New Type of Hot Air Blimp

An anonymous reader writes to let un know about a story up on the Experimental Aircraft Association site about a new kind of blimp. From the article: "Alberto, whose name pays homage to Brazilian aviation pioneer, Alberto Santos-Dumont, is 102 feet long with a 70-foot diameter and uses hot air rather than helium for lift. Its innovative foldable frame (much like an giant umbrella) creates structural support of its hot-air envelope, and it has a fly-by-wire vectored thrust steering system. Alberto is a hybrid; a hot-air balloon with aluminum ribs that looks more like a blimp, but with a tail propeller that gives it directional control." The home site of the blimp's developers has a timeline, photos, and a video of the blimp in flight.

Oh No !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That blimp is going to get /.

Re:Another piece in the puzzle

[truthsearch]

How can a blimp with a propeller ever leave the atmosphere?

PBS Nova episode on Alberto Santos-Dumont

[musicon]

FYI, there was a recent episode of Nova [pbs.org] on PBS all about Alberto Santos-Dumont.

Interesting source of lift

[markov_chain]

Seeing how helium is actually quite expensive (paid $70 for 300 cu ft. at a local welding supply if memory serves) it's interesting that this contraption uses hot air. I wonder what the economics of hot air look like; i.e. cost of fuel to maintain lift, etc.

Re:Big Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

>Stop being a hater for a single second and think about this, this thing is completely new.

Completly new? Are you serious?

Next thing you know, you'll be excited about someone using hydrogen.

There's little to this device except curiosity, mainly because hot air isn't very efficient to generate lift. Helium, or better yet hydrogen, is a better choice.

Inflating and deflating gas bladders within a rigid frame sounds more practical than this.

If they use black fabric they may not require fuel

[Colin Smith]

There are solar heated hot air balloons...

e.g.
http://perso.orange.fr/ballonsolaire/en-index.htm [orange.fr]

Re:I've seen more practical aircraft

[2short]

"you should be informed that in the 4th century the Koreans used blimps to successfully invade and conquer Japan."

You should be informed that you are making shit up.

Re:well

[Nefarious Wheel]

...but it seems better than being in a balloon with no real control ...

A term of some use here is "dirigible", i.e. "something that can be directed". Term for lighter-than-air airships of the past was dirigible balloon, shortened to "dirigible" in common use.

As a young lad I read Doc Smith's stories (before learning that) and had this terrible image of his dirigible torpedoes being these explosive little balloons running around in outer space...

Oh, and the term "blimp", like "jeep", was a military term shortened in general use -- originally it was a "Type B-Limp Balloon"

There, I have just elocuted you.

Re:I've seen more practical aircraft

[Dunbal]

in the 4th century the Koreans used blimps to successfully invade and conquer Japan

      Yeah, and the vikings flew across to the Americas in blimps in the year 200 AC, oh and forget about crossing the Bering strait on winter - the indigenous peoples of the Americas came from China in, you guessed it - blimps of course... Oh and remember, the great pyramids were actually docking towers for the blimps - there was a lot of transatlantic blimp traffic 5000 years ago. This explains the similarity in pyramid cultures, and of course Nazca... /sarcasm

Re:I've seen more practical aircraft

[Deadstick]

who the hell has that much space to store a blimp

You do, if you have a two-car garage and one car. It's collapsible, and the lifting gas is expendable (as opposed to helium which is very expensive: helium ballons have to be kept full or emptied with expensive compressors).

who the hell will police the skies

The FAA. It's an aircraft, and they know precisely how to give you a ticket, thank you.

rj

Re:well

[Grey Dragon]

blimp: a term coined in 1915 as a friendly synonym for a pressure airship. The word is said to have mimicked the sound made when a man snapped his thumb on the airship's gas-filled envelope. It is not derived from the description of an apocryphal type of World War I British airship, the "Balloon, Type B, limp." There was never a "Type B" nor a designation "limp" applied to a British airship before, during or after WW I. The term most likely originated with Lieutenant (later Air Commodore) A. D. Cunningham of the Royal Naval Air Service, commanding officer of the British airship station at Capel in December 1915. During a weekly inspection, Lt. Cunningham visited an aircraft hangar to examine a "Submarine Scout" pressure airship, His Majesty's Airship SS-12. Cunningham broke the solemnity of the occasion by playfully flipping his thumb at the gasbag and was rewarded with an odd noise that echoed off the taut fabric. Cunningham imitated this sound by uttering: "Blimp!" A young midshipman, who later became known as Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, repeated the tale of this humorous inspection to his fellow officers in the mess hall before lunch the same day. It is believed that by this route the word came into common usage.

clarification.

Re:well

[The_Wilschon]

Well, in response to both you and the poster who disagreed with your etymology of "blimp", I went out looking for more information, since nobody bothered to cite any sources. The Discouraging Word [thediscouragingword.com] ran a bit on the etymology of "blimp" a while back, which can be found about halfway down the linked page (sorry, there's no anchor there), under the heading "Shortt, Cunningham, and the bothersome matter of blimp". This posting pulls together a number of sources: the New Yorker, the Oxford English Dictionary, "www.blimpinfo.com" (which seems to be where the other poster got his paragraph verbatim), "www.bartleby.com" (The American Heritage dictionary), "www.m-w.com" (Merriam-Webster), "www.wordorigins.com", and "http://www.worldwar1.com/sfzepp.htm" (a personal website).

The conclusion drawn by The Discouraging Word is that the etymology is very unclear, but that more sources tend to weigh in on the otomatopoeic origin side than anywhere else. It is worth mentioning that the OED, perhaps the most authoritative source cited, favors the B-limp origin, by itself citing a 1939 issue of the periodical War Illustrated.

The post ends with "Hmm. Such a complicated circle we can weave with on-line sources alone. We can't imagine what we might find were we to venture into a library...".

There is one more proposal for the origins of the word, put forth by none other than the celebrated philologist and author J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien suggests that "blimp" comes from a compounding of the words "blister" and "lump". However, nobody seems to give this theory much credence.

Re:Another piece in the puzzle

[Calinous]

You would lose the blimp - there aren't many materials to survive the heat from the launch of a rocket, and none of them in the form of a thin enough film to be used for balloons.
      Anyway, let's assume a Saturn V rocket - with a mass of 3,000,000kg. As each cubic meter of air has about 1kg of weight, you need a balloon at least 3,000,000 cubic meters for buoyancy at sea level.
      Let;s say you want to launch the rocket at 8,000m (some 25,000 feet). Air there has a density around 0,5kg/m^3, so you need at least double the volume just for payload - let's add some more volume for balloon mass, and you end up with 8 million cubic meters of gas, or a cube 200m long.
      How much helium is worth? $37.50/1000 ft^3 (28 m^3), by the U.S. Bureau of Mines.
      To fill the balloon, you need 10 million dollars worth of helium (which will be lost, as the balloon envelope will be destroyed at rocket launch). How much energy you save using this?
      Well, the first stage on Saturn V rockets will fly up to 110km (using some 2 millions kg of fuel). As such, a ballpark estimate would be a tenth of the energy would not be needed if launch was 8km higher - saving you 200,000kg of liquid hydrogen and oxygen (in a proportion about 8:1 for oxygen, mass). Cost? $3.6/kg hydrogen, $0.1/kg oxygen - $100,000 at 1980 prices.

      Launching rockets from balloons sounds reasonable?