The idea been exploited here is to simply compress the helium in
order to shift and reduce ballast. Inasmuch as they are in fact
doing so, the technical problems must be worked out. And as
Pasternak observes, that is the critical issue.
Once achieved airship building can proceed apace.
Importantly, helium is not consumed at all in this design protocol.
Even better, he states that a 800 ton payload is feasible which is
eight containers. This suggests some expert evaluation of the issues
of material strength. It seemed likely, but this is additional
confirmation.
What this chap requires is a contract to deliver Airships culminating
quickly in a steady stream of 800 ton behemoths. Once costs are
trimmed down, commercial use can prosper by progressively replacing
long haul trucking. That is the primary initial market. In time our
skies will be full of these craft.
By now just about everyone has woken up to just how huge the transport demand happens to be for a craft such as this.
A Plan For Airships
That Might Finally Take Off
By Josh BearmanPosted
07.02.2012
"Some kids wanted
to be firefighters,” Igor Pasternak says. “I always thought about
blimps.” Pasternak grew up in Lviv, Ukraine, near a weather
station. When he was six, he convinced the Soviet meteorologists
there to let him launch one of their balloons. “I was hooked,” he
says. “I wanted to build airships.”
We are standing in the
vast wood-beamed hangar where one such vessel, a 400-foot-long
“variable buoyancy functional cargo airship” called the
Aeroscraft, is being assembled. The looming aluminum and carbon-fiber
skeleton, not entirely unlike a half-completed Death Star, is the
prototype for what Pasternak says will be a new and better kind
of flying machine: one that can carry substantial cargo to any
place on Earth. The reason there are so few blimps flying today, he
says, is that “no one has improved the concept. I am solving a
problem more than a century old.”
Pasternak is wearing a
T-shirt that says Ballast Control Matters, which pretty much
sums up that problem. “Blimps fly with buoyancy,” Pasternak says.
“But when the blimp is empty, if you don’t hold it down, the ship
flies into space. I realized we could compress the helium inside
special chambers and give the ship more or less lift.”
Hot-air balloons are
completely at the mercy of the winds, and even dirigibles (a general
term for all steerable airships) still require ground crews—guys
with ropes and ballast. If Pasternak’s variable-buoyancy system
works, the pilot will be able to maneuver in all directions,
vertically and horizontally, with no external assistance. He will be
able to go anywhere and land anywhere, and take a very big cargo
along with him. “Then you have progress,” Pasternak says.
Revolutionizing
transportation with airships is an old idea but a persistent one, and
it’s usually the military that brings it closer to reality. More
than a century after George Griffith described armed conflict fought
with “war balloons” in his popular novel The Angel of the
Revolution, the U.S. military was considering the merits of
transporting materiel with airships. In 2005 Darpa, the Pentagon’s
experimental branch, initiated Project Walrus and set about finding a
contractor to build a “hybrid ultra-large aircraft” that could
transport 500 tons of cargo at least 12,000 nautical miles.
Pasternak’s Aeros got the biggest contract of the project. (“There
is only one solution,” Pasternak had explained to the Los
Angeles Times, “and we have that one solution.”) But in 2010, the
Pentagon chose not to renew Project Walrus, a fate not uncommon to
airship schemes.
Builders around the
world nonetheless continue to investigate various ways to get
airships off the ground. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed and other major
aviation companies, alongside such smaller entrepreneurs as
Cargolifter and Aeros have all at various times participated in the
race to build a commercially viable airship.
Bill Crowder, a
logistics expert who is inspecting the Aeros prototype with us today,
has been following Pasternak’s efforts for years. Logistics is the
industry term for the business of getting the world’s freight and
equipment where it needs to go. Imagining the sky filled
with Titanic-size dirigibles induces “the giggle factor,”
Crowder now says, craning his neck up toward the frame, but that
doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. And in fact, a ship like this
could stay in the air for a week and then deliver a substantial
payload—a 50-ton crane, say, that’s needed in the Arctic.
Pasternak launched
Worldwide Aeros Corp. in Ukraine in 1987 and at first made just
unmanned “aerostats,” small tethered blimps. He moved the company
to the U.S. shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and, in a
moment of détente, became the lead Pentagon contractor for the
development of lighter-than-air vehicles. Aeros is the biggest seller
on Earth both of aerostats and manned blimps—its customers include
the U.S. Department of Defense and authorities in several foreign
governments—but all of that, Pasternak says, is a means to an end.
“I always wanted to build the Aeroscraft,” he says. “I put all
the profit of my company into this new ship. Everything.”
For the moment, his
ship is leading the race. Cargolifter went out of business, as did
Advanced Technologies Group, the U.K.’s main firm attempting to
revive airship innovation. Lockheed and Northrop have fixed their
sights on a type of airship that still requires a runway. “None of
them have the capability of the Aeroscraft,” Pasternak says.
The widely used C-17
cargo plane can carry 75 tons. The one-off Soviet AN-225 can carry a
record-breaking 275 tons. But if the Aeroscraft prototype works and
Pasternak completes plans to build an 800-foot model, he will advance
the capacity of airborne transportation to 500 tons, delivered
anywhere. “This is a lovely sight to a logistics guy,” Crowder
says. “I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time.
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