I have been
waiting to see this out and operational and it is clear that we are much closer.
Also recall that
a ten percent increase in dimensionality suggests a ten cubed increase in
lifting power and though using cross sectional units for lift at least a ten
squared increase in lifting power. So while
the first commercial unit will be able to lift a container it is not a very
long step up to both a four container craft or even a forty container airship
and may well be inside economic material choices. After all we are describing a five by eight container
lifting frame or with container stacking an easier six by three grouping for
thirty six containers.
The containers and
their frame can be placed inside the craft to eliminate air drag.
Again the real
gold rush will be in actual rapid point to point movement of cargo worldwide. That means from the producer’s complex
directly to the distributer’s complex.
This is ideal for fresh food were time and excess vibration matters.
Aeroscraft
begins flight testing following FAA certification
September 8, 2013
After a 70-year absence, it appears that a new rigid
frame airship will soon be taking to the skies over California. Aeros
Corporation, a company based near San Diego, has received experimental
airworthiness certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to
begin flight testing the Aeroscraft airship, and it appears that the company
has wasted no time getting started.
Aeros has provided these photographs of the
Aeroscraft airship outside undergoing tethered testing on Saturday, September
7, 2013, and they clearly show the airship off the ground and under control.
The large bag structures under airship are landing pads, a type of inflated
hovercraft skirt that allow the airship to rest on the ground – or water, or
ice – without wheels.
Speaking to Gizmag, company Communications Director
John Kiehle says that the first untethered test flight will be “very soon –
within a few weeks” and should see the airship fly around the airfield at a
height of about 100 ft (33 m). First flights will not include operating the
Aeroscraft’s trademark variable buoyancy system, but that system has been
successfully tested inside the large hangar where the airship was built at
Tustin, California.
President of Aeros Corporation, Igor
Pasternak, announced the FAA approval on September 5: “I’d like to
personally thank the Aviation Safety Inspectors Cindy Napolitano and Kurt
Krumlauf at the FAA for their professionalism and effective collaboration with
Aeros over these many months.”
The company also announced the flight test crew for
first flights of the airship. Chief test pilot will be 40-year airship veteran
Corky Belanger, who has flown just about every airship available. The co-pilot
is retired four-star General Raymond Johns, former head of the Air Force
Mobility Command. Also on the flight will be someone with a personal stake in
the operation – Aeros CEO Igor Pasternak will take on the duties of Flight
Engineer.
The Aeroscraft has been under development since
2006, and the US Government has contributed some $35M for research, along with
expertise in aerodynamics and control systems from NASA.
The impressive Aeroscraft prototype is 266 ft (79 m)
long and 97 ft (29.5m) wide and nearly fills a football field or soccer pitch.
It is powered by three swiveling engines – two on the sides and one in the back
– that provide both lift and thrust to lift the airship into the air and propel
it forward. The rear engine gives control at low airspeeds by pushing the tail
around, side to side or up and down. Two sets of wing-like control surfaces are
mounted fore and aft, and two large rudders push up vertically from the tail
end. These aerodynamic surfaces are used at higher speeds (above 20 mph / 30
kph). As big as this airship is, it is still a one-half scale prototype –
the final design is expected to be more than 400 feet (121m) long and be able
to lift a cargo weight of 66 tons.
The Aeroscraft is a fully rigid airship, of the type
that has not been seen in the air since 1940 when the highly successful airship
Graf Zeppelin was retired after flying over one million safe air miles and
making 144 trips across the ocean. A rigid airship has a stiff outer frame that
maintains its aerodynamic shape regardless of the amount of helium inside the
ship. This is different from the more common blimp, where the shape of the
airship must be maintained by the internal pressure of the gases inside the
envelope. As with all modern airships, the lifting gas inside the large hull is
helium, an inert element that cannot burn.
The Aeroscraft airship was designed from the start
to haul cargo, and it needed to solve a problem that has prevented airships to
be used for cargo in the past: the problem of ballast. Airships are basically
balloons with motors and steering, and like balloons, the helium gas inside
provides a fixed amount of lift all of the time. If you picked up 10 tons in an
airship and delivered it to a remote location, before the 10 tons could be
removed from the airship, 10 tons of other weight must be added in order to
prevent the airship from rocketing skyward from the extra 10 tons of lift. You
could dump a lot of helium overboard, but that gets very costly, as helium is
an expensive, non-renewable resource that is found under the ground in natural
gas wells.
What the engineers at Aeroscraft have done to
compensate for this problem is to take a lesson from submarines. The Aeroscraft
airship can compress a certain amount of its lifting gas and put it into fabric
tanks, under pressure. The density of the compressed gas is higher so that it
is no longer lighter than air, and therefore this airship, unlike any of its
predecessors, can change its buoyancy. The company calls this system COSH, an
acronym for “Control of Static Heaviness.”
This ability adds another benefit: reducing the
ground crew. Since blimps and other airships are always close to neutrally
buoyant, they are in fact always flying. To land an airship, a large ground
crew comes out to catch ropes and hold it down until it can be attached to
something – usually a mast anchored in the ground or connected to a very heavy
truck. This ballet of ground handling can take a crew of up to 20 people for
even a small airship ... and the Aeros is not small.
With the Aeroscraft, the crew starts up a pumping
system as it nears landing, which begins to compress the gas in the gas cells,
making the craft heavier. The engines on either side power up to compensate,
and by the time the vehicle touches down, it is quite a bit heavier than air
and will stay in place on its own. The pumps continue to compress helium as
cargo is removed and the craft remains heavy as long as it’s on the ground.
When it is once again time for takeoff, a proper amount of helium is released
from the tanks back into the gas cells, meaning the airship becomes lighter and
the engines can easily lift it off the ground in a vertical take-off.
Blimps contain smaller gas bags inside their main
envelope, called ballonets (French for “little balloons”) that are filled with
air, and the crew can adjust the pressure in the envelope as the airship climbs
and descends. As an airship climbs, the outside air pressure reduces, and the
helium inside expands. The crew releases air from the ballonets to maintain the
shape of the blimp.
Rigid airships do not have ballonets. Instead they
have a series of gas cells inside the rigid frame that can expand and contract
independently, and thus have more volume of helium to work with. The frame
itself has weight, however, and must be balanced by more helium, which is why
airships like the Aeroscraft are so large.
The rationale for bringing back this type of airship
relates to its ability to deliver heavy, outsized cargo to remote locations
without needing an airport to land at. Communities in locations like Alaska,
the north of Canada, Africa, and the Australian outback are rich in minerals
but lacking in infrastructure. It is the vision of Pasternak and his crew that
the Aeroscraft will transform the delivery of cargo to mines, wind farms and oil
fields in remote areas like these.
Source: Aeros
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