Tonight on NOVA. Giant airships like this once ruled the skies. They were the first
to drop bombs on a city and the first passenger aircraft. Speed and a comfortable ride made
them the ocean liners of the sky. But a number of well-publicized crashes ended their reign.
Some never gave up on the airship, and today there is a small renaissance for these machines.
The great old brother is fantastic and great to it. The blimp is back.
Funding for NOVA is provided by the Johnson and Johnson family of companies supplying
health care products worldwide. And Lockheed, a bold new force in systems engineering,
management, and technology services for defense, space, and industry. Major funding for NOVA
is provided by the financial support of viewers like you. Anyone who has seen the Goodyear
blimp can appreciate why people might build these graceful and most capricious of aircraft,
lighter than air machines. This familiar craft, small as airships go, is but a relic of the
giant dirigibles that once dominated the skies. Years before planes carried anyone but a pilot
and crew, airships like this transported paying passengers. By the late 1920s, airships were
more comfortable and faster than steamships. But their vast size made them hard to handle,
and accidents were all too frequent. For many, the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937 confirmed
that something was fundamentally wrong with them, and enthusiasm waned. Today, more than
50 years later, interest in these most romantic of flying machines appears to be growing again.
Are the designers of these modern dirigibles visionaries, anticipating some new age for
the airship, or hopeless romantics, ignoring the lessons of the past? With lighter than
air, it seems that the dream never dies. Two Frenchmen first floated free of the earth
in a balloon in 1783. But for more than a hundred years, these balloons flew at the
whim of the wind. Then, at the turn of the century, Alberto Santos Dumas, a young Brazilian
living in Paris, took the first important step in powering and steering balloons. Santos
attached a propeller to his motorcycle engine and slung it under a silk balloon. He filled
the balloon with hydrogen lifting gas. As the airship rose, the outside air pressure
decreased, allowing the hydrogen gas to completely fill the balloon. On returning to earth, the
hydrogen contracted again. The drop in internal gas pressure nearly ended Santos's flying
career. To stop the airship from folding in two, Santos pumped air into an inner balloon
called a baloney. As the airship rose and the hydrogen expanded, he released air from
the baloney to maintain internal pressure. On the way down, re-inflating the baloney
kept the pressure up and the balloon firm. Although Santos built the first true dirigible,
literally a steerable balloon, he saw no commercial future for his tiny, one-person airships.
To propel a dirigible balloon through the air, he once remarked, is like pushing a candle
through a brick wall. In Germany, an ex-cavalry officer, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, took
the next step in airship design. Instead of limp fabric bags made firm by the pressure
of the gas within, Zeppelin's airships were truly rigid. Zeppelin filled a lightweight
aluminum framework with 17 separate hydrogen bags. The skeleton was then covered with canvas
to create a streamline hull. Hydrogen-filled airships controlled their buoyancy by carrying
water ballast. To make them lighter, water is released, while releasing gas makes the
airship sink. Zeppelin's designs were known as rigid airships. The first Zeppelin flew
on July 2, 1900. The city block-long rigid airship was initially so overweight and underpowered
that it could barely carry the Count and three assistants at eight miles an hour. But the
Count refused to give up his dream. He began building Zeppelins to take passengers on sightseeing
excursions. The Count became a national hero. He finally developed a Zeppelin that flew
almost 50 miles an hour. The German War Ministry was impressed. The aging Count was overjoyed.
Instead of passengers, Zeppelins would now carry bombs. Early in 1915, Germany began
the first campaign to bomb a nation into submission, and Britain was the target. Although property
damage was only scattered, the psychological impact of the raids was devastating. But the
hydrogen-filled Zeppelins were vulnerable targets, and Germany lost 79 of her 123 airships.
After the war, the U.S. Navy ordered an airship from the Zeppelin Company. She was delivered
to the United States in 1924 and christened the Los Angeles. One of her officers was George
Watson. And it was built, we always understood, from the Germans with loving hands because
they felt this might be their last airship and it was going to be the best one ever built.
