Whole lotta love for zeppelins
A new-generation airship is visiting Puget Sound, a reminder of the pleasures and Northwest history of traveling by dirigible.
Photo by Roger Cain/Airship Ventures
Airships were not an uncommon sight in Seattle skies at one time, between regular visits of the Goodyear blimp to Seafair and U.S. Navy blimps cruising over Lake Washington. This week, a new generation of airship is in the area giving passengers a glimpse of the view from above.
It's a sausage-shaped dirigible based in California named Eureka. It's a next-generation zeppelin made with a hard exterior shell and filled with helium (not Hindenburg-style hydrogen). It's based at Everett's Paine Field and trips are $375 and up. The Seattlepi.com's Aubrey Cohen went for a ride.
The Northwest's history with airships goes way back. Famed airship pilot Lincoln Beachey floated about the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland in 1905. In 1908, an aviator flew over Seattle's Luna Park, and a dirigible was a presence in the skies over the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Expo in 1909. Famous airship crews have also passed through town, notably the Arctic explorers Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth, and Umberto Nobile, who were greeted by thousands of Seattleites when they visited the city after crossing the North Pole in an airship in 1926.
At one time, James Ditty, an early visionary of Eastside development, imagined that airships would transport commuters between Seattle and Bellevue — I'm sure better for the carbon footprint than floating bridges.
According to The Seattle Times, the owner of the airship, Airship Ventures CEO Brian Hall, fell in love with the craft while flying in one over Cologne, Germany, which, by the way, is also the home of Seattle's Alweg monorail. The Zeppelin NTs are made in Friedrichshafen, Germany, on beautiful Lake Constance, which was home to the famous German zeppelin fleet that included the globetrotting Hindenberg, Graf Zeppelin, and others. Early airships were tested above water and often crafted by boat-builders and navy men, not unlike the early airplanes of the original Boeing Company on Lake Union.
The Lake Constance area is also home to a fabulous Zeppelin Museum where you can board an accurate, life-size mockup of the passenger quarters of the Hindenberg to see what life was like for passengers aboard the classic airships of that era before they came to earth. There's an excellent restaurant there were you can eat off the Hindenberg menu on Hindenberg china if you want. You can also see charred Hindenberg relics in the exhibits, before or after dining.
Even after the age of the big passenger zeppelins had passed, airships continued to be used. The U.S. Navy had a blimp fleet stationed at Tillamook, Ore., where one of the giant sheds is now an air museum. The U.S. government and other companies are exploring ways of using airships in famine relief, warfare, and other purposes. Sightseeing is also a draw.
What is the appeal?
Airship flight is generally slower and lower than what you get in an airplane, and more directed than a hot air balloon. I had the chance to ride over Seattle on the Goodyear blimp Columbia in the late 1970s, and it was an unforgettable experience, and the opposite of a ride on a Blue Angel.
One reason is that an airship can fly at an altitude reminiscent of "dream flight." It is somewhere between flying and hovering. While aboard, you are completely unaware of the huge gas canopy overhead. You are merely hanging in space, moving and turning slowly, on a suspended view platform. In the front seat, you could open the passenger window and hang out. The city and landscape below felt like a living diorama. It was a blast circling over Green Lake from above.
Weirdly, I found it a little like riding in a floating VW microbus — one without a muffler, however. In the Goodyear blimps, the sound of the motors was a very loud drone, much like a small plane. They seem quieter when you watch them float from the ground.
We landed and took off from Sand Point Naval Air Station, now Magnuson Park. You came in for a landing at a pretty steep angle and stopped when a ground crew ran out and grabbed your ropes. On the ground, there was a wheel under the gondola and you could watch the airship bounce in the wind, which could make getting on and off gracefully a bit tricky.
The most "classic" zeppelin that visited Seattle was Led Zeppelin (at the Green Lake Amphitheater, 1969).
The new Zeppelin NT promises to be a very cool show too, but more like a step toward heavenly flight than a "Stairway to Heaven."
