Re: Bike to Anywhere Day Redux

Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

On 5/17/2025 11:08 AM, pH wrote:

On 2025-05-16, Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@gXXmail.com> wrote:

On 5/15/2025 8:25 PM, sms wrote:

Bike to Anywhere Day Redux
 

<snip>

 
Interestingly, I was on some of those same roads and trails this week.
 
That wasn't a blimp. It was LTA Research's Pathfinder 1 rigid airship.
(A blimp is limp.) It's the largest flying machine currently existing. I
watched one flight from the northern end of the Stevens Creek preserve,
near GooglePlex. I've got contacts at LTA, and was given a facility tour
last Friday.
 
(Yep, look at me!)

 
 
Holy Hindenberg, Batman, I didn't know there were any dirigibles flying.
 
It seems to be a disappeared part of history that there was indeed a few
years of the big ships flying hither and yon.

 
There are several companies betting on the usefulness of large airships.
LTA is (mostly?) funded by Sergey Brin of Google, but there's also
Flying Whales (in France) and others. Washington Post did a big article
on this a few days ago. There are proposals to use the technology for
disaster relief (dropping tons of relief supplies or cargo where
infrastructure has been destroyed), airlifting harvested timber out of
inaccessible forests, transporting immense cargo like wind turbine
blades, etc. And BTW, the Zeppelin company still exists.
 
Most people don't know how successful the old Zeppelins were. Hindenburg
flew across oceans and around the world, successfully handling bad
weather, navigation, etc. without modern technology. But we'll see if
companies like LTA can find a niche.
 

slightly related, I recall reading that Helium supplies may be diminishing.
Of course we can make all the Hydrogen we want, but there's the "boom"
factor.

 
IIRC, helium is harvested during natural gas production. It's expensive,
but I doubt it's going away.
 
I also think it's feasible to use hydrogen. The TV series Nova once did
a program that talked about the controversy regarding the crash of the
Hindenburg. There's strong speculation that the very flammable skin of
the craft was the root cause of the disaster. Hydrogen burns, but it
doesn't explode unless pre-mixed with air. Burning hydrogen from an
airship or balloon would produce flames that were barely visible, with
the heat rising pretty slowly upwards.

That was my understanding as well, the skin being what caused the disaster.

Certainly the airships of the 1st world war were remarkable difficult to
take down at least in the first few years, artillery was if it could hit
them was a one shot kill, but aiming and targeting was a challenge.

But certainly a technology worth rebooting maybe? Considering the problems
air travel will have with getting cleaner it’s potentially one option for
some use cases maybe considering it’s speed maybe bit like some of sleeper
trains ie the travel is the experience and all that.

 
Gasoline or kerosene are probably more hazardous!
 

Roger Merriman