Kind: captions
Language: en
airships seem like a bad idea exhibit
a it's the greatest of Miracles that
anyone came out of the disaster alive
the Hindenberg was filled with over 200
million lers of hydrogen but it also had
an iron oxide and aluminum powder
coating on its outer shell two of the
ingredients that make thermite a mixture
that undergo such a strongly exothermic
reaction it is used to weld train tracks
together
but even if airships weren't giant sacks
of flammable gas encased in questionable
Coatings they would still seem like a
bad idea because they are big and
slow but right now a handful of
companies around the world are competing
to build a new generation of
airships so why are they doing
it I came across the following argument
in a blog by El Dorado and I found it
compelling so I wanted to explore it
think about how Goods all the different
types of stuff are transported around
the US a large amount of money is spent
moving things around by airplane but
this doesn't translate into a huge
volume of goods because Air transport is
really expensive it's the fastest way to
get something from one place to another
but you pay a premium for that speed if
you want to save money you can transport
your Goods on ships using the waterways
in and around the country but that will
be much
slower still since it's significantly
cheaper far more goods are transported
this way and more money is spent on it
overall rail provides an even better
option it's faster than ships and
cheaper than planes so more goods are
sent by train than by air and water
combined but by far the way that most
goods are moved around the US is by
truck what's interesting about this is
that trucks are not as fast as planes
they take several days to get across the
country they are also not as cheap as
ships but the combination of speed and
price puts them in this sweet spot of
cheap enough and fast enough which is
why they transport the vast majority of
goods they are like the baby bears
porridge of transport options just right
now consider how goods are transported
internationally the only options are
planes and ships again a lot of money is
spent sending Goods by air but because
it's so expensive the actual volume of
goods is low and most Goods both in
terms of dollars and weight are sent via
Ocean
Freight but what if there were a third
option faster than ships and cheaper
than planes it seems likely that most
customers would prefer this new
truck-like method of of Transport
airships could be this
option they could be the trucks of the
sky they would transport cargo across
oceans in around a week rather than a
month for freighters and theoretically
they would be several times cheaper than
sending Goods by plane and they would
achieve all this while emitting
significantly less emissions than
planes see while planes get their lift
from their wings and so they need to
burn a lot of jet fuel just to stay in
the air airships get their lift
effectively for free the buoyancy of
lighter than air gas keeps them up so
they don't need to move forward to stay
aoft as a result modern Airship
manufacturers estimate airships can
reduce carbon emissions by 90% or more
but for airships to become the trucks of
the sky they would have to carry a lot
of weight and historically that has not
been a particular strength of airships
but that's where the physics comes
in the lift of an Airship depends on the
volume of lighter than air gas it
contains so lift is proportional to
radius cubed whereas drag depends on a
combination of the cross-sectional and
wetted area that is basically the
surface area of the craft so it's
proportional to radius
squared this means the bigger you make
an Airship the more efficient it becomes
lift goes up from proportional to radius
cubed whereas drag only goes up
proportional to radius squared so
there's a cubed squared Advantage for
larger airships want to boost the
performance of your Airship we just
double it in size the area Grows by a
factor of four the volume by a factor of
eight so your lift to drag ratio doubles
if that's not enough just double it
again to make airships the trucks of the
sky we need to build the largest
airships the world has ever seen
there are three different kinds of
airships the first is a blimp which is
basically a balloon with a gondola and
Motors attached like a balloon it is
overpressurized to maintain its shape
therefore the skin of a blimp is in
constant tension as the blimp becomes
larger this tension increases moreover
it becomes increasingly difficult for
larger blimps to maintain their shape so
you can't scale up blimps forever the
second opt option is semi- rigid just
like a blimp the hull is still in
tension yet now there's some added
structural support to maintain the
shape the last variety is a rigid body
Airship these have an internal structure
to maintain their shape inside the hull
there are a series of gas cells filled
with a lifting gas like hydrogen or
helium in this case the gas cells are
not over pressurized so making them
larger is no issue the great thing about
rigid airships is that they don't run
into the same scaling limits want a
bigger Airship just scale up the
structure and add some extra gas bags in
fact the weight of the structure
actually decreases as a fraction of the
total weight so rigid airships scale
even better than Square cubed so it's
this last option that is best suited for
the cargo
market and that's what Eli proposes to
build a 388 M long rigid Airship to
conquer the cargo Market it would be
capable of carrying 500 tons of goods at
a speed of 90
kmph that's enough to carry two statues
of Liberty at the speed you drive down
the highway if built it would be the
largest aircraft by far both in size and
in how much weight it could carry not
bad for an
Airship but to take a significant piece
of the cargo Market you don't need just
one Airship you need a fleet of
thousands constantly moving Goods around
the globe
