certainly more advanced than Lightships, but they were also a bit… well, British. With all that implies. They had some weird teething issues and QC problems. Also, using Porsche engines? That’s just weird.
In concept they’re really cool. In practice, Zeppelin NTs have demonstrated way better build quality. I wonder what the average cumulative airframe hours look like between the two.
They had converted some of them to Lycoming before they stopped flying. And they were much more durable than NT. If skyships are British, NT are German and complex maintenance hogs. It’s why you don’t see Goodyear taking them on long tours the way lightships and skyships did, they keep them almost exclusively near their maintenance bases.
Plus the internal structure and tail wheel setup means you’re one bad storm on the mast away from disaster. I am just not a fan, all rigids and semi-rigids are doomed to the same fate of either being hangar queens or wrecks.
NT are German and complex maintenance hogs. It’s why you don’t see Goodyear taking them on long tours the way lightships and skyships did, they keep them almost exclusively near their maintenance bases.
Couldn’t that just be a difference in their revenue streams? The NTs tour between various cities in Germany and get sent hither and yon by Goodyear. I don’t see how that doesn’t count as “long tours.” And without seeing a direct comparison between the two in terms of maintenance costs, I wouldn’t really rush to characterize one or the other as needing more maintenance.
Plus the internal structure and tail wheel setup means you’re one bad storm on the mast away from disaster. I am just not a fan, all rigids and semi-rigids are doomed to the same fate of either being hangar queens, or wrecks.
That’s a really weird thing to say. Looks like the exact opposite from the records I’ve seen. Several of the 500s and 600s ended up being hangar queens, serving only a few dozen or hundred hours in their entire lifetimes, but the NTs usually put in roughly 3,000 hours a year. Several 500s and 600s have been either badly damaged or wrecked due to design flaws with the masts, hull, or battens during storms; one 500 crashed and lost an envelope due to an engineering failure, and two more due to miscellaneous reasons, while one 600 lost an envelope to a storm. Meanwhile, despite having vastly longer service careers, only one NT, the first one, ended up being damaged beyond repair when a whirlwind caused it to break free from the mast in Botswana.
Your NT damage data is because they treat them with kid gloves.
I mean, however you characterize Zeppelin’s handling policy, it seems vindicated by the fact that they manage to squeeze thousands of hours of safe operation out of them every year, yet the first skyship got wrecked within a month and most of the rest were either hangar queens or lost an envelope or crashed within a few years, and none are still operating as far as I’m aware.
Imagine an NT operating like the Trinidad ship or any lightship.
Well, what is the functional difference between what Goodyear does with their ships and the lightships also doing advertising flights in the same country? They both tour around, carrying occasional passengers and filming things and whatnot. I’m not sure how many hours the lightships tend to rack up each year.
Have you ever worked directly with any airship?
Nope, just a fan. Though I did fly a RC airship I built myself.
No Skyships are operating. They’re all gone. I worked on blimps and they’re far more fun than any other aircraft. I’m happy that someone is keeping the torch going with them but I fear that in my lifetime manned LTA will stop. They just cost too much to operate and our advertising budgets have gone elsewhere.
I’m a bit more sanguine than you are, I think. Blimps are definitely expensive to operate, but no more so than a helicopter of similar passenger capacity, the main issue is how many people the more primitive ones like lightships need on staff, and the logistics of moving them around. Thermal airships cost over an order of magnitude less than a helium blimp to operate, and don’t really have storage costs as such since they pack away after every flight, so I think it far likelier that they’ll eventually get modernized and take over the advertising roles, while helium airships may either die out for a while or get used for niche cargo and tourist roles where the difference in lift is more consequential.
