What Kinda People Does the Project Need?

I love our motto; "This is a new forum for people who can't wait to have their own peronal blimp!"
   Yes, we are the inventors of "peronal" blimps. Wish us luck.
  
   Seriously, a project to create a good skyboat design and bring it to flight status takes different personality traits which are seldom found in one or two people. Here's a skinny list of who we have to lure into the fold:

1. Technical idea people.
2. Hardware hands-on fabricator people.
3. Fast-talking pitch people to get investors.
4. Venture Investors and aerospace dreamers with cash.
5. Project organizers and managers to watch the paperwork.
6. And then, skyboat crews! Yippee, the payoff finally.

All members can do a little of all these tasks but not well enough to get the jobs accomplished as properly as specialists would accomplish.

   The majority of these personality types don't really have to come from the limited herd of helium heads so we should make our needs known to websites outside the airship groups.

UP!

I was waiting for the picture upload function to ask me for a caption for the floating saucer picture but this forum doesn't work that way, so here's the belated caption to the pic in my previous post: Alize, a French 2-person lenticular airship prototype in 2006.

   I don't know their current status but they want to make a "50 ton" model. (don't know if that's gross or payload)  http://www.operation-lta.com/programme-UK.html

 Allen

Wow, great pic. I don't think I have ever seen a lenticular airship built before. That deserves it own thread.

But, to answer your question, we need all kinds of people, and your list is a great stating point.

In my opinion we will need to release any final product as an experimental kit aircraft so we won't have the costs of certification. So, we will need a person or people who have put out a kit aircraft before.

Anything we cannot provide inside of the group, we will have to pay for.

Money is a big question here. Should we look for money from outside the group, or from within the group, or both? This has implications. If we want outside money we will have to produce a product to sell on the market. If we only need internal money, then we don't have to focus on selling a product. We can concentrate on only the desires of the group rather than the desires of a venture capitalist or the market at large.

<<In my opinion we will need to release any final product as an experimental kit aircraft so we won't have the costs of certification. So, we will need a person or people who have put out a kit aircraft before.>>

   Possibly, a good ultralight maker such as Kolb Aircraft in Kentucky, would want to make final product personal skyboat kits and sell built airframes and pay a royalty to the designers for an income stream to this group.
   No mfrs are selling so many aircraft that they don't need another  product to sell. And this little dirigible should be a very very hot seller because it would make the antique, 220-year-old, hot air clumsy balloon finally obsolete.
    But firstthey first would have to see a perfected prototype and internet collaboration can do that.

Sounds good. These kinds of leads are encouraging.

It also occurs to me that we will need a lawyer to consult about patents and an accountant to watch the money.

Hi everyone,

Just got started in the group, time is limited.  I have had three patents approved, did it all myself (except registering the international ones), and can actually recommend against using a lawyer, at least for the majority of the process.  Lawyers charge a fortune - near $10,000 plus application fees, or about 8 to 10 times what it costs to do it yourself,  and often do a bad job.  I used the book Patent it Yourself from Nolo Press.  A decent patent takes about 100 hours all-inclusive, including drawings.  AND the majority of patents should never have been applied for - they were never and never will be used.

When and if we get to that part of the process, or if anyone has ideas they are considering patenting, I can put in my recommendations.

jesse blenn

Welcome Jesse. I'm excited to have a member that knows something about the patent process! I have been wondering about how the patents work for group projects like this. 

For example if we were to have a design competition and people submit designs for consideration, who has the rights to those designs once they are submitted?

Okay I've compiled a list off of the French Team website.  We should probably work out a similar team chart (along with a BUSINESS PLAN)...  below is their list, we'll need to set up our own.  In ( ) are the amount of people they have under each category.

Founders
Secretary
President
Treasurer
Press Contact
Airshow Organizer

Project Managers (x3)
Envelope Team (x6)
Thermal Study (x3)
Mechanical Team (x9)
Conception of Gondola (x10)
Electronics Team (x7)
Realization Display System and Sensors (x1)
Electric First Conception (x3)
Coordination Assistants/Quality (x3)
Legal Advisors (x2)
Budget (x1)
Essels's Study (x3)
Insa's Study (x3)
Communication (x7)
Supports (x3)
Technical Advisors (x5)
Work with the Technical Secondary Schools (x16)
Other Supports (x9)

along with the Nav's list integrated into it!

