Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... → Learn More
Call me unimaginative, but I always thought blimps were best suited for sporting events and alternate history fiction. The US military would beg to differ, if this pearly-white behemoth is any indication. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Blue Devil Block 2, a floating surveillance platform that could soon appear at war-torn combat zones the world over.
These photos come courtesy of Wired’s Danger Room, and at first glance, the airship doesn’t live up to its namesake. It’s neither blue, nor particularly menacing, but the Blue Devil is downright massive: it’s 370 feet long from end to end, making it nearly double the size of the Goodyear blimp.
This whale is slated to carry an array of wide-area cameras and eavesdropping equipment into scenic Afghanistan by the middle of next year. Once it reaches its destination, the Blue Devil will hang 20,000 feet in the air and starting spying. An onboard supercomputer will process all the information, which will then by relayed to our friendly forces below.
The Blue Devil has been in the works for a long time, as most military projects tend to be. Interestingly, Danger Room notes that it’s one of two airship-related military projects in the works, which is probably two more than any civilian would’ve expected.
Floating through the air 200 feet above the ground, I glide past a cluster of buildings, a stand of trees, the shoreline of a shimmering bay. A golf driving range drifts into view. Four men stop swinging their clubs and stare up, open-mouthed. In an age that's jaded by wall-to-wall entertainment, they're experiencing an all-too-rare sensation: pure awe. A giant oval shadow moves over them, and I'm gone.
If the guys at the golf club think a low pass by a 246-foot airship is impressive, they should check out the view from the pilot's seat. That's where I am, getting flight training in a zeppelin. It's an incredibly rare privilege. There are fewer licensed zeppelin pilots in the United States than there are Supreme Court justices. And there is only one zeppelin airship in the country.
For most people, the word zeppelin evokes one indelible image: the Hindenburg's flaming crash in 1937. That catastrophe struck the death knell for commercial airship travel, but the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company, which owned the doomed airship, hung in there. Out of the wreckage of postwar Germany, it prospered in a variety of ventures, among them selling and servicing Caterpillar construction equipment. Then it got back in the airship business, launching a helium-filled model called the Zeppelin NT (for "new technology") in 1997. Since then, the company has built three more airships, now flying in Japan and Europe.
To see the American zeppelin up close, I travel to San Francisco, where a company called Airship Ventures operates the Zeppelin NT Eureka. Mostly, Eureka earns its keep by carrying passengers on short sightseeing jaunts. A year ago, however, the company also began offering zeppelin-piloting classes. Customers who have a private pilot's license can spend two days learning about the zeppelin, including 3 hours riding as a passenger and a half-hour as the pilot.
At noon on a sunny Monday, I arrive at the front gate of Moffett Field, a former Navy base. I go to a classroom with five other students and chief pilot Fritz Günther, a severe-looking former flight instructor in the East German air force who introduces us to Eureka's basic principles. He explains that a Zeppelin NT is designed to fly a bit heavier than air, which makes it easier to handle on the ground (airships of the Hindenburg era required hundreds of men to hold them down). To get off the ground, the zeppelin is equipped with propellers that can swivel up and down to provide vertical thrust. Then, when the ship is in the air and moving at speed, it shifts into "flight configuration," in which the engines swivel to horizontal. In effect, the highly maneuverable Zeppelin NT is a cross between a dirigible and a tilt-rotor aircraft like the V-22 Osprey.
The next morning we finally get to climb aboard. Inside, the gondola is spacious, more like the interior of a yacht than an aircraft. It feels like a yacht too—even on the ground, the gondola's slow rolling motion reminds me of an ocean swell. The first student straps into the pilot's seat, with Günther in the co-pilot's chair to his right. The engines increase in pitch. Smoothly, we begin to rise vertically into the air. We start to move forward as well, as though ascending a giant escalator. The expanse of the airfield falls away, and soon we are coasting along at 1000 feet over Silicon Valley.
Those of us who aren't at the controls roam around the gondola, admiring the view. The windows slope outward, so we can look straight down and watch the scenery scroll beneath our feet. I open a window and stick my head out into the 40-mph slipstream like a dog on a road trip. Mountains lie to the west, the bay to the east, all of it soft and gauzy in the morning's lingering haze. As an Airship Ventures staffer hands out snacks and drinks, I feel like I'm at a party that happens to be dangling a quarter-mile up.
Eureka returns to the airfield and touches down; now it's my turn. I strap in and put on a headset. Almost immediately I'm struggling to keep up as Günther talks me through the controls. There are so many of them. One lever controls the angle of the two forward propellers; a nearby pair changes their thrust. A joystick on my left-hand side commands the rear propellers to pitch the nose up and down or to yaw side-to-side. On top of that, there are numerous switches and levers and toggles to control the pressure of the helium and the distribution of ballast. Helpfully, Günther tells me what to do; if I'm too slow, he reaches over and moves the control himself.
Up we go, climbing and gaining forward speed. I focus on the stick as I try to keep the enormous lumbering craft under control. With three engines, four propellers and a bag of helium gas whose buoyancy constantly changes depending on the temperature and pressure, piloting the zeppelin is like flying an airplane and making a scuba dive at the same time. As I try to figure it all out, Eureka bucks and weaves through the California sky like a spastic humpback whale.