That being said, I think we can both agree that thermal airships are, like lightships, in dire need of modernization in order to really compete with the speed and operating envelope of a helium ship. The best attempt at that were the Good Beer Blimps back in the 1970s, and that was a letdown due to various minor, eminently fixable teething issues that could largely be attributed to the project being done on the cheap. A porous envelope leading to terrible burner fuel economy, poor fit between the gondola and hull, undersized fins, lack of solid or pneumatic nose battens making the ship go “squirrelly” over 30 mph or so…
What I’d really love to see is something similar in size, shape, and power to the Skyship 500 HL, but converted to a thermal design. You’d save literal tons of weight from not needing all the helium-specific systems, and you wouldn’t even really need all the thrust vectoring gear anymore since the buoyancy is on demand. But you could keep the advantageous and highly lightweight gondola design, the maneuverability, the speed and practicality of a helium ship with most of the immense cost advantages and transportability of a thermal ship. They’ve done great things with lightweight flock insulation in hot air balloons, reducing fuel use by 70%, so you could get really good flight times out of it if properly designed. Not to mention fuel cells and motors are really lightweight compared to motors, they can run on clean propane or even cleaner hydrogen, and you could use the waste heat from a high-temperature fuel cell to supplement or even supersede the need for a burner.
Sadly, that kind of tech is still on the cutting-edge, so it would take a long, long time to filter down to use in something as marginal as a thermal airship, despite the obvious advantages.
I was psyched to see this thing poking above a hangar when I was driving by the airport! Timing was perfect cause they were about to launch it right when I pulled up. I’ve only seen a blimp flying around this area one other time in my flying career about 6 years ago. It looked almost like it wasn’t going to clear obstacles at first!
Sort of. At low airspeed and high angle of attack, a flight regime where the flow separates off the top surface of the envelope can be created, and technically you could describe that as a stall. The way the flow evolves, and the impact it has on lift/drag is nothing at all like an airfoil stalling, though, and in terms of flight characteristics, there is nothing that could be described as a stall.
Appropriate-Act1411@reddit
Used to watch blimp takeoffs and landings in Houston, way back when.
Pro-editor-1105@reddit
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Critical_Angle@reddit (OP)
I was psyched to see this thing poking above a hangar when I was driving by the airport! Timing was perfect cause they were about to launch it right when I pulled up. I’ve only seen a blimp flying around this area one other time in my flying career about 6 years ago. It looked almost like it wasn’t going to clear obstacles at first!
GrafZeppelin127@reddit
People often really underestimate the climb and dive performance of airships. They can stay comfortable at crazy angles of attack.
Critical_Angle@reddit (OP)
I mean it makes sense with how neutrally buoyant they are. I’m sure it’s still an insane sight picture from the controls.
wolftick@reddit
STOL performance is easier when you don't have to worry out pesky gravity so much :-)
RotoGruber@reddit
idk why (because ive never seen one fly) but i always thought they were VTOL all the way and that angle of attack was always 0
Bureaucromancer@reddit
Iirc slightly negative buoyancy is the commercial norm
CutHerOff@reddit
Same this AOA surprised me a lot lol
GrafZeppelin127@reddit
From what I hear, pitch angles of +/-30° aren’t out of the ordinary. They can go even steeper than that, though it’s not advisable.
Their crab angles can also be pretty wild, especially in the Navy:
—Cmdr. Charles Mills
ThatBaseball7433@reddit
On my blimp ride the pilot pitched way up on takeoff and cut the throttles to give all the fixed wing pilots a heart attack.
GrafZeppelin127@reddit
Ha! That’s not even the first time I’ve heard of them pulling that prank.
With LTA Research recently flying the largest new rigid airship since the Grad Zeppelin II in 1938, and larger versions planned for the near future for cargo and tourism purposes, it’s funny imagining a fancy cruise ship-like piano lounge suddenly tilting 40 degrees like something out of The Poseidon Adventure just because the pilot felt like being cheeky.
wisbballfn15@reddit
Cursed Magic Johnson
airboss1971@reddit
SSF or BAZ? Saw it on my way home from work yesterday. It was westbound just north of I-35 & RND Delta.
Critical_Angle@reddit (OP)
BAZ
GrafZeppelin127@reddit
Those old Lightships are real dinosaurs. No thrust vectoring, still needs a big ground crew, doesn’t even have a bathroom, pretty badly underpowered… I expect they’re not going to be much longer for this world.