And those of us who flew on the Los Angeles quite agreed with them. It was the best one
they ever built. It was a wonderful ship, and everything about it was good. And I think
it is true that they put a lot of their emotions and their skill in the building, the building
of Hawaii, so she had life and one of the few airships that died in bed.
On arrival, the hydrogen in the Los Angeles was replaced by helium. Helium has less lifting
power than hydrogen, but it has the great advantage of not exploding. Helium was found
underground in Texas, and the United States had a monopoly on helium production.
The Los Angeles gave the Navy a chance to experiment. To see if an airship could operate
from an aircraft carrier, the Los Angeles was ordered to land on the Saratoga off the
coast of Rhode Island. And as they brought us down on the carrier,
we discovered the carrier deck was rising and falling some 20 or 30 feet. So as we would
be coming down, the carrier deck would be coming up and we would hit with an awful crash.
So this happened four or five times in quick succession, and we were battering the bottom
out of the control car there. The Rosendahl let go about 2,000 pounds of water ballast
right on the Saratoga ground crew, and this made us pretty highly unwelcome to ever come
back again. The experience gained with the Los Angeles
encouraged the Navy to try and take the lead in airship development.
The Navy contracted the Goodyear Tyrant Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio to build two state-of-the-art
airships, the Akron and the Macon. The Akron contained eight million cubic feet
of helium. It was over two football fields in length. The eight inboard engines could
cruise at 70 miles an hour for up to 75 hours. To compensate for weight loss from burning
off fuel, water was recovered from the engine exhausts. In 1931, there were great expectations
for the new airships. At that time, you have to remember that the
Navy badly needed some surveillance of the really broad ocean areas. The carriers were
not ready yet to provide this. They just sort of started off. The seaplanes didn't have
the legs to do it with. It was really a device that was badly needed.
The Akron and the Macon were flying aircraft carriers with room for five planes inside
their hulls. And the idea is these planes, there would
be four of them out at one time, two on each side of the airship, 100 miles apart. So you
were sweeping a 400-mile width area as you went along. And, of course, this greatly extended
the amount of area you could cover in surveillance. But the Akron seemed ill-fated. A well-publicized
accident showed how difficult it was to land a huge, buoyant airship, even with the help
of over 200 sailors. In 1932, while she was attempting to moor, a gust of wind swept her
skyward so suddenly the three men of her ground crew were pulled high into the air. The grip
of one man loosened, and he fell to his death. The second man followed him to destruction,
but the third crewman hung on and was saved. It was a grand and glorious feeling to get
inside once more. During a visit by government observers, the
Akron crushed her fin, causing further embarrassment to the Navy. Before they could prove their
worth as long-distance scouts, both airships were sunk in storms at sea. The loss of the
Akron and Macon ended American ambitions to build giant, rigid airships.
Back in Germany, the Zeppelin Company was enjoying great success with its passenger-carrying
ship, the Graf Zeppelin. The accommodations were more comfortable
than on any earlier airship. There were ten staterooms for twenty passengers, all with
windows that could open on a world just a few hundred feet below. Food and service were
first class, as one satisfied passenger commented, on a plane you fly, but on the Graf you voyage.
The Graf offered the first transatlantic flights to New York and Rio. The driving force behind
the Zeppelin Company was Hugo Echner. We had a wonderful flight in a rocker time of about
fifty hours from coast to coast. That is nearly half the time the fastest steamers need. I
admit we had to make the flight on very favorable weather conditions, but I am convinced under
all weather conditions, even on the most unfavorable, we will be able to make the flight in all
regularity and safety. Thank you. By 1935, Echner's plans to build the world's
largest and most luxurious commercial airship were nearing completion. The sixteen gas bags
were to be filled with helium, purchased from the United States. But huge construction costs
forced the Zeppelin Company to forfeit control to the German government. The United States,
fearing that the Nazis would use the new airship for military purposes, refused to export any
helium, so the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen. The first flight of the 1937 flying
season offered 50 passengers the fastest and most comfortable means of crossing the Atlantic.
