The Project

The whole reason this forum exists is to talk about small blimps right?..

Wrong, the discussion here is good, but the purpose of this forum is much bigger. This forum is here to bring together a wide and disconnected community of blimp enthusiasts, amateur inventors, engineers, pilots, and euntrepruners in order to do something that has never been done before. 

The goal of this forum is to connect a group of people to define, design, and build a simple, cheap, and reproducible personal blimp for everyday people. 

The first leg of this project is the define what we want in a small personal airship. We need to discuss and define how to measure the merits of an airship. We will need to decide what attributes are desirable and to what degree. Once we have a scale we can weigh one design against another in order to pick the best designs objectively. Of course we should also vote on final designs, but an objective fitness test can narrow the field to only the best performers.

Once we have defined what we want, we will move on to the design phase. We will put together tools to help each of us put together concept designs. We will each use these tools (probably excel spreadsheets with genetic algorithms) to outline and optimize them. Once we have a few promising candidates we will submit them to feasibility studies and/or design reviews to pick out a final prototype design. 

By now we will have a concept design but we will need financing. We will probably want to form a corporation and sell stock to interested forum members, but this is not the only way to go and we will certainly vote on how best to proceed. Once we have a concept design and financing we will have to get a fully engineered design drawn up.

Finally, we will have to build a prototype. We will have to decide how, where, and who will build it. As you can see we will need to vote a good deal. Once it is built I we will have to test, evaluate, and perfect it. If all goes well we can move to production.

We can operate for profit or not, but we will have a company with a product. We will have to move into production with financing from deposits by group members, investors, loans, and/or customers. We can build it for the masses or for the community the choice is ours.

That is my vision, but I don't own it. This is a public forum. I want to hear from you. We can go in a different direction, but the goal must be the same. This project can happen and can succeed if we want it to.

As of now this forum is small and overlooked. But in the coming weeks we will be seen by search engines and word will spread through the airship community about our lofty goal. Anyone can participate. You don't have to be a genius or a millionaire. You don't have to be an engineer or a scientist.  All you need is a spirit of adventure and a desire to create something new and wonderful. 

Hi Dude, it's Navigaiter from  skyboat.wikispaces.com
Your and my websites have the same goal and I hope you get more participants than I have! (2)

I believe a collaborative web group can design, build and fly a cheap personal airship. Not to say it'll go easy and smooth.

A personal skyboat is something that is only as difficult as a fiberglass sailboat to make and is in demand by people who want to float in the sky for five to ten grand investment, and a labor time of no more than a two hundred hours.

[I'm uploading a model prototype of my skyboat design]

UP!
Allen

Wow that looks interesting. I'm glad you joined the forum. I agree that a collaboritive web site has great potential if we can get people involved. So far I have posted on any mailing lists and forums I can think of to get people to join in. One advantage this site has is that I am not pushing any specific design. I invite everyone to put forward thier ideas in an effort to build something the community thinks will be great rather than just one person. In my opinion I believe people want to make their own dreams a reality rather than someone else's.

The biggest problem I have had in designing blimps is estimating weight and drag. Do you have estimates of these yet?

Your post is certainly on topic, but if you would like to talk more about your ideas, feel free to start a thread in the "pitch an idea" forum. 

A quick intro and some thoughts about small blimps.

I've been a helium head since the 70s, when I first read John McPhee's The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. I joined the Assn. of Balloon and Airship Constructors (ABAC) soon after and started ordering technical information from the ABAC library. After my discharge from the Army I moved to California and worked closely with George Wright, Dean Englehardt and the late Don Woodward on a project we called the "Club Blimp." The idea was that building even a small blimp was beyond the resources - technical and financial - of most individual amateur builders. The Club Blimp or MB-24 was intended to be a club project; a bunch of enthusiasts would band together to rent hangar and workshop space, would build and document the ship under US Experimental aircraft rules or their equivalent elsewhere, and would then use the ship to teach themselves to fly airships (at the time at least, there was no requirement to use a certified airship for training). In this way we hoped to multiply the number of small ships and rapidly increase the number of qualified pilots to fill out the small and rapidly aging coterie of pilots, most of them Goodyear employees and old Navy "poopie baggers." Then Don's health went to Hell, George got involved in a new non-LTA business which became a big success and ate up 120% of his time, and I became heavily involved in a spin-off of my propulsion work on that project (see http://massflow.archivale.com). The project went dormant and the hardware we had purchased was eventually sold off. All the calculations that I did for it are still in my file, however, along with much of Don's and George's contributions.

Because I now live in the Philippines, I am not likely to be of much use in building hardware, but I can help with technical documentation and calculations.