Compare and contrast the more modern Zeppelin NTs that Goodyear uses, with fully modern side-stick controls, both vertical and lateral thrust vectoring letting it take off and land like a helicopter, it’s nearly twice as fast as this blimp, requires a ground crew of three, and it has a nice bathroom. Or, if cost is a concern, thermal airships cost a fraction as much as a Lightship and are just as big a billboard (although they’re desperately in need of modernization too).
ThatBaseball7433@reddit
It’s a tragedy that skyships are all in boxes.
GrafZeppelin127@reddit
Eh, they were certainly more advanced than Lightships, but they were also a bit… well, British. With all that implies. They had some weird teething issues and QC problems. Also, using Porsche engines? That’s just weird.
In concept they’re really cool. In practice, Zeppelin NTs have demonstrated way better build quality. I wonder what the average cumulative airframe hours look like between the two.
ThatBaseball7433@reddit
They had converted some of them to Lycoming before they stopped flying. And they were much more durable than NT. If skyships are British, NT are German and complex maintenance hogs. It’s why you don’t see Goodyear taking them on long tours the way lightships and skyships did, they keep them almost exclusively near their maintenance bases.
Plus the internal structure and tail wheel setup means you’re one bad storm on the mast away from disaster. I am just not a fan, all rigids and semi-rigids are doomed to the same fate of either being hangar queens or wrecks.
GrafZeppelin127@reddit
Couldn’t that just be a difference in their revenue streams? The NTs tour between various cities in Germany and get sent hither and yon by Goodyear. I don’t see how that doesn’t count as “long tours.” And without seeing a direct comparison between the two in terms of maintenance costs, I wouldn’t really rush to characterize one or the other as needing more maintenance.
That’s a really weird thing to say. Looks like the exact opposite from the records I’ve seen. Several of the 500s and 600s ended up being hangar queens, serving only a few dozen or hundred hours in their entire lifetimes, but the NTs usually put in roughly 3,000 hours a year. Several 500s and 600s have been either badly damaged or wrecked due to design flaws with the masts, hull, or battens during storms; one 500 crashed and lost an envelope due to an engineering failure, and two more due to miscellaneous reasons, while one 600 lost an envelope to a storm. Meanwhile, despite having vastly longer service careers, only one NT, the first one, ended up being damaged beyond repair when a whirlwind caused it to break free from the mast in Botswana.
ThatBaseball7433@reddit
Your NT damage data is because they treat them with kid gloves. Imagine an NT operating like the Trinidad ship or any lightship.
Have you ever worked directly with any airship?
GrafZeppelin127@reddit
I mean, however you characterize Zeppelin’s handling policy, it seems vindicated by the fact that they manage to squeeze thousands of hours of safe operation out of them every year, yet the first skyship got wrecked within a month and most of the rest were either hangar queens or lost an envelope or crashed within a few years, and none are still operating as far as I’m aware.
Well, what is the functional difference between what Goodyear does with their ships and the lightships also doing advertising flights in the same country? They both tour around, carrying occasional passengers and filming things and whatnot. I’m not sure how many hours the lightships tend to rack up each year.
Nope, just a fan. Though I did fly a RC airship I built myself.
ThatBaseball7433@reddit
No Skyships are operating. They’re all gone. I worked on blimps and they’re far more fun than any other aircraft. I’m happy that someone is keeping the torch going with them but I fear that in my lifetime manned LTA will stop. They just cost too much to operate and our advertising budgets have gone elsewhere.
GrafZeppelin127@reddit
I’m a bit more sanguine than you are, I think. Blimps are definitely expensive to operate, but no more so than a helicopter of similar passenger capacity, the main issue is how many people the more primitive ones like lightships need on staff, and the logistics of moving them around. Thermal airships cost over an order of magnitude less than a helium blimp to operate, and don’t really have storage costs as such since they pack away after every flight, so I think it far likelier that they’ll eventually get modernized and take over the advertising roles, while helium airships may either die out for a while or get used for niche cargo and tourist roles where the difference in lift is more consequential.