One of the Hindenburg's crew was Richard Kolmer. The trip on the Hindenburg was a wonderful
experience. Food was excellent. Even the crew ate the same meals as the paying passengers.
Unlike travel by boat, airship passengers never became seasick. This was an important
consideration for travelers when choosing between a steamer or an airship. The chairs
and tables were not fixed to the floor. You could place a glass of water on a table without
it moving. This was the real proof of how smooth it was to fly on an airship. A large
crowd had assembled in Lakehurst, New Jersey to greet the Hindenburg's arrival on May 6,
1937. There were news cameramen. Radio reporter Herb Morrison was covering the event live.
It's practically standing still now. They've dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship.
They've been taking a hold out down on the field by a number of men. They back-motored
the ship, holding it just enough to keep it from... It's a terrific crash, ladies and
gentlemen. There's smoke in its flames now. And the frame is crashing to the ground. Oh,
the humanity and all the... I was the first out and ran for the fire department. I think
I set a world record running the 100 meters. It was high time to get out of there. Shortly
afterwards, the whole ship began to collapse, and I would certainly have been injured or
killed. In one minute, the whole ship was totally destroyed.
It was never discovered what caused the hydrogen to explode. Amazingly, only 35 of the 97 people
on board were killed, the only passenger losses that ever occurred on a Zeppelin. But these
newsreel images, shown around the world, spelled the end of the giant passenger-carrying airship.
It's the greatest of miracles that anyone came out of the disaster alive.
The future of the airship would be the blimp, and the blimp would be filled with helium,
not hydrogen. Blimps have no rigid skeleton. They're simply gas-filled balloons. In 1940,
when Hitler's U-boats started torpedoing merchant ships off America's East Coast, U.S. Navy
blimps came to the rescue. U-boats, of course, in World War II were primarily
surface raiders. They had the capability of submerging, and to come up and reveal themselves
to a blimp would have been disastrous. The blimps did have a pretty good staying power,
and we could stay with them for a long time, surfaced or submerged, and call in other forces
who could then destroy them. And I think they knew this.
Blimps were such an effective U-boat deterrent that no ship was ever torpedoed while under
their protection. The Navy built up to a fleet of 119 airships. After the war numbers dropped off
rapidly, Goodyear and the Navy did develop this mammoth radar-carrying blimp in 1959 for detecting
Soviet bombers. But by then, interest in airships was on the wane.
An airship program in the U.S. Navy back in 1961, when the decision was made to get rid of airships,
the airship program was essentially costing the Navy one aircraft carrier and one air wing. And
when it came down to a money crunch and they had to make a hard decision, they said,
we want the aircraft carrier and the air wing, and we'll do away with airships. Perhaps it
was a good decision, perhaps it was not. Those who love lighter than air, of course,
think it was a lousy decision. One of the little tricks you've got to be careful about is when
all this... before helium inflation, they have to bring all this lockdown and evacuate all the air
out with a pump. Therefore, this whole lot... Roger Monk is one of those people who loves
lighter than air. Two decades after Goodyear built its last blimp for the U.S. Navy, Monk decided to
resurrect the airship idea. Today, he is making a final check inside the bag of his 15th blimp.
I thought there was no point in producing anything that was the same as Goodyear because,
I mean, they've been doing it for longer and therefore... so we tried to delete them in
technology. So we decided we will put in all the technological advances that we could do,
like vector thrusts, like composite materials. In any case, I was more conversant with those.
A youthful Roger Monk began his struggle to build a high-tech airship in Cardington,
England more than a decade ago. There's as much difference between our design and the
airships of 1930s between, you know, 747 and the airplanes of the 1930s. You know,
a lot of advances have been made and they have made airplanes safer by using those same materials
and technologies and design ideas on airships. We hope to make the airship safer and to be more
productive. To improve control of the airship during landing and takeoff, Monk is determined
to incorporate a major innovation in blimp design, swiveling propellers.
