Sky Snake
Flexible blimps are bending the rules on UAV design.
- By Michael Klesius
- AirSpaceMag.com, December 18, 2009
An artist's concept shows how the STS-111 segments each come with winglets made of carbon fiber rods with nylon material stretched over them to aid with lift, steering, and overall stability. Sanswire-TAO Corp.
The blimp—that bloated, egg-shaped thing that blocks out the sun at major public events—remains one of aviation’s oddballs. Think Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the movie Ghostbusters. And it’s a high-maintenance oddball: lots of construction and operating costs relative to the few people it carries. No speed. Huge amounts of hangar space needed to shelter it when nasty weather arrives. How does this thing get work? Other than hoisting cameras above the Super Bowl for 10-second shots during TV commercial breaks, the blimp, or zeppelin as it’s never called anymore, has been a caricature of itself for decades.
Leave it to the Germans to think, we can do a better blimp. TAO (Trans-Atmospheric Operations) Technologies GmbH, of Stuttgart, Germany, partnered a few years ago with the University of Stuttgart, and more recently with Ft. Lauderdale, Florida-based Sanswire Corporation (from the French “sans” for “without” paired with the English “wires”) to develop and market a new kind of airship, the Stratellite—a smaller, more flexible, unmanned, autonomous blimp that may rewrite the books on the value of lighter-than-air vehicles.
The biggest plus for blimps is their time in the air, which can last days to weeks depending on whether they have people on board. Their biggest drawback is that when the wind blows hard from the side, they don’t stay on course very well. And several thousand feet up, blimps encounter a lot of wind.
For a blimp driver trying to angle for a good camera shot of a football stadium, it’s not a matter of life and death. For soldiers on the ground in Kandahar trying to maintain, say, a communications link to their supply base, or a video feed of insurgents across the valley, the stakes are higher.
Sanswire-TAO has done away with the rigid blimp design in favor of a flexible one, with segments linked like sausages inside a double-sleeve design. The vehicle looks like that hinged plastic toy snake you played with as a kid. As it undulates in the sky in a cross wind, it bleeds off the energy of the gusts, and stays on course or in place more efficiently.
“We focus strictly on being an eye in the sky—a very low-cost eye in the sky,” says Daniel Erdberg, Sanswire-TAO vice president of operations. “It’s not a complicated machine like a typical aircraft. Our [flight] duration exceeds anything on the market just due to design, to physics.”
Made mainly of rip-stop nylon, the multiple-cell airship, still in the test phase, would come in a crate that can be unpacked by two soldiers and deployed in a matter of hours. The forward bladder is filled with helium, which gives the airship its buoyancy. The rest of the bladders are filled with a gaseous, combustible fuel that gets compressed before being fed into a one-cylinder, reciprocating engine mounted below the front section, which pulls the airship along at almost 40 miles an hour.
The company’s current model, the STS-111, which is 111 feet long and 11 feet in diameter, can stay aloft for up to three days at altitudes between 10,000 feet and 30,000 feet. A larger version on the drawing board will go to 60,000 feet, where it will loiter for up to a month, with an expected top speed around 85 miles an hour. “At that altitude,” says Erdberg, “the airship has a line-of-sight view over an area the size of Texas.”
Related topics: Blimps Surveillance Aircraft Modern Aviation
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Comments (8)
As a commercial pilot and one of the early investors in Sanswire, I still think this design and related technology makes a lot of sense! I, for one, will be in Orland for it's testing in Orlando if I know where and when!
Posted by David Bodley on December 19,2009 | 12:35 PM
We need to get this vehicle operational and in the field as soon as possible. With expanding operations in Afghanistan/Pakistan, and with the drug/illegal alien problems on our borders, this technology is available now and is more cost effective than alternative systems.
Posted by richard white on December 19,2009 | 06:51 PM
"the blimp, or zeppelin as it’s never called anymore,..." Good reason for that is that they are two different types of airships!!! The blimp is non-rigid while the Zeppelin is a rigid airship
Posted by Lance on December 21,2009 | 05:18 PM
It's wonderfully affordable, even for countries like ours that are broke, and it's not the viability of the technology that concerns me. As a longtime Sanswire shareholder, it's Erdberg's historic inability to market anything the company does that is my primary concern.
Posted by KJ on December 22,2009 | 01:48 PM
“Their biggest drawback is that when the wind blows hard from the side, they don’t stay on course very well.”
and
“As it undulates in the sky in a cross wind, it bleeds off the energy of the gusts, and stays on course or in place more efficiently.”
Looks like we are back in down-wind-turn country here!
“The forward bladder is filled with helium, which gives the airship its buoyancy.”
So, what does the rest of it do: dangle down below?
“The rest of the bladders are filled with a gaseous, combustible fuel that gets…fed into [the] engine”. And what happens to the bladder after that?
Posted by Bill Tomlinson on December 24,2009 | 06:14 AM
Lance-
From the World War I aircraft spotter's guides:
Class "B" limp = became the word: BLIMP
Class "D" rigid = became the word: DIRIGIBLE
Zeppelin= A company in Germany- named for Airship Pioneer Count Ferdinand von Zepplin. Made lots of airships in that era.
There is a modern day Zeppelin company- http://www.zeppelinflug.de/
So yes- Zeppelins are back in style with the Zeppelin NT, now giving tour rides in Germany, and out of San Francisco.
Posted by Jim on December 24,2009 | 11:24 AM
The tired old carousel of LTA continues to revolve, on average once every twenty years or so. Is that an Aereon or a Megalifter? In a poor light a Skyship looks much like a Dynairship. Whatever virtues LTA once possessed have now been overtaken by the enrmous reduction in payload size and power consumption and the ready availability of uav's of all sizes, from Globalstar downwards, with which to deploy them. Time on station has been a red herring for years, the area to focus on being "on station" LTA has never been any good at this, a twenty knot headwind reduces your speed of advance by 40%, and is likely to result, if prolonged for anytime, in the vehicle being as likely to be found in Alabama as Afghanistan. In the trophosphere the situation gets worse!
The main attraction of LTA lies in the fact that those seeking investment in such crackpot schemes know that investors have no reliable database of what the build or r&d costs for such turkeys ought to be, it's rich picking time for the snake oil salesmen when an air ship project hits town. Luckily, the tired old carousel at DARPA and similar institutions revolves at about the same speed, whenever anybody at such government offices wants a little extra cash for themselves, why not flag up a new "Walrus" or "Skycat"? It like goldfish, a short attention span means you can re-introduce the same nonsense time and again and wait hopefully for the cheques to drop through the letterbox!
It is just possible that a conventional blimp of about 100 metres, approximately similar to a "K" class but with advanced glass cockpit and lightweight diesels, could make headway in the coastal surveillance/anti piracy field, but its a small r&d task, no money in it for the speculators you see.
I know what I am talking about, invest at your peril!
John Wood
(Ex Chief Exec and co-founder of Airship Industries)
Posted by John Wood on December 26,2009 | 10:19 AM
I stopped reading at "blimp, or zeppelin as it’s never called anymore." A writer who doesn't have the inclination, time, or whatever to look up the difference on wikipedia before writing an article on the latest innovations in the field loses all credibility. What kind of journalist doesn't care enough to learn the tiniest bit of basic history about what they're writing about? The kind that just rewrites press releases without further investigation, probably.
@Jim: B-limp is folk etymology. Not true. (Also covered on wikipedia.)
Posted by C on March 16,2010 | 06:02 PM