A recent news story produced by the Boston Globe on Alberto the Skyacht Personal Blimp. Produced by Thushan Amarasiriwardena. Copyright 2007 Boston Globe/Landov - used with permission. For more information, see www.personalblimp.com/
Great job you guys look like people I could have easily partnered with - always dreamed of a personal blimp, last year or so. Haha. Been planning seriously the last two months. I plan on beginning with a single-person hydrogen fueled zeppelin with a unique design. Good luck to you guys, really impressed!
Well, there is something to that. Before anybody builds a thousand-foot airship, there will need to be several seven-hundred-fifty-foot airships, and some five-hundreds before that, and probably some two-hundred-fifties before that. But because of the square-cube thing you explain in another reply, I suspect that we should move through the smaller phases as quickly as possible. It may turn out that the biggest flaw with the 1930s airships is that they weren't big enough.
Questions: Why the internal support rods? What does that give you that you couldn't do with internal inflatable tubes? What would you do differently with the shape? It seems extremely round to me. Would not a more slender shape help with forward motion? What weight fabric are you using? It is like HTN-90 or Hyperlast? Thanks in advance for your answers.
In fairness, the people in the past who were talking about thousand-foot airships already had experience with eight-hundred-foot airships. It isn't like they were proposing to go directly from a child's balloon to a flying Queen Mary.
Then again, you could use steam as your lifting gas, and power it with a steam engine. But there's already somebody else working on that. I wish you and them luck. The more successful airships flying around, the better.
its a very massive ship yes but you said it holds about 1300lbs could you cut back on size and make one smaller that holds one person? and would it be any smaller?
I'm not into speed.That said...what an awsome airship! I'd love to slowly cruise around enjoying the sights while in the air. Are you going to market this great flying machine? I want one.
@skyacht I know you are planning a sleeker ship, when conditions are eventually more favorable. Are you going to sell them in various sizes as well? I would really be interested in a faster, smaller ship of a little more than half your 205,000 cubic feet, for extended one-man flights and shorter two-man flights. Also, how do batteries compare to gas for flight time?
In air with a density of 1.2 kg/m³, hydrogen gives you around 1.1 kg lift per m³, helium around 1.0 kg and hot air (typical temperatures in hot air balloons) around 0.3 kg/m³.
One thought, pedal power, no engine, would make an athlete like me ever so happy. Well, also i think that it would be nice if it were smaller sleek to allow for lift via forward momentum, perhaps also 2/3 helium 1/3 hot air to greatly diminish the size?
Nice job guys but do you realize that Cameron Balloons in Bristol England have been building hot air blimps for 30 plus years, and they are nice. I am infact a qualified instructor in LTA flight and have many hours of flight time in these things.
+Dan NZ Always delighted to meet another pilot. Yes, we carefully studied the Cameron, Gefa-Flug, Kubicek, et al designs before we started. Our conclusion was that the best performance that can be obtained from that design direction is still well below the level required for wider application. That's why we are driven to explore different envelope structures. Our view is that hot air ships will remain very much on the margins until someone comes up with a design that can fly at something like 40 knots and can takeoff/land in something like a 20 knot surface wind,. We've done the math to confirm that such performance is indeed plausible. But there remains a great deal of development work between here and there.
+Daniel Nachbar Yes you are absolutely correct, the Cameron hot air blimps are pretty useless at wind speeds of over 12 knots so ideally you need a nice still day to inflate and operate one. I do like your rigid internal support structure rather than the flexible catenary lines as employed in and by Cameron models. Keep up the good work and stay reasonably safe as my old instructor used to say :-)
