Giant Turtle Airships are the Way of the Future
Thu, Jul 3, 2008
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A turtle shaped airship is perhaps the last thing you might expect to see floating through the sky, but this eco-friendly craft might just be key to the next generation of humanitarian relief.
Powered by solar panels during the day and bio-diesel at night, the airship is an intriguing concept. It cruises at speeds comparable to some airplanes and can take off and land straight up and down like a helicopter. It can even to take on water ballast and act like a boat, enabling it to land just about anywhere – deserts, mountain lakes, swamps or the middle of the ocean – and the first prototype will make its maiden flight in 2009.
The plan is to use the airships to carry humanitarian relief to disaster victims around the world, where they can function as flying hospitals complete with emergency surgery rooms and medical equipment. The craft can also carry large amounts of supplies such as food, water purification systems and medicine, as well as doctors, nurses and search and rescue personnel. There’s more in the press release about the company’s investment plans ($200 million by 2012) and expected initial public offering ($3 billion in 2015), including dashed plans for deployment by the US Department of Defense as military transport.
Image by Flickr user teamdarfur
And even though it might look like something out of Star Wars, if it works I don’t think the people of impoverished regions all over the world will be complaining too much.
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“Turtle” Airships Hope to Mix Novelty With Philantrophy Says:
July 4th, 2008 at 2:13 pm[...] Source: environmentalgraffiti.com [...]
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Hearing about this enough, never hear of any actual progress. I doubt any serious usage is ever going to happen.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:09 am
@hearing this
At least they have a business plan to make this a reality. It may never materialize but there are more forces driving this to fruition than many of the other “Concepts” out there.
July 4th, 2008 at 3:45 am
impoverished people will always complain and try to bring down those who are willing to work for a living and create better societies than their own.
July 4th, 2008 at 4:39 am
There’s little chance that we’ll see any progress with Turtle Airships. I’m hoping to see more development, but the concrete establishment of such a company does not appear to have even left the planning stages. 2009? Not likely.
July 4th, 2008 at 8:14 am
That’s nice that you feel the need to express your feelings just because there is a text box that allows you to do so. It would be nicer if you posted something constructive or at the very least, something interesting.
I’ve been hearing about these for a very long time too. I am more optimistic, and hope that the technology has finally reached the point that we will see these. We could have used these this summer during the floods, or during Katrina!
Also, it’s getting prohibitively expensive to move cargo around with massive airplanes due to the rising price of gas. This crappy aspect of our current economy might push this machine into more widespread use.
July 4th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Give us a break, guys. Anyone who knows anything about aerodynamics can see that whoever designed this pipe dream is a rank amateur. And any undergraduate aeronautical student can tell you that if you’re flying anywhere near the speed of a propeller driven airplane, the physics says airships are far less efficient than winged vehicles.
Get a clue, guys, and get some good technical advice from a competent university professor before you publish such schlock. Or better yet, get a copy of my great uncle’s book, “Airship Design” and read Chapter 10, “Common Airship Fallacies”, which covers this and many other fraudulent ideas people have been repeatedly trying to pass off as viable for the last hundred years!
July 4th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Hi Chyck, All…
Answers inline as follows…
July 4th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Those look really cool. I hope someone will build them.
July 4th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a clear example of either fraud or complete incompetence in engineering on the part of MKWalden:
*** Any engineer will be able to tell you that it takes more energy to both LIFT and PUSH a given mass than it does to simply PUSH the same mass.
Especially if the mass is in a form that is designed TOTALLY for low drag at 0 degrees AoA, requiring no dynamic lift.
No, sir, you are completely wrong on that.
Airships have a fixed quantity of lift, and the drag which varies with airspeed. The amount of drag increases as the square of the velocity, and the lift remains constant with airspeed.
Airplanes have lift which varies with airspeed, and drag that varies with airspeed. The lift increases with the velocity squared, just like drag.
Now, let’s say you want to fly stuff. Okay, put it on an airship. Sure it’ll float, but you have to push it don’t you. The important thing is how much lift you get compared to how hard you have to push. This is the “lift to drag ratio”, or L/D as engineers call it.