These engines positioned inside the gondola and we have a model of the propulsor duct.
When the ship is taking off and it's full of fuel and heavy, the propulsor is rotated
around in the vertical position. So we just drive the ship up, away from the ground.
Vertically? Yeah. It's because it's used in Harrier. They deflect the thrust downwards.
The vectored thrust propulsion system is the most complicated part of the airship. Monk's
backers are urging him to abandon this refinement because the project is already behind schedule.
Can you pull me that way and up a bit and pull me that way? It's been, you know, two years of
absolute sheer hell really. I mean, 90 hours a week. And also, I mean, we're sort of, you know,
we're a long way behind time and a long way over budget and, you know, bank managers and
what have you get a little bit harassed. And there's a pretty small margin for error over
this last few days. I mean, if it didn't go absolutely like clockwork, you know, the whole
thing could have gone down the pan. When the airship is finally ready to fly, the weather
turns bad. Monk is out of crisis. His backers are giving him an ultimatum, fly within a week
or we're pulling out. On the appointed day, test pilot Giovanni Abbrotti decides to postpone the
maiden flight because he feels the wind is still too strong. They weren't getting ten knots out
there. Bastards. Right, isn't it? They weren't getting ten knots out there. Ron says he's happy.
Like a bloody baloney. Crap about. You know, we won't get any lulls because the sun's coming up.
It's constantly lifting up there, which I said would be less. Can you, you know, it's going out
in any case, whatever. I'll take responsibility for the bloody thing. Is everyone ready? We're
going to have to get a move on because the wind's going to get up again shortly. They've got a strong
wind warning though coming up, so if we don't get it out in a minute. Get it out there, up to the,
let's move it, otherwise we'll miss the next bloody lull. Oh God, I mean, we could have gone
at eight. It's all right. It won't drop down. Of course it did do for half an hour. Now it's picked
up again. You've got to be on the, there and ready to go. Stamper two for Danza Qadani. Screw!
Now the sun is setting. If we don't move now, we're never going to do it.
Okay. Slug the line, slug the line. Hands off.
Great. Oh brother, it's fantastic and great to it. Oh God. What a thing though, isn't it?
After a successful 20 minute flight, Monk is ecstatic.
But six weeks later in a rising gale, Monk is caught trying to stuff the airship back in the
hangar. It's a casebook disaster. Most airship losses occur in strong winds on the mast or during
attempts to get in and out of the hangar. Well, some city sods somewhere, I suppose,
are going to have to put the whole lot back together again. At the moment, I don't really
feel like it being me. We were in such a hole that the only way to get out of it was going on.
I was very ill for about six months after that. Anyway, got out of that. We, we reformed.
With new backers, Monk established airship industries and 10 years later,
he's still building airships. His sophisticated blimps were built with the military in mind,
but most have ended up in advertising. Monk's blimps are expensive. This one sells for five
and a half million dollars, or it can be leased for 3.6 million a year. So far,
sales and leases for advertising have not made a profit for airship industries. Monk
always believed the right role for his blimps was surveillance, but only the Japanese and
Korean police have bought them. In July of 1989, the Paris police were concerned about
two major events that were to take place simultaneously in the city, the 200th anniversary
of the French Revolution and an economic summit attended by the heads of state of
the seven leading industrialized nations. The Paris police mounted a huge security operation
under the all-seeing eye of one of Monk's blimps. The blimp was equipped with a powerful camera
that could identify a person at over a mile, and there was an infrared camera for guarding
Paris airspace at night. The blimp was aloft for 22 hours a day for seven consecutive days.
Pictures were relayed to police headquarters. For years, the Paris police have had cameras
at ground level for monitoring traffic. A blimp was the ideal vehicle to give them
an additional bird's-eye view of the city. Chief of Security Raymond de Matias.