That being said, I think we can both agree that thermal airships are, like lightships, in dire need of modernization in order to really compete with the speed and operating envelope of a helium ship. The best attempt at that were the Good Beer Blimps back in the 1970s, and that was a letdown due to various minor, eminently fixable teething issues that could largely be attributed to the project being done on the cheap. A porous envelope leading to terrible burner fuel economy, poor fit between the gondola and hull, undersized fins, lack of solid or pneumatic nose battens making the ship go “squirrelly” over 30 mph or so…
What I’d really love to see is something similar in size, shape, and power to the Skyship 500 HL, but converted to a thermal design. You’d save literal tons of weight from not needing all the helium-specific systems, and you wouldn’t even really need all the thrust vectoring gear anymore since the buoyancy is on demand. But you could keep the advantageous and highly lightweight gondola design, the maneuverability, the speed and practicality of a helium ship with most of the immense cost advantages and transportability of a thermal ship. They’ve done great things with lightweight flock insulation in hot air balloons, reducing fuel use by 70%, so you could get really good flight times out of it if properly designed. Not to mention fuel cells and motors are really lightweight compared to motors, they can run on clean propane or even cleaner hydrogen, and you could use the waste heat from a high-temperature fuel cell to supplement or even supersede the need for a burner.
Sadly, that kind of tech is still on the cutting-edge, so it would take a long, long time to filter down to use in something as marginal as a thermal airship, despite the obvious advantages.
Critical_Angle@reddit (OP)
I was psyched to see this thing poking above a hangar when I was driving by the airport! Timing was perfect cause they were about to launch it right when I pulled up. I’ve only seen a blimp flying around this area one other time in my flying career about 6 years ago. It looked almost like it wasn’t going to clear obstacles at first!
Omgweregonnacrash@reddit
Air Charles!
Critical_Angle@reddit (OP)
It’s Magic Johnson homie.
richtrapgod@reddit
What amazes me more is that there’s only around 25 blimps in the world. Each one is special
truethatson@reddit
Yeah when I drove by one in Los Angeles I about hit the roof. I’d never seen one in real life.
NxPat@reddit
So can they ever technically stall?
BobbyP27@reddit
Sort of. At low airspeed and high angle of attack, a flight regime where the flow separates off the top surface of the envelope can be created, and technically you could describe that as a stall. The way the flow evolves, and the impact it has on lift/drag is nothing at all like an airfoil stalling, though, and in terms of flight characteristics, there is nothing that could be described as a stall.
airfryerfuntime@reddit
Yeah, if the helium leaks out.
airfryerfuntime@reddit
Lol what in the fuck is that livery?
pucksnmaps@reddit
Magic Johnson. They have a commercial using it as a gag too.
Pinksters@reddit
Damn wonder if that blimp can cure HIV?
Blueberry_Mancakes@reddit
Well, just stop and ask yourself…can HIV cure Blimps?
Critical_Angle@reddit (OP)
It’s hilarious is what it is.
Delicious-Window-277@reddit
Is his arm on backwards?
Ok_Muffin_925@reddit
We're due for another Hindenburg
ShutterHawk@reddit
That livery weirds me out.
mechabeast@reddit
If that's the look they're going for, they sure picked a good one.
magnumfan89@reddit
Even saw the lights of the ~~Goodyear blimp~~ capitol one blimp, and it read "ice cubes a pimp"
Red-Truck-Steam@reddit
I know it'll never happen, but I dream of one day getting airship rating. Now wouldn't that be incredible.
Plus they do instrument procedures. Can't imagine what category they're rated in -A? Shooting an approach would be hilarious.
THE-NECROHANDSER@reddit
That's a goofy paint job, it's great.
Carbon-Base@reddit
"What's in your airspace?"
aarrtee@reddit
izzat Magic Johnson?
Visual-Brilliant-668@reddit
Now this is content.