In airships, the lift is constant, but the drag increases with speed. Then the L/D looks like 1/velocity squared or 1/(V*V). As velocity increases, 1/(V*V) gets smaller and smaller and smaller: 1/(1*1)=1/1=1, then 1/(2*2)=1/4th, 1/(3*3)=1/9th, 1/(4*4)=1/16th, and so on until it gets really small.
In airplanes, the lift varies with speed just like drag does. So the L/D varies with speed like (V*V)/(V*V). As velocity increases, the L/D ratio stays constant: (1*1)/(1*1)=1/1=1, then (2*2)/(2*2)=4/4=1, then (3*3)/(3*3)=9/9=1, and so on.
So the performance of airships gets worse and worse with increasing speed, but the performance of airplanes stays the same with increasing airspeed.
At zero speed, airships can stay up in the air and consume no power, whereas an airplane (for example the Harrier) has to burn up a lot of fuel. At really low speed, an airship can use less power than an airplane, since 1/(small number squared) is bigger than (small number squared)/(small number squared).
But for any reasonable speed, say, anything over 80 miles per hour, airships require more “push” than an equivalent airplane.
So, contrary to MKWalden’s comment, EVERY competent engineer knows that performance of the vehicle matters, and that at any reasonable speed airships require more power than airplanes – which is why we don’t have airships anymore, except for flying advertisements around, and making a little extra money by letting people go along for the ride.
Now, what about hurricane Katrina relief? Well, trucks work just like airships; they can haul a certain amount of stuff and the road and air resistance increase as the velocity squared. An airship big enough to haul 40,000 lbs of freight would be about two football fields long. Compare this to a single semi, which takes one guy to drive and consumes a lot less fuel – this is why we don’t use airships to haul cargo around.
So no, MK, this design isn’t thought out at all. It’s a complete pipe dream.
As for the rest of your post, I could tear it as equally apart; but I hope it is sufficient to say that it fails to stand up just as your waving your hands at “lift and push”.
Just because there’s a patent on it, doesn’t mean its worth anything. Sure there’s patents on junk science. There’s a patent on an airship with a sail, and it’s been known since the Montgolfier’s that putting a sail on a balloon doesn’t do anything because you’re “in” the wind, and thus there’s no relative wind to push on the sail!
And Pavleka? Don’t get me started! What a joke. If his system was viable, it should also work on ships and submarines; but they still have rudders, don’t they. Yes, bow thrusters are great a low speed, which is why ships have them so they don’t need tug boats; but when the ship or sub is up to speed, they don’t use them because they don’t work as efficiently as a simple rudder. Get a freaking clue!
Solar power? Sounds great. One problem: Where are the solar powered solar panel factories? Where are they? Nowhere, because a solar panel can’t produce enough energy over its lifetime to produce copies of itself. So powering an airship with them is just silly. It would cost way too much compared to simple fuel, and then you’d either have to have two propulsion systems to be able to run at night, or have batteries; and I don’t know about you, but I for one don’t want several tons of lithium-ion or other nasty chemicals flying over my house. Even with reversible fuel cells, solar powered airships aren’t in your future.
The old-timers weren’t dumb folks. They didn’t do things that look like today’s crazy proposals because they knew that stuff wouldn’t work! And they quit building airships for simple practical reasons too. They didn’t run around saying schlock like “this would drastically reduce operational costs”; they went ahead and did it if it worked, and they shut up if they couldn’t make it go. Hence the phrase, “put up or shut up.”
July 6th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Ah. so you see folks? You call people out with some facts and then they refuse to answer.
By the way, M K Walden stated:
*** Indeed, I AM IN your great uncle’s book…
BOTH for designing and flying one of the FIRST solar powered airships as well as co design credit for the first rigid manned airship since the LZ series, the MLA-32-B. (A “Flying saucer”)
Excuse me? He is in my great uncle’s book? Yeah right. Be careful ladies and gentlemen! Snake oil alert! Charles P. Burgess published “Airship Design” in 1927. M K Walden wasn’t even a twinkle in his daddy’s eye then. In fact, his daddy wasn’t old enough to HAVE a twinkle in his eye that could result in procreation in 1927.
Moron.
No, MK, you were not C. P. Burgess’ “Airship Design”. You’re a demented blog fool and it’s about time someone called you out on it.
