Old Airlift Vehicle Concept Made New

starexplorer writes "LiveScience is reporting on an early conceptual design of The Walrus the DOD's new planned 'very large airlift vehicle'." Could the concept of a 'war-balloon' really be gaining favor again?

Re:Protection Methods???

[Rei]

As long as you don't coat it in rocket fuel of course

Myth [colorado.edu].

FedEx tried this once

[Anonymous Coward]

FedEx tried this once, with Lockheed Martin Skunk works as the prime and ran out of money. One of the biggest problems was that the vehicle was so big, it would hardly fit onto the runways at LAX. Try having those things land regulary at any busy airport and you are going to have major logistical problems. Also, I worked on a similar concept for a now extinct company in Germany called CargoLifter. There airship was called the CL160, which was actually lighter than air (didn't need aerodynamic lift) and was the length of roughly 3 American football feilds in length. It could carry 160 tons of cargo from destination to destination ...eliminating the need to build things in small enough pieces to be carried on the highway. Seemed like a good business plan until the German government pulled th plug on funding. The old hanger, which could fit two of these things side by side, is now a bioshpere like amusement park:

http://www.my-tropical-islands.com/index-e.htm [my-tropical-islands.com]

It's too big to be taken out.

[lommer]

Answers to the "target problem"

1) bullet holes are no problem. Airships like the goodyear blimp get shot at regularly by rednecks and the compartmentalization keeps them afloat.

2) This thing should be able to carry a fairly advanced array of anti-missile weaponry and decoys. Combined with a low radar and heat signature, it's not as good a target as one might think. It should even have enough lifting capacity that they can throw in some anti-missile gatling guns like the ones they use on cruisers and aircraft carriers. Also, it flies quite high, out of the range of shoulder-launched missiles (they only have a range of a few miles), so you only really have to worry about conventional missiles.

3) Back in the heyday of airships, the US Navy actually built and tested "aircraft carrier" airships. They carried a complement of fighter airplanes on board, and could launch them at will for self defense. Recovery involved catching a cable hanging underneath the airship, not unlike arrestor cables on modern aircraft carriers. Updating the technology to the jet age and accomodating the higher speeds would not be easy, but it could be done.

In short, these things are a lot more practical for military purposes (let alone civilian) than one might think.

Re:Heavy lift aircraft don't usually do combat dro

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing film where a propeller driven biplane was launched and retrieved from the bottom of an airship.

That would be from the Skyhook [unrealaircraft.com] project.

A few missing variables..

[TheHawke]

Weather, for starters.. Folks seem to forget what happened to the first Zeppelin airfleet that was made by both the US navy and the brits.

They had made some wonderfull airships and were considered to be real plum assignments to have.

Just they underestimated Mother Nature.
Both sides lost at least 4 airships before scrapping their airship fleets to sudden storms, squall lines and even a hurricane.

This Walrus maybe almost impervious to enemy fire and operating in the rear area, but when a sudden storm comes up and the thing aint secured, well.. Break out the torches boys, alot of scrap metal is headed to the recyclers.

Re:Commercial Uses Galore

[stvangel]

As a balloon and airship pilot, I find this completely ridiculous. Equilibrium is a -very- tenuous thing. When flying a helium balloon, you can go up 10 feet simply by throwing a handful of sand out of the basket. Even though this airship is much larger, the same principle applies. You cannot add or drop large amounts of weight in flight or you would be completely out of control.

Just dropping a few tons of weight would throw an airship thousands of feet into the air. Everything about weight control must happen -very- slowly because that is the only way the aircraft can be adjusted to the changing weights and still maintain control. Modern airships achieve a large amount of their lift to the engines and aerodynamic affects, most of which disappears when they are stationary or moving slowly. Airships are in no way or form manueverable in anything but light winds. There's a reason an airship requires dozens of people to run out on the ground and grab ropes to dock it.

The other obvious problem is the updrafts and downdrafts and other winds associated with a forest fire. Trying to fly something like this over one would be suicide. With the rapidly rising and falling columns of air and the huge surface area of the craft, it would be completely uncontrollable at best and ripped apart at worst. Even if you could vent enough lifting gas ( hydrogen or helium ) to keep from crashing, it would take hours or days to refill the gas to lift something of that mass again.

This is an interesting idea, but it must be taken in context. Takeoffs and landings should be made early in the morning or late in the day when winds are calmer. Inclement weather may prevent landing at all due to the weather hazards involved. A large ground crew will be needed to help with controlling the craft. A huge amount of mass can be transported, but the logistics of supporting such an unwieldingly large craft have to be accounted for as well. There's no way this could be a battlefield-deployment system without complete air and ground control.

There ...

[Giffut]

... is a German concept called "Cargolifter", which can claim prior art to this revocation of old technology. Read here for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter [wikipedia.org] .

Unfortunately, mostly to blame on bad managment and leadership, not really regarding technical creativity and expertise, they went bankrupt in 2002.

Re:Thunderbirds are go!

[radarvectors]

The true prior art: http://www.aereoncorp.com/ [aereoncorp.com] [Aereon Corp] as documented in 1973 in this book: http://www.johnmcphee.com/deltoid.htm [johnmcphee.com]

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed tells the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the airplane and the rigid airship--huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. It flies aerodynamically. It floats aerostatically. It carries bridges, buildings, fleets of trucks. It is a flying warehouse. It eliminates the need for roads, railroads, prepared harbors. Or so goes the dream. With an arching back and a deep belly, it looks like a tremendous pumpkin seed.

Re:Two words;

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't survive everything, but they survive a hell of a lot more than airplanes. Airships can take a foot of ice and keep flying. Many planes will no longer generate lift when they have 1/4" of ice on the wings, or, particularly, the prop.

Read John McPhee's book "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" some time if you're curious about airships.