AirSkyBuster : Aircraft and Airplane

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Airship (Wallpaper 4)
4. Photo wallpaper gallery of Airship. 4. Airship pictures and images collection.
A line of limousines and taxis snakes its way into the Royal Park to deliver 300 well-heeled passengers and their smart luggage to the discreet air terminal. They are in no rush because the flight they are about to board to New York will take two days. Moored on the grass outside the terminal is a 600ft long behemoth, a vast Hybrid Air Vehicle. A cross between a balloon and an aircraft wing, this new-wave blimp is filled with non-flammable helium and air. Slung beneath is a vast passenger cabin akin to a miniature first-class cruise ship with dining rooms, a ballroom, bars and a casino. For the same price as a club-class plane ticket, these 300 discerning travellers will eat, sip cocktails and dance as they float serenely across the Atlantic. There is no runway; there is no need. Once clearance is given for take-off, the captain disengages the hover cushions that suck the craft to the ground, directs the thrust of four 8,000hp engines down, and powers the ship up to 9,000ft. In 48 hours they will touch down in New York harbour, having burned just a fifth of the fuel used by an aeroplane. It’s a stress-free hop from central London to the centre of Manhattan, with no lengthy airport connections at either end, and no icebergs either. Airship travel has been a distant dream ever since a catastrophic fire in 1937 ripped through the LZ-129 Hindenburg as it neared its mooring mast in New Jersey, killing thirty-five people on board and one man on the ground. Reporter Herbert Morrison’s vivid eye-witness testimony would become the industry’s epitaph: ‘It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It’s smoke, and it’s in flames now; and the frame is crashing to the ground… Oh the humanity!’ Could an industry dogged by tragedy and belonging to a bygone era finally have found the technology to cruise back into the mainstream? The American Department of Defense thinks so. They have just handed a £315 million contract to design and build the world’s largest flying object to a small British company based in Bedfordshire. Having beaten aviation giants Lockheed Martin, Hybrid Air Vehicles have just four months to build the belly and bones of the craft – the payload module, the fuel tanks, the four engines, the propulsion ducts and bow thrusters (the prototype is pictured on the previous pages). If all goes to plan these parts will leave its secure manufacturing facility in May, be loaded on a vast Antonov cargo plane, and flown to Arizona where they will join up with the ‘envelope’ (ie, the balloon). Once assembly is complete, military technology giant Northrop Grumman will add the top-secret surveillance equipment and the vehicle will travel on its own power to a U.S. army base on the east coast of the United States. Once there the U.S. military will put the fully assembled 300ft long craft through its places, flying it with pilots and without. When it finally completes testing and trials in January 2012, it will leave the US and fly back across the Atlantic to the UK, the first time this has happened since the heyday of Zeppelins in the Thirties. Guided by a three-man crew, the giant ship will stay at a U.S. Army base here, ready to be deployed. It will be available for use in Afghanistan where it can be flown remotely, climbing to 20,000ft and circling for 21 days, an omniscient god perpetually surveying the battlefield and giving advance warnings of IED attacks and ambushes.

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Airship (Wallpaper 3)
3. Photo wallpaper gallery of Airship. 3. Airship pictures and images collection.
The hot air airship was invented by Don Cameron (UK) of Cameron Balloons fame in the early seventies. After three years of development, the first prototype, G-xxxx, was presented to the public at the Icicle Meet in January 1973. It had a single vertical fin of roundish shape and the single rudder was inflated with ram air from the propane fueled VW engine. A second vertical fin was added quickly. Later, Cameron switched to tail surfaces in a Y-cofiguration and finally to the now prevalent cruciform arrangement. Around the same time, engineers at Thunder Balloons (later to unite with Colt Balloons to form Thunder & Colt) were experimenting with scale models of pressurized thermal airships. A first prototype, sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland, made its maiden flight in 1970something. Cooperating with a Swedish balloon company, Cameron also flew its first pressurized hot airship. Also in 1973, Brian Boland (USA) flew his 140,000 cu. ft. Albatross. Along the years, Raven Industries in Sioux Falls (South Dakota, USA) and the World Balloon Corporation in Albuquerque (New Mexico, USA) built their own pressurized thermal airships. But their designs never entered certified production. In 1980? Cameron went on to pressurize its airship line as well. Today, all commercially available hot air airships are of the pressurized type. In the 1980s, the German GEFA-FLUG conducted extensive research into hot air balloon and airship technologies, under the direction of its founder Karl-Ludwig Busemeyer. In cooperation with Thunder & Colt, from which it borrowed the gondola design, GEFA-FLUG developed its own thermal airship design. Featuring a finer, more aerodynamic shape and higher performance specifications, the prototype AS 80 GD flew in 1985?. In 1990? Thunder & Colt built a very large hot air airship of 261,000 cu. ft. for Frenchman Dany Cleyet-Marel, the AS-261. The airship was later fitted with an even larger replacement envelope by Lindstrand Balloons and has since then been know as the AS-300. Late entrant in the market is Lindstrand Balloons (founded in 1994?) with its HS-110, a very sophisticated design intended mainly for commercial advertising operations.