And oooh! you built a solar powered airship? When. Yeah right. Big deal! Any real engineer knows to equip a vehicle with a power plant with the minimum life cycle cost, so why pick solar cells _ever_? All you’re doing in proclaiming that is stating, “Hey! I’m a hobbyist! I mess around with stuff on the weekends and I made a thing and I’m ever so proud of myself! You should worship me because I’m sooooooo cool!”
You’re a moron. Consider your self PWNED, as they say.
Folks, no rigid airship has been built and flown (other than a few models as noted in K. L. Busemeyer’s “RC Luftschiffe und Ballon”) since LZ130 “Graf Zeppelin 2″ in 1938. Period.
MK, leave it to the professionals, and shut the hell up. We all make mistakes, BUT YOU ARE A NUTJOB PSYCHO WHO CLAIMS HIS WORK IS WRITTEN UP IN A BOOK PUBLISHED LONG BEFORE HE WAS BORN!!!
Engineering is NOT Karaoke. Quit treating it as such.
July 6th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Maybe the L/D ratio is not the right one to use to measure performance. It is specifically intended for powered flight of fixed wing aircraft. It doesn’t not seem sensible to use it for helicopters, for example, where L is a function of fuel consumption and can go as high as gross fuel consumption will permit.
Some relationship between speed and fuel efficiency is probably better.
July 7th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Alas, no, same thing for a helicopter. Helicopter blades are just rotating wings. They create lift and they have drag as they go around, and that consumes power. And the body of the helicopter has drag too, so that consumes power. If you prefer, you can compare it as L/T, as in Lift/Thrust, if the concept of rotational drag on the rotor doesn’t seem like “drag” to you.
No matter how you slice it though, machines lift things and require power to move from one place to another, so the lift divided by how hard you have to push is all that matters. If you use power to push a floating thing or rolling thing, or you use power to hold it up and push it, you still have to push it from A to B.
Look at it this way: If you have one horsepower, and you want to haul the most stuff at a certain speed, you pick the machine that hauls the most -unless you’re a silly person.
Don’t get me wrong, airships are pretty things; but they just don’t cut the mustard when it comes to using the least fuel to get a job done.
July 8th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Chuck, A serious question here (although I doubt you’d be back to this forum as I am really late to the party). I agree with you that this turtle airship looks like a pipe dream, but I disagree on lighter-than-air travel in general.
Basically, If oil hits $250-$300 a barrel in a few years, would that make airships that lift 100s of tonnes and move them at 70-80 MPH a viable option? They can make that journey at a fraction of the fuel cost of an equivalent airplane…
The world is changing and energy is becoming much more scarce, and the problem engineers in the good old days had to deal with and the tools they had are vastly different from today.
Would be interested to know what you think…
July 8th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
A Boeing 757-300 is roughly 123 metric tons loaded max take-off mass (MTOW).
It carries, presumably as part of that take-off weight, 43,400 Litres of fuel.
It has a range of ~ 6,400 km with that fuel.
It requires an airfield 2.9 km long at the MTOW.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_757
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin
So a 1918 Zeppelin weighing max 50 tons with some fairly puny engines had a range of 6,700km. Yes, it was slower. Yes, it only lifted 50 tons (but how much of the MTOW of the Boeing 757-300 is payload I wonder?). No, it didn’t require 2.9 km of managed real estate to take-off and land.
Kind of ideal for moving goods into the heart of Africa, one might suggest.
I can’t find figures for the fuel payload or consumption of those Zeppelins, but I would wager that modern flexible photovoltaic coatings coupled to hybrid powerplants would put the Boeing to shame on fuel efficiency.
So one remaining question is: Is speed that important?
July 8th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
I found data for the max payload of Boeing 757-200 PF dedicated freighter on the same page. This plane is 23.7ft shorter than the 757-300, so max payload for dedicated freight might increase a bit for the 300 model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_757#757-200PF_and_757-200SF_freighters
So maybe 45 tons, but only ~ 3,000km.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:59 am
July 9th, 2008 at 7:30 am
s2ao, good question, but think in terms of transportation as a system. Everybody uses fuel, right? So yes, the cost gap between airships and airplanes would increase, but the cost gap between trucks and airships increases, and the cost gap between trains and trucks does too.
