Giant Airships to Deploy Buildings by 2003

UniDyne writes: "CargoLifter, an airship manufacturer based in Germany, plans to build giant-sized airships to drop modular buildings in remote areas and help with disaster relief. These airships are the size of the largest building in my home city: the NationsBank Headquarters here in Charlotte! This article explains the possible uses of these airships and how CargoLifter plans to build a manufacturing hangar in North Carolina. They kind of remind me of something you'd see in an anime series." Mmmmm, CargoLifter.

Never Gonna Happen

I was senior crew on the worlds largest and most successfull airship company in the world. I have seen these far-fetched ideas for airships come and go over the years, and NOT ONE has materialized. NOT ONE!!! The airship has only been viable and only will be viable as an advertising platform. Advertising is the only market that has turned a profit in the airship world. While some of the ideas that have come and gone over the years have been good, for one reason or another, the only ones that succeed are those based on arial advertising. Trust me, I know.

How

How do they connect the building to the blimp? How do they keep the blimp stationary while placing the building on its destined site? And how do they diconnect the building? I can imagine the blimp will go up like a cork once the building is disconnected.

Caution

Sure, it sounds good now, but how long will it be until we have Frogstar fighters picking up buildings at will just because they want someone who is inside?

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blimp habits

Although blimps are certainly an attractive idea for unmanned armed forces surveillance balloons, lifting logs out of areas where sustainable lumbering is being done but roads are impractical or undesirable, and other applications where they can be tethered to the ground as well as their cargo, they are notoriously prone to being damaged or destroyed by unforseen winds and weather conditions, or simply thrown out of control and blown away.

There are good reasons why they are not used for passenger or military service otherwise, repeated attempts to use them have resulted in loss of the airships and their crews, for reasons totally unrelated to the Hindenberg - Bringing up their relative nonflammability is largely a straw-man argument in their favor.

Yes, they can be made to work in average weather and winds - but expecting this to keep them safe is about as intelligent as expecting building a seaside house at the same level as the average high tide and expecting it to therefore stay dry - and tides are considerably more predictable than sudden changes in the weather.

Pardon me, but I would greatly prefer these potential juggernauts to stay downwind of wherever I am when loaded down with the buildings, locomotives, et cetra the article envisions - if at all, considering again that the wind direction may change.

Priorities

The CargoLifter web site resembles a dot-com with too much venture capital and a bad business concept. The product isn't ready, but the theme park and the visitor's center are open. They have seven locations and twelve business units. They did all the irrelevant stuff first.

If they had one medium-sized airship ferrying around bulky medium-weight stuff like drilling rigs and transmission towers, and real customers using it, it would be a better company.

They are quite serious about it, indeed.

I have read a lot of dismissive comments about cargolifter here. And it is true that they face a lot of technical difficulties.

But they are very serious about building this keeled airship (not a blimp, not a zeppelin).

They have build the production facilty in Germany, an incredibly big hangar. They do have lots of investors, many of them companies that will benefit from the finished product.

Yes their stock is slumping, but that is no wonder in the current climate at the stock exchanges, it _is_ a very risky venture.

But this is not some crazy venture, von Gablenz is going about it in a very level headed way. When they premiered on the stock market during the bubble, they did not go to the "Neuer Markt" where the bubble economy was rampant. They went into the MDAX. The DAX is Germany's equivalent of the Dow, the MDAX holds the next 100 smaller companies (not small caps, more like middle caps, damn my restriceted vocabulary). This means that they are very interested in a steady, level headed developement of Cargolifter, instead of making big bucks fast.

To sum it up: Cargolifter is a risky, crazy thing, but they are very sure of accomplishing this technological feat. The already have funding up to the finished full scale operating prototype (their estimates).

So watch out! If it can be done, their doing it. It is incredibly interesting technology and it will be fun to watch how they are going to do it. Their web site holds a lot of information and many good pictures of side projects and the big hangar. http://www.cargolifter.com

Marcus

Wired Article - Much more in-depth

Wired ran a much more in-depth article about this last August [wired.com]. It also discussed worldwide helium shortages which may come about because of such increased demand.

-Nev

Re:Never Gonna Happen

But have any of those other projects had a 400 M$ budget.

The company seems to be quite determined, so if they can find a decent solution for the two obvious problems (wind and getting the thing certified by the state governments), there probably would be some market for them to tap. (It's at the moment incredibly hard and to transport very bulky freight).

But as the stock price [comdirect.de] shows, quite a lot of people don't think they will be successful anymore.

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Hindenburg Uncertainty Principle.

A German company is making plans to build huge dirigibles capable of picking up already-assembled fast-food restaurants, locomotives, even fully equipped hospitals and setting them down in villages with no roads or in big cities tangled in traffic or in Third World settlements recovering from disaster.

Hmm.. sounds like a wonderful target for a scud missile.

Or maybe just a good way to perform McDonalds Drop Testing. Hmm.. Science project, anyone?

Link to CargoLifter's CL160 Page

Here's a link to the company [cargolifter.com]'s info on the CL160 airship: http://www.cargolifter.com/2001/content/solution_e /index-160.htm [cargolifter.com]

Additional info on the company and its other products, etc. can be found here: http://www.cargolifter.com/2001/repository/portal_ noscript_e.html [cargolifter.com]. There are even links to a theme park!

hm.

Buckminster Fuller had some idea akin to this. His plan was to mass produce his Dymaxion Houses and airlift them by zeppelin to where ever. I can't find an exact refrence to this, but I know I read it somewhere. Here's a good Buckminster Fuller page. http://www.cjfearnley.com/fuller-faq.html