Airship

From the 1960s, helium airships have been used where the ability to hover for a long time outweighs the need for speed and manoeuvrability, such as advertising, tourism, camera platforms, geological surveys and aerial observation.

For instance, Platform Wireless International Corporation announced in 2001 that it would use a tethered 1,250 pounds (570 kg) airborne payload to deliver cellular phone service to a 140 miles (230 km) region in Brazil.

Envelopes in the early 19th century were made from goldbeater's skin, selected for its low weight, relatively high strength, and impermeability compared to paper or linen.

Although the basic principle is sound, such a craft was unrealizable then and remains so to the present day, since external air pressure would cause the spheres to collapse unless their thickness was such as to make them too heavy to be buoyant.

In 1709, the Brazilian-Portuguese Jesuit priest Bartolomeu de Gusmão made a hot air balloon, the Passarola, ascend to the skies, before an astonished Portuguese court.

It was a small balloon of thick brown paper, filled with hot air, produced by the "fire of material contained in a clay bowl embedded in the base of a waxed wooden tray".

The 16 water-color drawings published the following year depict a 260-foot-long (79 m) streamlined envelope with internal ballonets that could be used for regulating lift: this was attached to a long carriage that could be used as a boat if the vehicle was forced to land in water.

In 1863, Solomon Andrews flew his aereon design, an unpowered, controllable dirigible in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and offered the device to the U.S. Military during the Civil War.

[65] From 1888 to 1897, Friedrich Wölfert built three airships powered by Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft-built petrol engines, the last of which, Deutschland, caught fire in flight and killed both occupants in 1897.

His widow, Melanie Schwarz, was paid 15,000 marks by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin to release the industrialist Carl Berg from his exclusive contract to supply Schwartz with aluminium.

[69] From 1897 to 1899, Konstantin Danilewsky, medical doctor and inventor from Kharkiv (now Ukraine, then Russian Empire), built four muscle-powered airships, of gas volume 150–180 m3 (5,300–6,400 cu ft).

The use of a metal column erected on the ground, the top of which the bow or stem would be directly attached to (by a cable) would allow a dirigible to be moored at any time, in the open, regardless of wind speeds.

[86] On May 12, 1902, the inventor and Brazilian aeronaut Augusto Severo de Albuquerque Maranhao and his French mechanic, Georges Saché, died when they were flying over Paris in the airship called Pax.

Later in the war, the development of the aircraft carrier led to the first successful carrier-based air strike in history: on the morning of 19 July 1918, seven Sopwith 2F.1 Camels were launched from HMS Furious and struck the airship base at Tønder, destroying zeppelins L 54 and L 60.

The NS class (North Sea) were the largest and most effective non-rigid airships in British service, with a gas capacity of 10,200 m3 (360,000 cu ft), a crew of 10 and an endurance of 24 hours.

The large number of trained crews, low attrition rate and constant experimentation in handling techniques meant that at the war's end Britain was the world leader in non-rigid airship technology.

Hindenburg's identical sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin II (LZ 130), could not carry commercial passengers without helium, which the United States refused to sell to Germany.

The first two blimps (K-123 & K-130) left South Weymouth NAS on 28 May 1944 and flew to Argentia, Newfoundland, the Azores, and finally to Port Lyautey where they completed the first transatlantic crossing by nonrigid airships on 1 June 1944.

FAW 2 also patrolled the northern Caribbean from San Julian,[clarification needed] the Isle of Pines (now called Isla de la Juventud) and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba as well as Vernam Field, Jamaica.

The program is directed by the Naval Air Systems Command and is being carried out at NAES Lakehurst, the original centre of U.S. Navy lighter-than-air operations in previous decades.

The airship started flight tests in late 2007, with a primary goal of carrying 2,500 lb (1,100 kg) of payload to an altitude of 15,000 ft (4,600 m) under remote control and autonomous waypoint navigation.

[129] In late June 2014 the Electronic Frontier Foundation flew the GEFA-FLUG AS 105 GD/4[130] blimp AE Bates (owned by, and in conjunction with, Greenpeace) over the NSA's Bluffdale Utah Data Center in protest.

[132][133] The primary goal of the research program was to determine the feasibility of building an airship capable of carrying 500 short tons (450 t) of payload a distance of 12,000 mi (19,000 km) and land on an unimproved location without the use of external ballast or ground equipment (such as masts).

In 2008, Airship Ventures Inc. began operations from Moffett Federal Airfield near Mountain View, California and until November 2012 offered tours of the San Francisco Bay Area for up to 12 passengers.

A Zeppelin NT, equipped with a Bell Geospace gravity gradiometer, was used to find potential diamond mines by scanning the local geography for low-density rock formations, known as kimberlite pipes.

[151][152][153] Today, with large, fast, and more cost-efficient fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, it is unknown whether huge airships can operate profitably in regular passenger transport though, as energy costs rise, attention is once again returning to these lighter-than-air vessels as a possible alternative.

Most airships, when fully loaded with cargo and fuel, are usually ballasted to be heavier than air, and thus must use their propulsion system and shape to create aerodynamic lift, necessary to stay aloft.

[165] EU FP7 MAAT Project[166] has studied an innovative cruiser/feeder airship system,[167] for the stratosphere with a cruiser remaining airborne for a long time and feeders connecting it to the ground and flying as piloted balloons.

[169][170] The certificate allowed the largest airship since the ill-fated Hindenburg to begin flight tests at Moffett Field, a joint civil-military airport in Silicon Valley.

Given the large frontal area and wetted surface of an airship, a practical limit is reached around 130–160 kilometres per hour (80–100 mph), only about one-third the typical airspeed of a modern commercial airplane.