1. Technical idea people.2. Hardware hands-on fabricator people.3. Fast-talking pitch people to get investors.4. Venture Investors and aerospace dreamers with cash.5. Project organizers and managers to watch the paperwork.6. And then, skyboat crews! Yippee, the payoff finally.

Wow that is a lot of people. Dan Nachbar's team on the Alberto appears to be much smaller. It looks like 3 people and 6 technical advisors. 

OK, reality check. We'll have to go with who we got until we fly the prototype. Then people will leap on board. Nothing inspires like a new shape basking in the sky. Until then, we are just hot air, excuse the pun.

Just finished reading "Deltoid Pumpkinseed"  [available online for four bucks plus postage] The sober lesson of that book is that, even though they had a partial prototype flying well,  IT WASN'T ENOUGH TO ATTRACT INVESTORS! and the successful [?] proof-of-concept aerobody was retired, never to fly again.

The problem? It was only a partial prototype. They did not build a big LTA, just a twenty-six foot bulbous HTA.  It was only an HTA lifting body without the volume for enough lift gas to prove that  it was a floatable, serene, long-flight DIRIGIBLE. It proved that lifting bodies could lift themselves. Period. Nice but not exciting.

They forgot that LTA lifting bodies don't even have to worry about lifting themselves. They only have to aerodynamically lift a minor percent of their weight, about a third, I haven't calculated it yet, and let the lifting gas do the major lifting. So THEY WASTED THEIR RESOURCES. With the result that a lifting body LTA hasn't flown for forty years. [all the better for us] It looks like Aereon was planning on an HTA with helium assist. That's not an airship.

All this talk is just to prove what Boldt posted earlier; we need a business plan. Or, since many thoughtful people hate business, let's called it a FLIGHT PLAN  so we know exactly where we're going.   Aim right through the little details and remember why we're doing this -- a full scale flying skyboat for barnstorming a wonderful way to fly. If we can't find an investor that way, we can't find an investor.  But I believe we can. At least we'll have a working vessel.

That's my simple Flight Plan, hope you all agree. I'm talking about a good seventy footer here. A half scale at 35 feet or a quarter scale at 18 feet would be do-able and would prove the concept but would not be REAL, in the public's eye and in the media's eye and would probably end right there, same as the Aereon 26.

Flight Plan = Plan to Fly!

Before we can build a prototype, we need to agree on a design, and we need to prove that the drag, lift, and structural integrity fall within design parameters. I support the idea of building a full scale prototype after a small model to prove construction techniques and performance.

I'd like to explore the team idea with you all a little further.

If you're considering going to a VC later on to possibly commercialize your project, as you already know I'm sure, they will be looking for a very professional business plan and a convincing baseline technical design.

My name is Jim Sutton, and I might be able to help with the latter. I am a Principal Systems Engineer at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company. The "Systems Engineer" role doesn't show up in either of the team-member lists in this thread, but can be very useful for this sort of thing because of the big-picture techniques developed in this discipline.

Our group at work contains several systems engineers who have done aviation-related projects, from earliest concepts through product delivery. Several of us are very jazzed at the idea of your project. We'd be willing to help for free, if you'd like to have us. There would be no Lockheed involvement in this at all; just us, our skills, and some very expensive design tools we happen to personally own (not through the company) and would be happy to use. Actually, Lockmart has no interest in small, personal airships anyway. Just really-sophisticated, really-expensive ones! :-)

If you'd like for us to help, we can contribute to creating optimal requirements for the system, generating design alternatives, developing trade studies, finding breakthrough design ideas (for instance, I am certified in a technique called "TRIZ"; googling will tell you more, but it's about ways to break design logjams and generate innovative solutions), assessing risks, and much more. Work from my earlier career in software was recognized with the Shingo Prize in 2007 (googling "shingo" and my name "James Sutton" will turn this up if you want to look into it), which Business Week has called "the Nobel Prize of Manufacturing." Others in our group are also quite serious about their profession. In other words, we've been around the block enough to know how to be a help more than a hindrance. And we're also good team-players!