We have helicopters, like police everywhere in the world, but for this security operation they
were not an appropriate choice. Helicopters are very noisy and Parisians are very sensitive about
aircraft noise, which is why no planes are allowed to fly over Paris. We were pleasantly
surprised that Parisians immediately adopted the blimp, which they nicknamed the whale.
The blimp trailed President Bush as he traveled across the city,
allowing the police to anticipate any potential problems en route to his meeting at the Louvre.
The Paris surveillance operation was a success, but it did not lead to a sale.
Monk is hoping that a contract with the US Navy to build a much larger blimp will improve the
company's prospects. The Navy is interested in a blimp that could help protect its fleet from the
kind of missile attack that damaged the Stark in the Persian Gulf. Radar on board only gives
a commander a few seconds to shoot down incoming missiles. To gain more warning of an attack,
the Navy uses planes or helicopters to carry radar aloft, but keeping them constantly in the
air is very costly. As sea-skimming missiles get smaller and faster, the size of the radar
antenna needed to detect them gets larger. The Navy concluded that the only vehicle that could
keep a billboard-sized radar aloft for weeks at a time is a very large blimp. Today, Monk
takes the Navy review team through a full-size mock-up of the cabin. He has to convince them
he has a viable design for building the world's biggest blimp.
What we find is in the lighter-than-air game that people find it incredibly difficult to
visualize airships. They instantly imagine sort of wicker baskets and sort of canvas envelopes
creaking across the sky, and you basically have to do this to make people realize that it is an
advanced technology product and just as capable as any other airplane.
Yeah, I think we could get away with pulling these down even a little bit more. I'm not sure
what would happen with a computer panel here. I think the one thing that we do have is massive
sticking power and a massive determination to make it work, and I think the Navy actually
recognized that, and we're just going to keep pounding away until we get this thing in the air.
But Monk's going to need all his determination because in an old wartime airship hangar in Tulumac,
Oregon, a contender is putting the final touches to his new blimp.
It's taken two and a half years to get to the point of having a production version airship,
an airship that somebody wants to buy, that we've built, the FAA wants to certify it,
and we've got it here finely inflated. It's kind of a birthing process after all this time.
Okay, these cables, the cables on the side line up with the patches, and it should be about six
inches of overlap. Phil founded the American Blimp Corporation when he felt that Monk's blimps
were too expensive for many potential advertisers. Although by volume, Thiel's is a quarter the size
of airship industries, it carries almost half the passenger load. Thiel kept the empty weight
of the blimp to a minimum by creating a very simple design. They're loose. Like the early
blimp designers, Thiel put the cables that suspend the cabin on the outside of the gas bag. An
external suspension system is easy to assemble and maintain once the cables are the right length.
And these cables are supposed to come to a point in space, which they do. Unfortunately,
it appears to be the wrong point. The cables are designed with what's called a short leg,
so that just for this purpose that if the balloon would stretch with age or for any reason you'd
need to change the length of the cable, you can just work with this short end of the cable. So
what we're trying to determine now is if we actually have the parts with us to make up
these short legs at the moment. And I guess the answer is yes. Thiel's most important innovation
is the design of the envelope. Conventional fabric has to combine both strength and impermeability
to gas. Thiel uses two bags. The transparent material on the right contains the helium,
while the outer red fabric is the weight-bearing hull. The result is a very lightweight translucent
envelope. The bags are easily changed. Just before the blimp was delivered to Arizona,
Thiel's first customer, Virgin Lightships, decided on a lily-white envelope. Making airships
profitable is like making any business profitable. You really have to focus in on what the customer
wants and what he's willing to pay for. And I think in case of airship advertising, he's
paying for corporate recognition. And he doesn't want an overly big airship. He's not impressed
with all the details and performance that as designers we get so enamored with. He needs
a Mack truck of a blimp to be there reliably doing what he wants. And that's what we've
tried to do here. The A-60 Lightship will sell for about a million and a quarter dollars,
about one-fourth the cost of Roger Monk's airship. Operating it will cost around a hundred
thousand a month. We're getting ready for the first flight of our A-60 after re-inflation
with the new envelope. Yeah, there's always a few butterflies the very first flight of
a new aircraft, you bet.
