Personal Blimp
Frequently Asked
Questions

Its smooth ride also makes it well suited for precision low-altitude airborne sensing applications. Diamond prospectors and land mine clearing operations have already had some success using helium blimps for this type of sensing.

Because hot air is much cheaper to use than helium (Our aircraft cost about one tenth as much to build and operate as a standard helium blimp.) we can meet these needs very profitably as well as entering more traditional blimp venues such as advertising.

As our flight experience has grown, we have come to believe that the FAA will need to revise its rules for airships pilots to properly deal with aircraft like Alberto. We hope to work with the FAA in the future to make the necessary rule changes.

Now that we've successfully gotten into the air, we'll begin to replace the noisy components with quieter ones. We'll be starting with the burners first. The engine, since it's mounted far away on the tail, can barely be heard from the cabin as is.

The FAA uses one sets of certification rules for airships and a different set for hot air balloons. The rules for airships were drawn up with helium-based aircraft in mind. The rules for balloons were drawn up with unpowered aircraft in mind. One challenge of creating a truly new type of aircraft is that it doesn't fit neatly into either regulatory box.

The hurdles (and thus costs) involved with certifying a new aircraft for sale are very different for each set of rules. The FAA may choose to use one set or the other or some subset of each. It's impossible to determine the cost of the certification process, which will be a significant component of the sale price, until we actually start the process a year or so from now.

That said, we expect the price of the aircraft to be between $100,000 and $200,000 depending upon configuration and precise FAA certification process applied.

If that sounds like a high price you might keep in mind that it's about what it costs to buy a new small airplane or mid-sized (35 foot) sailboat these days. Further, if you go out and price a helium airship, you'll find that the cheapest one made costs over $2 million. If you want a real top-notch ship, the Zeppelin NT -- the only other airship available with in-flight control that comes close to ours, you're looking at a price tag over $12 million.

First of all, their designs can only be inflated when the surface winds are fairly calm. The key to controlling any blimp in a moderate ground breeze (unless you willing to hire a small army of people to act as ground crew) is being able to fly up to a mooring mast. The key to being able to fly up to a mast is effective control of steering at slow airspeeds. That's why we chose to tackle low-speed steering first. It is the key enabling technology for using a mast.

In general, none of the other hot air ships steer very well. Some of the more advanced designs steer reasonably well once they get up to speed. However, things get tricky when they slow down to hovering speeds -- i.e. when approaching a mooring mast. In contrast, we can spin our ship around like a top. In order to obtain such highly effective steering, we needed to find a better way to build a blimp. Unless the other folks who make hot air blimps make comparably radical changes in their designs, it's hard to see how they will ever be able to use a mooring mast. (By the way, we haven't actually built our mast yet. However, it is one of the next steps in our development plan.)

Secondly, their designs have very low airspeeds. How slow isn't entirely clear. For example, some of their websites claim that they can fly at 40 km/h (25 mph). However one can't help but notice that the FAI's world speed record for hot air airships stands at 27.5 km/h (17 mph).

They've been working for years to fly faster, but they seem to reached the limits of their technology. In contrast, while we don't fly very fast yet, our new structural concepts gives us a clear roadmap for going faster. We've "done the math" and can reasonably expect to build aircraft with significantly higher airspeeds with only a modest increase in the weight of our aircraft's structure.

Besides, we don't feel any strong desire to fly higher any time soon. Already we've noticed that the higher we fly, the less unique the experience feels. It's great fun to poke around the tops of the trees where no other powered aircraft can routinely and safely fly.

There is also Wikipedia article for airship.

The notion that blimps explode in flames comes from the famous Hindenburg accident of 1937, that aircraft was filled with highly flammable Hydrogen gas. Nobody really knows how the Hindenburg fire started. But once it did, the Hydrogen ignited and the famous fireball resulted. Amazingly, even with the intense fire, 2/3rds of the people onboard survived. In any case, neither we nor anybody else today has an airship filled with Hydrogen.

Unfortunately, even though the explosion risk has long been a thing of the past, the exploding airship sequence has become a staple of Hollywood movies. It's much like the smashed fruit-carts that seem to be part of every action movie that has a car chase. If you see a fruit-cart by the side of the road during a movie car chase, you can be pretty sure that it's going to get clobbered. Likewise, any time an airship appears in a movie, you can bet your popcorn it's going to disappear in a ball of flame. But in real life, blimps don't explode.

Today, this sort of flying uses much more refined technology and can be done safely, in stark contrast to Walters' debacle. It's called "cluster ballooning." The two regular practitioners of cluster ballooning in the US today are John Ninomiya and Jonathan Trappe.