Zeppelins are making a comeback in California, and, no, we're not talking about the English rock group.
Airship Ventures, which operates out of Moffett Field near the southern end of San Francisco Bay, has announced an agreement with Germany's Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH (the successor of the same firm that made the Hindenburg) to purchase a modern, 12-passenger zeppelin.
The 8 million U.S. dollar airship will be sent to California in September, where it will be used mostly for sightseeing excursions. It will be carried across the Atlantic Ocean on the deck of a ship because it is much smaller and has less range than the passenger zeppelins of the 1920s and 1930s.
The airship will be the fourth of the Zeppelin NT line produced by the German firm, which differs considerably from the aerial giants that roamed the skies before they were retired after the fiery crash of the Hindenburg in 1937.
First, they lack the rigid hulls of the old-style zeppelins, which housed loose-hanging gas cells. Instead, the gasbag is the hull, and it houses an internal skeleton that supports the control surfaces, control car, and the engines. But both old- and new-style zeppelins differ greatly from ordinary blimps, which are literally just motorized gasbags.
Second, with a length of 247 feet the Zeppelin NT airships are much smaller than the old-style zeppelins—the Hindenburg was 804 feet long and remains the largest aircraft ever to have flown. But the NT airships don't need the mammoth hangars required by the old-style zeppelins.
Third and most importantly, they are inflated with inert helium rather than the more buoyant but explosive hydrogen, whose ignition destroyed the Hindenburg and several World War I zeppelins. The British invented incendiary bullets in 1916, and it was downhill from there for the zeppelin service. They were re-engineered to fly higher than the airplanes of the time, leading to many adventures with hypoxia, Earth's fast-moving jet stream, and frozen engines.
The last zeppelin to operate out of California was the USS Macon, part of the U.S. Navy's experiment with flying aircraft carriers. Along with its sister ship, the New Jersey-based USS Akron, it could launch and recover four small biplanes while aloft.
Source:Xinhua
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