With a banner on there, it'll really look super. You know, it does have a quieter sound.
Doesn't it sound good? Yeah, sounds a lot better, doesn't it? But the best part about
it is it really has some kick when you, for acceleration.
Dick Whittekam is an ex-Navy and Goodyear blimp pilot who was Thiel's mentor throughout
the development of the lightship.
It's not infrequent that people will assume that they have the capabilities to build airships.
I think they're graceful, they're lighter than air, they seem simple. And yet in fact
those same people would not sit around and propose to build helicopters. And I'm not
sure what it is about airships that makes people feel qualified at the drop of a hat
to be experts.
One of the major costs in operating the airship is the crew, and particularly when you're
traveling on the road. The per diem and hotel costs can become enormous. Conventional airships
operate with crews between 20 and 25. What we've tried to do with the lightship is minimize
the amount of crew. And we've done that partially by minimizing the size, but also by trying
to make the maintenance as simple as possible, and to make it as field-ready as possible.
Well at this point, my single biggest priority is to orchestrate putting this airship into
production, not just build one, but to actually deliver four or five in the balance of this
airship. And we really have our work cut out to do that. So right now we've just frozen
the design, we want to stabilize what we're doing, and simply put it into production.
There literally was a day during a walk on a beach that the idea just hit. Let's put
a light bulb in there and light it up. Before Thiel can finalize any sales, he has to get
his design approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, a long and expensive task
that has dashed the dreams of many fledgling airship entrepreneurs.
Back in Tillamook, Oregon, another company, coincidentally using the same hanger, has
worked seven years to develop a strange-looking machine called the cyclo-crane. The cyclo-crane
is designed to transport heavy loads. It was initially funded by a group of Canadian logging
companies and the U.S. Forest Service, who wanted an aerial crane to carry logs out of
inaccessible forests where roads didn't exist. The designers claim that the cyclo-crane will
eventually carry twice the load of a helicopter at a quarter of the cost.
It flies just like a helicopter, and it's very easy to fly. An old man like me could
fly it because it reacts very slow, but it's extremely stable. It flies very well.
Money for the project runs out in a week. In an effort to keep the cyclo-crane alive,
the company has invited potential buyers from the Navy, World Bank, and the Canadian government
to witness today's flight. For us, it's a do or die. Not that we will
do anything dangerous. I want to make sure Mrs. Morris has a husband at home.
Ah, she looks good. As soon as that cab gets hooked up, we'll go.
J.J. Morris's precarious-looking perch for flying the cyclo-crane is the modified helicopter
cab sitting on top of the tractor. This is how the two-ton prototype works. There
is enough helium in the bag to lift the cyclo-crane, the suspended pilot's cab, and 50 percent
of the weight of the payload. When the pilot starts rotating the cyclo-crane,
air passes over the red airfoils, which act like the wings of an airplane, and provide
the aerodynamic lift for a two-ton load. When the payload is dropped, the helium immediately
lifts the cyclo-crane skywards. The pilot then adjusts the red wings to fly downwards
against the lift of the helium. Today, as the cyclo-crane prepares for the
test flight, a suspension cable chafes against the nose assembly, causing an electrical fire.
This is yet another incident in a whole series of problems that have been brought on by the
rush to get the cyclo-crane flying before funding runs out next week.
It takes the rest of the day to repair the damage.
Next morning's pre-flight check uncovers a bug in the flight control system. Takeoff
is postponed until the afternoon, by which time most of the VIPs will have left.
In the afternoon, the cyclo-crane is back on the runway, ready for its first flight
in almost five years. As JJ attempts to ease the cyclo-crane off the tractor, it's clear
that something is seriously wrong.
It appears that yesterday's fire did more damage to the flight control system than was
previously thought.