At present, you can haul things fast and expensive on airplanes. Sadly for airships, when the speed comes down to where airships can begin to perform against airplanes, in the 60-70 mph range and below, trucks are way cheaper and more fuel efficient, and trains are cheaper than that, and shipping is even cheaper energy and vehicle capability ($/ton carried to construct, and $/ton-mile hauling capacity).
No, increasing oil costs cause less worthy air freight to move down to trucks, and less worthy truck freight to move onto trains -skipping right over airships, caught in the void of being more expensive to build and operate at high speeds than aircraft, and more expensive to build and operate at truck and train speeds than trucks and trains.
Airships are pretty things; but who’s going to pay to haul cargo in a pretty way, when it costs more and takes longer than airplane, helicopter, or surface surface transport.
And to Firelight, hey, sounds great without the rest of the numbers – the most important numbers. If solar panels worked they’d be everywhere. If augmenting a a car or truck’s propulsion worked, there’d be solar panels on the roof. Trains especially would benefit, what with all that area on the top of each railroad car, and they’re already running electric motors – but they aren’t using it _because_ is isn’t economical or energy efficient. There are no solar powered solar panel factories – get it? We make them with energy we get from coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power plants. If you could get off the grid with solar cells, then wouldn’t solar panel factories be the first to get off the grid? Why keep paying the electric company to run the processes that make solar cells when you make solar cells? Because solar cells don’t make enough energy during their lifetime to make copies of themselves. They can’t mass produce from their own kind. If solar cells were going to replace other forms of energy, they’d have to be able to reproduce like a virus. But they don’t, and they can’t, because the energy required to make them is fixed by physical laws, and the amount of energy they can collect is fixed by physical laws, and it just ain’t gonna happen. YAPD: Yet another pipe dream.
Politicians always try to legislate what they don’t understand; and ignoring the laws of physics to pass laws to subsidize solar panels and other “alternative” energy sources won’t make it work anymore than legislating pi=3 will make a circle to conform to desired simplicity of calculation (an urban myth, by the way, owing its life in great part to Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land”, c1961).
Hope that helps. We all need to think realistically. “Ye cannae change the laws of physiks, Captain!
December 5th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Chuck,
You made a few unremarkable points in terms of L/D and wasted time comparing airships to aircraft. The point is: airships are NOT aircraft. Period. In terms of speed, efficiency, and payload, both have advantages and disadvantages. There is a niche for manned or unmanned HTA transport and military attack aircraft. The same is true for LTA airships. Please take the time to read Col Walter O. Gordon’s (USAFR) paper (which summarizes Althoff’s book, “Skyships”) entitled “Back to the Future: Airships and the Coming Revolution in Strategic Airlift (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IBO/is_3-4_29/ai_n27868212/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1) or hundreds of other articles, books, histories, memorandums, DARPA requests for proposal, and you will come to understand that simply mocking Airships does not negate the value they provide.
All engineered vehicles are an exercise in trade-offs–pros vs. cons–which I’m sure you hear about in class. Aircraft have the ability to move small quantities of things, at high cost, and comparatively quick speeds; “pure” airships, despite your L/D speech, are provably more efficient vehicles in terms of moving things. Please reference the Stryker Brigade Combat Team study, which reports:
“…[that when comparing] 30 HAs against 63 C-5s. The much slower HAs have a slight edge in total deployment time, 96 hours against 102 hours for the C-5s, because the 500-ton payload HAs need only make one trip versus three for the 130-ton payload C-5. From a cost standpoint…the HAs have a 3:1 advantage in fuel burned to accomplish the mission.” So even though I disagree with the idea of hybrid airships in general-even they are 3 times more efficient in terms of the same type of fuel spent. Pure airships, properly engineered to remove the induced drag component, would prove even more efficient than HAs. And you have 6 more hours per deployment to spend with your wife and kids at home.
Looks to me like airships would be a strong contender for replacing our current airlift policy that flies non-essential cargo on Air Force airforce C-17, C-5, and C-130s with a more sustainable plan using airships. And if piracy and/or seaborne boarding becomes a threat, airships may as well replace cargo sea ships since you can float the items directly to the FOBs where they’re needed instead of having to an intra-theater transportation system to get things forward from the SPOD seaport, all pirate- and terrorist-free.
-Osk (Aeronautical Engineer, USAFA 04)
United States Air Force