and if they take over half of the ocean
Freight container Market at a price
comparable to trucks say 10 cents per
ton kilometer that would equal $650
billion of Revenue per year and if that
was all served by one company it would
be the biggest company in the world by
Revenue bigger than Apple or Amazon or
Walmart so who is building these monster
airships well at the moment no one this
this part of the video is sponsored by
odu.com
just like airships many of our own dream
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Show while transporting cargo is
probably the largest market for airships
it's also one that's driven by Fierce
competition and low margins and that's
not ideal when you need to spend a lot
of money to First build develop and
certify your Airship what you want is a
market with less competition and better
[Music]
margins this is the airlander 10 and
it's built by the UK company Hy air
vehicles can you tell me about the
envisioned use of the airlander they'll
be going on extraordinary experiential
holidays so going to the North Pole
going on a safari going over the Amazon
knowing that they're making almost no
environmental impact being able to
travel in some luxury and see things
that you just can't do another way the
first trips are scheduled for no later
than 2026 want to go on this trip well
you'd better start saving because
getting a cabin for two will cost you
about
$200,000 and while a few companies are
focusing on the luxury travel markets
others plan to make use of another
unique advantage of airships think about
what it normally takes to move things
around trucks need roads ships need
water and ports trains need Railways and
stations and planes need long runways
and airports airships on the other hand
require very little infrastructure the
most important thing they need is a
reasonably flat surface to land on like
grass sand ice or even water and it's
this unique ability that allows them to
deliver Goods where no truck boat train
or plane can go airships can connect
Parts the world that have been
disconnected forever such as remote
villages in Canada or Alaska and they
can do this with little to no
infrastructure or what if the roads
rails and ports have been destroyed by a
natural disaster
help is urgently needed to find and
support the survivors but there seems to
be no way to get there and no methods of
communications once you are there well
then airships could quickly rush to the
scene to deliver rescue workers and
supplies or to provide cellular service
from the sky disaster relief missions
like these are what LTA research which
is backed by Google co-founder Sergey
Brin is focusing on and they're making
great progress their current prototype
the Pathfinder 1 has completed multiple
indoor flight tests and it's scheduled
to fly outside sometime in the next few
months they plan to take the lessons
they learn from these tests and build a
series of airships that can provide help
to disaster stricken
areas other times roads may be available
but what you're transporting just isn't
that compatible with roads like long
clunky and fragile turbine
blades to get them from the factory to
the destination requires careful
planning and perfectly choreographic
Maneuvers and this process is what often
limits the size of wind
turbines airships don't have that
problem they can simply Mount turbine
blades of any size to the bottom and
carry them to the destination so it's
much faster easier and it allows you to
build more powerful wind turbines plus
airships can also easily transport other
structures that are hard to move but
sometimes instead of delivering Goods
you need to pick them up France is full
of Natural Resources like wood yet many
of their forests can't be reached by
truck so they can't actually extract the
wood they've chopped down the French
company flying whales backed by the
French government is hoping to change
that they are developing this 200 met
long cargo ship that's capable of
carrying a 60 ton payload it was
designed to be able to hover above
remote forests and pick up logs which
could then be carried off and turned
into Timber
but loading and unloading from the sky
comes with significant problems for
starters you need to make sure that
during this process your Airship stays
still which is more difficult than it
sounds so a very large Airship has what
we call sail effect even a relatively
light current of wind when multiplied by
a really really large area is going to
have a huge effect that makes airships
uh difficult to control especially close
to the ground and at low speeds so they
are a little bit unwieldy to overcome
this the Airship is fitted with
propellers all around the hull that can
stabilize it but still this limits the
use of most airships to places with
stable
weather a bigger problem comes from the
fundamental reason why airships work in
the first place and this issue is
particularly bad for large cargo
airships see when an Airship is carrying
a heavy load the combined weight of the
load and the Airship are offset by the
lift the problem arises when you release
that heavy load because now the Airship
is suddenly much lighter and so it wants
to shoot up into the sky so you need
some way to stop that from happening
unless we can solve that problem we're
kind of dead in the water in terms of
airships for cargo a few methods have
been proposed to solve this problem the
easiest one is to decrease lift by
venting lifting gas the only issue is
that most modern airships use helium and
to off set say 60 tons of weight you
would need to release about 54,000 cubic
M of helium which costs a few
$1,000 not to mention that helium is
scarce so venting it isn't really a
practical option now you could use
propellers to push the Airship down but
that ends up burning so much fuel it
negates much of the advantage of using
airships in the first place the real
dream has been to compress and
decompress lifting gas because you take
a lifting gas and when it is when it is
