Eureka. David Axe photo.
by DAVID AXE
Military air travel can be one of the most exciting things in the world: catapulting off an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, churning low over the Afghan countryside in a twin-rotor Chinook helicopter, spiraling down for a tactical landing in a C-130 bound for Baghdad. By comparison, my Zeppelin ride was almost tranquil.
To be clear, the German-built Zeppelin NT on which I was a passenger, motoring low over the San Francisco area, is not a military aircraft. It belongs to Airship Ventures, a two-year-old tour and advertising operator based at an old Navy blimp base at Moffett Field in northern California. But Eureka, as Airship Venture’s Zeppelin is known, is an unofficial test model for the coming renaissance in military lighter-than-air operations.
Nearly 50 years after the last U.S. military airship in regular service was decommissioned, lighter-than-air craft are making a big comeback. To gain a sense of how our balloon-based aerial future might look and feel, I hitched a ride on Eureka for a 90-minute tour. Airship Venture’s flight-ops officer Jim Dexter was at the helm, wearing a leather bomber jacket and sunglasses.
My first impressions were how quiet and comfortable Eureka was — and how slow. For our circuit around Moffett Field and over Stanford University, we cruised at just 35 miles per hour. With around a dozen passengers and crew and a one-ton payload, Eureka tops out at 50 miles per hour. Cars sped past us on the highways a thousand feet below. It’s the nature of lighter-than-air travel to be low and slow — almost ponderously slow.
But the time premium you pay for airship travel buys you several advantages: airships are highly fuel-efficient for a ton-mile; as long as they avoid storms, they endure few stresses in flight, affording them extremely long service lives; they can be scaled up to a very, very large size at low cost compared to airplanes. In terms of cost per ton-mile, with delivery time factored in, airships fit a niche within the wide gap between sea vessels and cargo planes.
It’s for that reason that the U.S. Navy is mulling the return of large airships for military missions. In coming decades, lighter-than-air vessels much larger than the 250-foot-long Eureka could become a fixture in U.S. military transportation networks.
Hi there,
Another point I missed was that airships are the worst performers in terms of fuel efficiency measured in per passenger mile of almost any type of air transport but they are by far the best if measured in terms of fuel per hours endurance. That is why airships like the Skyship 600L are used by the military. The Zeppelin nt is heavier and hence a larger volume design that simply lifts the same payload as a 13 passenger seat Skyship but uses much more fuel for it 3 engines and much more helium for its more complex envelope than a normal blimp and costs twice as much to buy. Another reason the military like the Skyship 600 is that the gondola is made of Kevlar and more bullet proof than the thin skinned carbon fiber used for the Zeppelin.
I can also assure you that the US Navy is not mulling the return of airships. They are however using blimps on occasions and have shown particular interest in the HAV Skycat program and even flew a Sentinel 1000 in the past which is a Skyship not a Zeppelin.
Regards
JB. (www.airshipblimp.com)
Whole ScyCat program is hanged. This project by
Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) company where the Ideas Generator was Roger Munk is at a crossroads. General Designer for the airship serie ScyCat (on HAV base) died and today involved in this project orders has no assurance that one will be adequately implemented. Obituary of Roger, see here!
[...] comes at a time when the U.S. military — the Navy, especially — is trying to get back into the airship business in a big [...]
This is a great idea but I fear that the disasters of the 1920 and 1930 must be first addressed to assure the Public that the future airship will be safe and efficient.
We are a society that is obsessed with speed and convenience and this is getting in the way of the one very important fact that there is a place for a slower more efficient transportation method that the airship can fill.
Being that the airship is a low altitude low energy option more public money should be available to develop this exciting futuristic mode of transport so please keep the airship in the forefront of technology where it belongs.
I hope that one day the option of taking an airship is available both for moving people and goods not only for the efficiency it offers but the obvious beauty of hundreds of these amazing vehicles floating serenely above us and not a dirty ugly road in sight.
Sorry forgot to refute the energy efficiency. Yes using conventional engines it is fuel inefficient but using the option of electric engines or tethers means that the per mile cost is reduced to almost nothing in comparison with conventional transportation and not only that but the infrastructure costs will be peanuts in comparison to building a conventional road and we can even use the present road system to route airships around simply by building tracks along the highways that the airships can tether to, which can route electrical power to the airship or even act as tug ways as propulsion. The possibilities are limitless we only need the will and vision to realise the dream.