Hybrid Airships Could Change the Economics of Asia and Africa
We are very close to waking up one day and finding ourselves in Fringe’s Alternative Universe. You can always tell by the airships’ sedate glide above the skyscrapers. Appropriately, it is on the fringe of engineering that the hybrid airship has quietly come about.
The first powered flight was an airship 51 years before the Wright brothers. A Frenchman by the name of Jules Henri Giffard attached a 3 horsepower steam engine to a cigar-shaped lifting bag and piloted it 17 miles above Paris at 6 miles per hour. Then came the Zeppelin airship, a rigid frame with cloth cover and internal lifting bags, was built by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in 1895. The luxury class flying industry it brought about died along with 36 passengers in the flames of the Hindenburg crash in May of 1937.
The historic airship has a lot going for it. It can carry a large payload faster than a passenger liner. There is very little turbulence and it has an impressive range. They can hover or turn in place. Flying low, they don’t typically require pressurization.
And it has some serious drawbacks. It requires attentive ground crews to keep it near the ground when loading and unloading. It is vulnerable to wind gusts on the ground and in the air, where it must avoid bad weather at all costs. Hangar space has to be huge…