in gaseous form it lifts when it is
compressed it's Bast it's heavy but
there are some real problems with that
so you're talking about a very large
Airship with a very large volume of
lifting gas now you need a compressor
that's capable of compressing a
tremendous amount of gas very quickly
and that is just a technological problem
we haven't really developed them until
then the short-term solution is to
replace the weight you're releasing so
if you're dropping 60 tons of supplies
you need to pick up 60 tons of Bast if
you want to pick up 60 tons of wood
you'd carry 60 tons of say water on
board and release it at the pickup
location but there's another Innovative
way to solve this problem and it's the
secret behind how the airlander 10 works
it relies on a combination of lift from
Helium and aerodynamic lift created by
its Hull we can lift the whole weight of
the aircraft with the helium inside so
that effectively when you're flying that
weighs nothing and the aerodynamic lift
is just there to lift the payload so if
we've say got 100 people on board we
take off like a conventional aircraft
just at very low speed and we we
generate the aerodynamic lift to lift
those people the advantage then is is
that when we come down on the ground and
those people get off we don't float away
cuz we used aerodynamic lift which you
can turn on and off while hybrid
airships work well for relatively light
payloads they're not ideal for carrying
heavy payloads over long long distances
because you would lose the advantage of
using free lift to carry all that weight
so for large cargo airships the current
best solution to the load exchange
problem is to replace the weight you're
releasing but there are harder problems
that you need to overcome to make
airships the trucks of the sky see no
one has ever built a 388 M long Airship
before so how do you do it well normally
airships are built in humongous hangers
to protect them from the elements but
the largest airship hanger that's ever
been built was only 360 M long so it
wouldn't even fit and since you need to
build thousands of these airships you
either have to find a way to magically
construct scores of fragile airships
outside or build lots and lots of the
world's largest hangers if that wasn't
hard enough there's also another problem
that needs to be solved because each one
of those airships must be filled with
over 1 million cubic M of lifting gas
which raises the age-old question
question do you use hydrogen or
helium helium is really expensive and it
has a lower lifting ability right
hydrogen's really cheap but it'll kill
you after the Hindenberg burned down in
less than 40 seconds the choice seemed
obvious only inert helium should be used
for airships the Federal Aviation
Administration agreed and hydrogen as a
lifting gas has been banned for many
years now but what many people don't
realize is that of the 97 people on
board more than 60 miraculously
survived just a few years earlier
another Airship the USS akan crashed off
the coast of New Jersey killing 73 of
the 76 people on board and that Airship
was filled with
helium so perhaps the issue wasn't that
hydrogen airships were inherently unsafe
maybe we just didn't know how to build
safe airships I mean we also didn't know
how to build safe planes and now they're
one of the safest ways to travel and for
any plan that includes building and
filling thousands of large scale
airships hydrogen is the only realistic
option because helium is too scarce and
expensive hydrogen on the other hand is
easy to produce cheap and it provides
about 8% more
lift and then there's the issue of
certification in general certificating
any new aircraft is really lengthy and
expensive process if you're talking
about certificating an Airship not only
are you talking about a brand new
aircraft you're talking about a brand
new type of aircraft no one has
certificated a large rigid airship in
well sort of ever combined that with
building the largest aircraft the world
has ever seen and filling it with
tremendous amounts of Highly flammable
gas and you've got yourself another
pretty big challenge but all of these
problems may not even matter because it
might not be possible to build a 500 ton
cargo ship of that size
I mean the most important thing of an
Airship structure needs to be light it
needs to be robust it needs to be strong
it needs to have really good structural
Integrity but it needs to be light
enough to get off the ground or there's
no point and at a certain point of size
the weight you need to add to create the
structural Integrity you need to operate
safely you know you reach a point where
those curves just intersect in a bad way
so there is a structural size limitation
due to weight issues so how large is
that size we're not sure what we do know
is that right now several companies
around the world are developing and
building the next generation of airships
for now none of them are setting out to
develop the trucks of the sky instead
they're focusing on areas where airships
have a distinct Advantage markets with
less competition and decent margins who
knows perhaps as airships mature one
company will take the leap and set out
to develop these trucks of the sky it
certainly won't be easy but the reward
could be
huge do you think we'll see a future
where you know we've got these airships
roaming all over our skies I know it may
sound crazy but we really do it won't be
very very long before we get to see some
stuff in the sky which will make a lot
of people including me uh have really
big smiles and a lot of happy Nostalgia
for the great airships of the pet it's
very hard to break into the world with a
a new thing that the world's not ready
for I mean there many other things that
have have become normal after a bit of
time there's no reason why this
shouldn't I hope when that day comes
someone will invite me to come along and
uh at least take a look if not if not
have a ride in it