This is the cyclo-crane in 1984, when it made several successful flights. In the air,
its ingenious design gives the cyclo-crane helicopter-like maneuverability. But just
how feasible it would be to operate and maintain in an inaccessible logging location is far
from clear.
In 1986, the U.S. Forest Service funded another attempt to produce a heavy-lift airship for
transporting timber, the Helistat, designed by helicopter designer Frank Piasecki. Piasecki
attached four surplus helicopters to a surplus Navy blimp envelope. The helium provides the
lift to get the weight of the Helistat itself off the ground, while the helicopter rotors
lift a 25-ton payload.
During hover tests, wind began to blow the Helistat off the runway. As the structure
began vibrating, the pilot tried to fly the Helistat out of trouble.
One of the four pilots was killed, and work on this marriage of helicopter and blimp was
not continued. But the idea of an airship as an aerial crane is not dead.
Here in French Guiana, another attempt to use an airship as an aerial crane is about
to start. The world's biggest hot air dirigible was built by a British company, Thunder & Colt.
The large volume is needed to lift this one-ton raft that will allow a French-led team of
biologists to work on the very tops of the trees. The buoyancy of a hot air dirigible
is adjusted by turning on the burner inside the airbag. More heat gives more lift. No
ballast is used.
Up till now, most research was conducted at ground level, biologically the least interesting
part of the rainforest. But this gives researchers a new tool to explore the canopy.
Given its maneuverability, it can choose exactly the site on which to deposit the raft. If
necessary, it could return to that same site a month later, a year later, even five years
later to give a continuity of scientific data.
The main feature of interest for us at the canopy is its hitherto inaccessibility. People
have been trying all sorts of methods to get to the top of the trees, and it's at the top
of the trees where all the activity is taking place. Well, most of the activity is flowering
fruiting, that's where all the leaves are, the insect life, the animal life is mostly
confined to the tops of the canopy.
But hot air dirigibles have their limitations. Because the air in the bag is under such low
pressure, the airship cannot make any headway in winds of more than five miles an hour.
This can only be made early in the day, or at night.
Tonight, some members of the team are trawling for insects. A net is suspended underneath
the gondola.
Unlike a helicopter, the airship can float along without a destructive downdraft.
In the night, the raft has slipped, but the team decides to continue working.
In order to unload an electrical generator, the dirigible is tied to the raft.
The additional weight causes the raft to fold in two. It is undamaged, but wedged between
the trees, 100 feet off the ground.
The success of the expedition depends on the airship's ability to extract the raft. But
will the dirigible have enough lift? This will be its first real test. The rescue is
postponed until early the following morning.
The airship must recover the raft quickly. As the tropical sun warms the ambient air,
the difference in temperature between the air inside and outside the bag is reduced.
And as the temperature difference is reduced, so is the airship's ability to lift the raft.
So, perhaps, after all, there is a future for the airship in a few specialized aircraft
applications.
But Goodyear won't be a part of building this future. In 1987, when Goodyear was developing
its first new airship in 30 years, the company was forced to sell the aerospace division
to defend itself from a hostile takeover bid. This airship ended Goodyear's 75-year tradition
of airship construction.
One month before Roger Munk's latest airship was due to fly, airship industries U.K. collapsed
under debts approaching $100 million. Despite this setback, Munk remains optimistic that
the giant blimpy design for the Navy will fly in 1994. In Tillamook, the cyclo-crane
has become a hanger queen.
But all may not be lost. A major amusement park operator is looking at the cyclo-crane
as an aerial attraction.
Of all the recent efforts to revive interest in airships, Jim Thiel's appears most likely
to succeed commercially. His design was finally certified by the FAA, and Thiel has now sold
several airships for advertising.
But the best hope for the airship is the enthusiasm that it generates in its supporters, who continue
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Next time on NOVA, the Northern California earthquake of 1989 was the most expensive
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it the most watched. It was also expected. The effort to predict earthquakes is a rollercoaster
ride filled with stunning revelations and catastrophic failures. When can we expect
another earthquake? That's next time on NOVA.
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