Some thoughts:

1. There is no such thing as a "simple" blimp. Yes, I know they look simple, but it seems to be a universal law that the simpler a thing looks, the more complex it is to analyze. This has certainly proved true of LTA, free-piston engines, tailless airplanes and other technologies that have attracted me over the years. It's not impossible - Bruce Blake built a highly successful ship under the most trying circumstances imaginable - but you need to keep in mind that you're not going to sew up a gasbag, hang a basket and some fins on it and soar into the wild blue yonder. Expect to do some very serious analytical work before building a single piece of hardware, and even then expect to make some false starts; be willing and able to throw those away and do it over, because somebody's life may depend on it.

2. Operational factors never get enough attention. A blimp is more like a horse than an airplane: most of the cost of operating it is incurred when it isn't operating - overhead like hangar space, a pressure watch, gas supply and so on. Anything you can do at the design stage to reduce those costs is going to be much more gainful, over the life of the ship, than a 5-knot improvement in airspeed. Anything that reduces by even one man the number of people needed for ground handling will multiply a club blimp's operating hours by lowering the bar to flight operations.

3. Don't be a "Code drone." Now that there are official airworthiness standards for airships, engineers tend to follow them rather than use their own judgment; the result has been an increase in accidents resulting from e.g. too-lenient mooring load estimates embodied in regulations. Do your own work, and if your results say you need more than the regs require, provide it! The FAA won't be there to comfort the widow of a fellow club member or answer lawsuits.

4. The job's not over until the paperwork is done. There is no such thing as too much documentation. Even if the target is to secure an airworthiness certificate under Experimental or Light Sport Aircraft rules, document the project as if you were going for commercial and production certification. This is especially useful in a collaboration because it allows everybody to familiarize himself with the work done by everybody else. If a key project participant drops out, somebody else can easily step in and momentum is not lost. Digital storage makes the overhead cost of maintaining records a trivial consideration now - which it definitely was not only a few years ago. Documentation will also help when it comes to insurance and litigation - two factors nobody wants to talk about but which will have an impact.

5. Don't reinvent the wheel. Long time ABAC member, blimp builder and pilot Bob Rechs has written a book about small blimp construction that is worth having... and I don't say that just because I now publish them. See http://abac.archivale.com/rexgas.htm and http://www.archivale.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=10003 . Bulk purchases at reduced cost are possible.

6. Innovation for its own sake is a project killer. I know all blimps look alike and that's boring, but there's a reason for it. Excursions into radical configurations can rapidly eat up all the available time, money and enthusiasm. Make sure you have a valid reason for making things differently. A wise man once said that an airplane is a squadron of compromises flying in close formation; the same is doubly, triply true of anything LTA.

Best to all,

Marc de Piolenc

<<<The biggest problem I have had in designing blimps is estimating weight and drag. Do you have estimates of these yet?>>>

I use the old physical method of designing, not math. If it looks good, it'll fly. If it doesn't fly, fix it.

I can't get a weight estimate yet because I haven't settled on how to make the airframe. I'm thinking about frames of stryofoam square tubes covered in fiberglass/epoxy. Trouble is, I want them to be curved and stryofoam doesn't bend, so I have to look at segmented beams with difficult miter cuts into styrofoam square tubes and I think that's too hard for the casual home builder. That's why the weight estimate will have to wait.

UP! Allen

The axiom of "If it looks right, it will fly right." has been proven wrong time and again.
This project cannot be successful without quantifying many design aspects. I find it very unlikely that a device as complex as an airship can be built in the absence of design estimates and calculations. This is especially true of a collaboritive project such as this because many different designs will have to be compared against each other in order to select good designs to pursue.

That said, I wish anyone luck who wants to build a small blimp regardless of the methods.

I was able to restore piolenc's post. It was marked as spam.

Thanks, dude6935, for posting my little essay. Let's see if this "thank you" note goes through.

No problem, and to continue our conversation, I concede that wind will always be a hindrance to ground handling. I also agree that increasing control at low speeds through thrust vectoring is a great way to ruduce the cost and danger of ground operations. But, every cubic meter of volume we eliminate through the use of dynamic lift makes wind less of a problem. 

I believe that most blimps operate a little heavy to improve ground handling; although, I am not sure if the primary concern is wind.

How could we quantify the effect of wind on an airship on the ground? Is it a problem of attitude, translation, or both? The problem will increase with surface area and decrease with mass and moment, correct?

Dude said <<The axiom of "If it looks right, it will fly right." has been proven wrong time and again.>> 
   Well, yes. Same goes for aircraft designed by engineers using CAD programs. They crack up too.
   That is why prototype pilots make very much money and cannot buy life insurance. Prototypes are flown by experts using ultra-strict safety procedures. There is no need to fear the first flight of a homemade aircraft.

   The important thing at this point in the project process is to GET a good-looking design and MAKE it.

    Afterwards it can be tested and proven by computers and wind tunnels and test flights and improved. Not necessarily in that order.
                                   
                                   UP!