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Airship (Wallpaper 2)
2. Photo wallpaper gallery of Airship. 2. Airship pictures and images collection.
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin began construction of his first airship, LZ-1, in June, 1898 in a floating wooden hangar on the Bodensee (Lake Constance) at Manzell (Friedrichshafen) in Southern Germany, not far from the Swiss border. The movable, floating shed allowed the ship to be positioned into the wind to enter or leave its hangar. The ship was completed in the winter of 1899 but von Zeppelin decided to wait until the summer of 1900 before attempting to fly his invention. The ship was inflated with hydrogen gas in June and made its maiden flight on July 2, 1900. The first flight lasted about 18 minutes and covered about 3-1/2 miles over the lake. LZ-1 (Luftschiff Zeppelin 1) was 420 feet long, 38-1/2 feet in diameter, and contained approximately 399,000 cubic feet of hydrogen in 17 gas cells made of rubberized cotton fabric. Two metal gondolas were suspended below the ship (one forward and one aft) and each gondola housed a 4-cylinder water-cooled Daimler gasoline engine producing about 14 horsepower. Each engine was connected by long shafts to two outrigger propellers mounted on either side of the hull. Pitch was controlled by a sliding weight suspended under the hull which could be shifted fore and aft; there were no elevators for pitch control, or fins for stability. The first flight of LZ-1 was the culmination of years of planning by Count Zeppelin, but as a first attempt the ship had understandable weaknesses: LZ-1 was overweight, and a severe lack of engine power and speed made it difficult to control in even slight winds; the engines themselves were unreliable, and one failed during the short maiden flight; the ship suffered from poor controllability due to its lack of horizontal or vertical stabilizing fins and control surfaces, and the sliding weight system jammed, eliminating pitch control; and most importantly, the structure itself lacked rigidity due to its weak tubular frame, which hogged during flight, with its center portion rising high above its drooping bow and stern. Attempts were made to increase the rigidity of the framework and address the other problems, and two additional flights were made, but the flights did not impress the military representatives in attendance that Zeppelin’s project deserved public funds, and Count Zeppelin was out of money. Zeppelin was forced to dismantle LZ-1. But while LZ-1 itself was not a success, Count von Zeppelin’s basic concept — of a long rigid metal frame containing individual gas cells and covered by fabric — was sound, and formed the basis for all future zeppelin airships.

image dimensions : 1092 x 682

Airship (Wallpaper 1)
1. Photo wallpaper gallery of Airship. 1. Airship pictures and images collection.
An airship or dirigible is a type of aerostat or "lighter-than-air aircraft" that can be steered and propelled through the air using rudders and propellers or other thrust mechanisms. Unlike aerodynamic aircraft such as fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, which produce lift by moving a wing through the air, aerostatic aircraft stay aloft by having a large "envelope" filled with a gas which is less dense than the surrounding atmosphere. The first lifting gas used was hydrogen, although this had well-known concerns over its flammability. Where helium was available, which was only in the USA, this non-flammable gas was used instead. All modern airships, since the 1960s, use helium. The main types of airship are non-rigid (or blimps), semi-rigid and rigid. Blimps are "pressure" airships where internal pressure, maintained by forcing air into internal ballonet, is used to both maintain the shape of the airship and its structural integrity. Semi-rigid airships maintain the envelope shape by internal pressure, but have some form of internal support such as a fixed keel to which control and engine gondolas and stabilizers and steering surfaces are mounted. Rigid airships have structural skeletons which maintain the shape and carry all loads from gondolas, engines, control surfaces and stabilizers. The skeleton contains numerous balloons, known as "gas cells" which supply the static lift without having to bear any structural loading. The name Zeppelin as the type was invented by Count Zeppelin and the vast majority of rigid airships built were manufactured by the firm he founded. Airships were the first aircraft to enable controlled, powered flight, and were widely used before the 1940s, but their use decreased over time as their capabilities were surpassed by those of airplanes. Their decline continued with a series of high-profile accidents, including the 1937 burning of the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg near Lakehurst, New Jersey, and the destruction of the USS Akron. Airships are still used today in certain niche applications, such as advertising, freight transportation, tourism, camera platforms for sporting events, and aerial observation and interdiction platforms, where the ability to hover in one place for an extended period outweighs the need for speed and maneuverability. There is some confusion around the term aerostat with regard to airships. This confusion arises because aerostat has two different meanings. One meaning of aerostat refers to all craft that remain aloft using buoyancy (static not dynamic lift): in this sense airships are a type of aerostat. The narrower and more technical meaning of aerostat refers only to tethered or moored balloons: in this sense airships are not aerostats. In some countries, airships are also known as dirigibles from the French (diriger to direct plus -ible), meaning "directable" or steerable. The first airships were called dirigible balloons. Over time, the word balloon was dropped from the phrase. In modern usage, balloon refers to any buoyant aircraft that generally relies on wind currents for horizontal movement, and usually has a mechanism to control vertical movement. The term "gondola" is used to describe the passenger/instrument and/or engine area of an airship. There may be one or more. The term zeppelin is a genericised trademark that originally referred to airships manufactured by the German Zeppelin Company, which pioneered dirigible design in the early years of the twentieth century. The word Luftschiff, German for "airship", usually prefixed their crafts' names. In modern common usage, the terms Zeppelin, dirigible and airship are used interchangeably for any type of rigid airship, with the term blimp alone used to describe non-rigid airships. Although the blimp also qualifies as a "dirigible", the term is seldom used with blimps. In modern technical usage, airship is the term used for all aircraft of this type, with Zeppelin referring only to aircraft of that manufacture, and blimp referring only to non-rigid airships. Non-rigid airships (blimps) use a pressure level in excess of the surrounding air pressure to retain their shape during flight. Unlike the rigid design, the non-rigid airship's gas envelope has no compartmentation. At sea level, the ballonets (internal flexible cells) are filled with air. As altitude is increased, the lifting gas expands and air from the ballonets is expelled through air valves to maintain the same hull shape. To return to sea level, the process is reversed. Air is forced back into the ballonets by both scooping air from the engine exhaust and using auxiliary blowers. Semi-rigid airships, like blimps, require internal pressure to maintain their shape, but have extended, usually articulated keel frames running along the bottom of the envelope to distribute suspension loads into the envelope and allow lower envelope pressures.