As we reach 25 mph, Günther switches the ship to flight configuration. Now we're using the fins, not the engines, to control the ship's motion. I'm starting to get the hang of it. Part of the trick is to fly the zeppelin like you'd steer a sailboat, anticipating corrections by a few seconds. But I still can't seem to stop the ship from unexpectedly rearing up or shifting to one side. "Remember, it's not just you moving the ship," Günther says. "You've got air currents and lift from thermals."
I keep trying. Precision flying, this is not. But I've reached my moment of Zen: No matter how badly I fly this thing, it's still going to keep bobbing along. You can't flip a zeppelin upside down; you can't dive-bomb it into the earth. The ship is inherently stable. That's comforting to know. And the golfers below certainly seem more than impressed.
My time is almost up. I head back toward the airfield and start coaxing Eureka down, angling the thrusters forward and back, toggling the throttle, easing us slowly toward the tarmac and the waiting ground crew. A few yards off the ground, the ship hangs, hesitant, then a nudge of thrust brings the front wheel down. The crew grabs a line hanging from the nose, and we're back on the ground. I unstrap and climb out of the pilot's seat, still feeling lighter than air.
BEYOND BLIMPS: The Bullet 580 is 235 feet long. By comparison, the Goodyear Blimp is only 192 feet long. (Photo: chadwho1ders/Flickr)
The heyday of air ships like the ill-fated Hindenburg were thought to be long gone. But decades since the famous airship crashed in New Jersey, the behemoths of the skies are making a comeback. Space.com reports that the E-Green technologies Bullet 580, a 235-foot long airship that is as long as a 27-floor skyscraper, is to serve as a stratospheric satellite, or "stratellite." Its developers hope that it will serve as a “high-flying sentinel” in the air.
The gigantic airship recently took six hours to inflate inside Garrett Coliseum in Montgomery, Ala. It is designed to carry payloads of up to 2,000 pounds at altitudes of 20,000 feet. The ship is made of Kevlar, which has a width just one-16th of an inch thick. Nonetheless, this is 10 times stronger than steel. E-Green Technologies bought the Bullet 580 from its developers, 21st Century Airships, just last year.
The Bullet 580 is intended as a prototype for a series of ships for commercial use. Michael Lawson is chairman and CEO of E-Green Technologies. As he told Space.com, "Our airships are radically different designs thatmove beyondthe performance limitations of traditional blimps or zeppelins by combining advanced technology with simple construction and the ability to fuel with algae, protecting our environment.”
The practical uses for the gigantic air ship include military and civilian purposes. Space.com reports that different versions of the airship might take on roles for “battlefield surveillance, missile defense warning, electronic countermeasures, weapons platforms, Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) services, weather monitoring, broadcast communications and communications relays.” Further, E-Green Technologies expects that the new series of airships will create aerospace and aviation jobs in both Florida and California, where the business hopes to set up operational centers.
On a recent sunny afternoon, SF Weekly contributing photographer Tim Wagner headed to Silicon Valley for a tour of Airship Venture's "Eureka," the first lighter-than-air passenger ship to fly in the U.S. after more than 71 years.
Tim Wagner
The 246-foot long zeppelin is larger than a Boeing 747 and carries 12 passengers at a cruising speed of 35 mph.
Tim Wagner
The cavernous Moffett Field hanger where Eureka is stored dwarfs even the airship. The row of three World War II blimp hangars are still some of the largest unsupported structures in the country.
Tim Wagner
Hanger Three's massive doors remain open except during heavy wind and annual maintenance. The airship hangar's interior is so large that fog sometimes forms near the ceiling.
Tim Wagner
Airship pilot Jim Dexter and crew chief Matt Smith discuss the day's route for the ship's Geek Tour.
Tim Wagner
Ground crew member Matt Nicolary climbs the mast of the 30-ton custom truck to tether Eureka. The truck helps anchor the ship as it floats just above the ground.
A Spanish company called Turtle Airships is working on plans to build a luxurious solar-powered blimp which can take passengers from New York to Paris.
Perhaps the only thing cooler than being powered by lightweight photovoltaic cells, this airship is also designed to rest on land or water.
The first blimp prototype will be propelled in two nontraditional ways. The outside of the ship will be covered with Cadmium-Indium-Germanium (CIG) photovoltaic cells, picked for their their light weight. The cells should generate enough power to move the blimp at around 40 mph in average conditions, or at around 70 horsepower. Meanwhile, a diesel drivetrain will generate the rest of the power, and ideally the designers will look to an adapted hybrid electric model for that. And because blimps fly at low altitudes, they don’t have to deal with problems that plague diesel engines at elevations over 30,000 ft.
The only thing currently keeping this visionary project from flying is funding. But Turtle Airships hopes that will change after the completion of a genuine prototype that will demonstrate the project’s viability to funders. “Our goal in flying this remote control model is to get some video of it onto the Web and hopefully attract some financing that will enable us to move on from there to a genuine, manned, demonstration model of a Turtle Airship,” said one spokesperson.
The folks at Turtle Airships don’t like calling their aircraft a ‘blimp’: “It is a rigid shelled, amphibious, solar powered, all weather, FAST aircraft that is lifted by helium, but it is not a blimp.”
Even so: it’s a blimp.
Though that doesn’t take anything away from the ingenuity of its design. Their idea is certainly not one short on vision. And who wouldn’t want to take a transatlantic ride on a flying luxury cruise ship powered by sunshine?
Nasty memories of the Hindenburg aside, it may not be long before passengers are flying comfortably from New York to Paris– and beyond– aboard Turtle Airships.
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All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
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