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Aug 31, 8:16 a.m. Inappropriate
Start of 2nd paragraph:
It's a sausage-shaped dirigible based in California named Eureka.
Hi folks,
I think it's a very funny description, but the good folks at Airship Ventures with their Zeppelin NT may not agree. The Eureka as they call it, is a semi rigid airship, which is a cross between a full framed Zeppelin with internal gas cells and a blimp with no frame and ballonets (Internal air bags) to adjust the envelope pressure. In simple terms it is a blimp with a limited frame to hang the engines and tail fins on.
The biggest airship in the world, the HAV 304 (A military version of the Skycat) will start construction at Tillamook Oregon early next year, before testing in Yuma Arizona and deploying to Afghanistan for use by the US Army.
If you want to see more on airships, past, present and future see: www.airshipblimp.com or if you just want a helium sniffing laugh try www.airship.me the worlds only lighter than air comedy site, with lots of funny pictures and U tube links fit for all the family.
Regards Bond, James Bond.
(Skyship blimp pilot in a View to a Kill)
PS. For the star of a future James Bond film see the Skycat: www.hybridairvehicles.com
Posted Tue, Aug 31, 3:09 p.m. Inappropriate
Hello from Cologne, Germany! Part of the zeppelin story is that for their construction the engineers in Friedrichshafen developed the art of building huge and intricate lightweight aluminium frames to support the airship skins. This technique was developed and perfected by Claude Dornier, working for Count Zeppelin. Dornier later founded the famous Dornier aircraft company (also in Friedrichshafen/Lake of Constance) and he introduced this aluminium construction technique to the aircraft industry. Years later, after WWII, several Dornier engineers joined in the early 1950s the Alweg Monorail Company in Cologne. Alweg's first test trains looked like airplanes without wings and their construction followed airplane construction techniques. This type of lightweight construction was also used for the two Seattle Alweg trains that were built in Germany. If you want to find out more, visit my website www.alweg.com . Thank you for an interesting article!
Greetings from Cologne, Germany,
Reinhard
Posted Tue, Aug 31, 8:19 p.m. Inappropriate
Interesting article, thanks. Would love to try a ride but it's a little pricey. Didn't the U.S. have a monopoly on helium in the 30's? Where does it come from now? There was a PBS program a few years back that seemed to exonerate hydrogen as the culprit in the Hindenburg disaster, fingering the flammable coating of the skin instead. Since airships might offer some possibility of keeping air travel alive as the oil runs down I wonder what the supply situation for helium is, and whether anyone is again considering hydrogen. I presume hydrogen must be cheaper.
Posted Tue, Aug 31, 11:06 p.m. Inappropriate
Hi there,
The US did have a monopoly on helium in the 30's but there are now vast rerserves in Russia and Algeria. Although the US has a very large helium reserve in Texas, most helium is obtained as a byproduct of the liquefaction of natural gas for shipping overseas.
The outer cover of the Hindenburg was painted in what was in effect a type of rocket fuel. It may have been partly responsible for the initial fire that spread to the internal hydrogen cells.
Hydrogen is cheaper but I don't think anyone is crazy enough to use it for manned airships. It was not only the Hindenburg that blew up because of the use of Hydrogen but the R101 that crashed in France would have been a survivable accident had it not been for the fire.
Regards JB (www.airshipblimp.com)
Posted Wed, Sep 1, 2:04 p.m. Inappropriate
The Hinderburg was designed to use helium for bouyancy, but the Roosevelt administration embargoed the gas, fearing the airships would be used for military purposes. There were plans to add extra staterooms to the Hindenburg, to take advantage of hydrogen's greater lifting capacity, at the end of that season. Of course, the crash put an end to that. The Hindenburg's sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin II (under construction at the time) never saw commercial service and after a few test flights was grounded and dismantled so the duralumin alloy in the frame could be used for aircraft manufacture - ironically, warplanes. That might have never happened were it not for the helium embargo.
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