The products we would add to the project could not only help the team with converging on the best design solutions for all of your criteria, but should also initiate a drooling response from any VC's you might approach later on. ;-)

Why would we want to do this for free? First off, I found your website and the "cool factor" on your project is off the charts. Years ago I hand-designed a propellor-driven aircraft, before I knew systems engineering. Have wanted to hang-glide for decades, but never had the excess money (raised 4 kids...you know the drill!). So I am already primed to be interested in this topic. Second, I talked to others in the group and some of them are also very interested, in much the same way I am. Third, it potentially gives us in our work group an outside project where we could practice our skills and use our tools from beginning to end on a reasonably-sized project. You'd be surprised at how seldom those kind of opportunities come along (most of our projects are bigger and more compartmentalized). Finally, like another poster said...maybe, just maybe, someday we might also get a ride on a personal airship! LOL

My email address is mygyro@yahoo.com. If you all aren't interested in involving us, no hard feelings. But if you are, we'd love to play a part in your project.

Looking forward to your reply.

Jim

Wow, I'm simply blown away that a team of engineers would be interested in participating in our project. And for free no less! We are happy to accept any willing participants into our group, regardless of wealth or ability. 

I appreciate some of the techniques you speak of, and I believe they would be extraordinarily valuable for our design process. In my own amateurish way, I have been working on an excel file to optimize design. It is not as sophisticated as I would like, but it uses a genetic algorithm to generate different design parameters to minimize drag or whatever the goal is.

We are happy to have your input. And, please feel free to let us know what kinds of information you guys need to work with. In the mean time, I think I will read up on some of the items you talked about. 

Welcome,
Jake

Jake,

We would need to know that all the decision-makers on your team really want us onboard. For us this is in part potentially a really great team-building exercise for us in our group...but it will only have that affect if everybody on the entire airship team views our participation as a real positive and wants us to be part of it. No hard feelings if that's not the case; it just won't be good for anybody if it's not.  

Assuming that is a "go," it would be good to set up a telecon and online meeting so we can get to know each other and my folks can understand the project better. One free solution is mikogo.com for web conferencing (or perhaps learncentral.org) and simultaneous skype for audio or IM'ing. One of our folks has set those up before and has volunteered to set it up for us if we want it. A paid web conferencing alternative is Citrix Webex. Divided across 10-15 people it would cost each person around $3-4/month each (depending on how many). Very good service, and cheaper than Live Meeting ($4.50/month each). I believe it includes audio, so skype would not be necessary.

The next question concerns where are all the materials on what's been considered and done thus far. Are they all posted on this website? Are there other files or information outside of this (e.g., associated with your Excel model)? We can talk about that at the web meeting (assuming you want to do one). But we would like to look over what we've got thus far, so we can know where our tools/techniques would be starting from.

That's about it off the top of my head. Looking forward to corresponding more.

Jim

I think Jim and his Lockheed group sound like our kind of people, personally. I would like to get his opinion of my plastic monocoque airship. I'm doing well with my thin aluminum mock up of a section, the seam technique is working, and a piece of the plastic I have accepted the seam, also. Still no solid answer from Piedmont Plastics, I will bug them tomorrow, trying to get the best deal on freight.

Looks good from my viewpoint, welcome aboard.  Look forward to an online conference.
 
-Boldt

I think we need currently need a couple of business minded people, a couple of art related people, and a couple of IT/webmaster type people.

There may be people in the group with these skills. If there are, we need to talk to them about getting a plan for future organization on the business side, we need to talk about putting together some promotional and conceptual artwork, and we need to work on improving this site.

The wiki also needs a bit more content before it will be useful.

If you are interested in offering your skills in these or other areas, please let us know and we can talk about what can be done.