Hot Air Whimsey

[don]

Often seen cruising Bay Area skies about 1,000 feet off the ground, the Eureka airship is one of only two of its type in the world, and the only one in the United States that carries commercial passengers. This German-made zeppelin, owned by Airship Ventures, is not a blimp; though both types of airships are filled with helium, only a zeppelin has an internal framework.

INFLATED HISTORY
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin patented plans for a rigid-frame airship around the turn of the 20th century. The United States has long been a huge supplier of helium: a 1927 ban on exporting it forced the German airship the Hindenburg to use highly flammable hydrogen — until its fiery demise in Lakehurst, N.J., in 1937.

THE HIGH COST OF FLYING
The Eureka is 246 feet long — longer than a Boeing 747. It can hover in place, spin 360 degrees and land as lightly as a butterfly. Tickets start at $375. This German-made airship, which holds two crew members and up to 10 passengers, cost 15 million euros (nearly $20 million at current exchange rates) and another 1.5 million euros in shipping.

GOOD WORK
The airship has functioned as a billboard for Farmers Insurance. It has also worked for NASA, tracked whales in the Puget Sound and often served as a platform to provide television camera coverage for sporting events.

IMPRESSIVE LINEAGE
The Eureka parks at Moffett Field, which was built in the 1930s to house the Macon, a United States Navy airship built by Goodyear. The Macon, which was large enough to carry and launch five biplanes, crashed in 1935 in a storm off the coast of Big Sur.

GHOST BLIMP?
In 1942, a blimp left Treasure Island on an antisubmarine patrol to Point Reyes. It landed in a residential neighborhood in Daly City. Mysteriously, authorities found it intact but the crew missing.

CREATURE COMFORTS
The Eureka travels about 40 miles per hour; its engines are only about as loud as a washing machine on its final spin cycle. The cabin is equipped with an onboard restroom (with a view), a rear love seat that has provided a setting for several marriage proposals, and windows that open. Passengers may stick their heads out but are encouraged to remove their glasses beforehand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/us/eureka-airship-flies-high-over-the-bay-area.html?scp=3&sq=bay area news&st=cse

[oddlots]

Re: Hot Air Whimsey

Posted this before, but I think it's interesting:

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/09...in-the-arctic/

I'm a sucker for a project that revives a - to conventional thinking - prematurely dead technology. Airships make a lot of sense to me.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Hot Air Whimsey

In 1930, while the country was deep in the Great Depression, flying across countries and oceans in a lighter than air craft was something many dreamed of but few could afford. People from around the globe watched as the Graf Zeppelin, the largest airship ever created, began its globe trotting voyage. Passengers aboard this luxury craft were charged $9,900 for a trip around the world. In today’s dollars that trip would cost $126,000. Even at this exorbitant price, the German Zeppelin Airship Works did not expect to make a profit by selling tickets, as the 775 foot long craft could only accommodate 20 passengers at a time. Where the real money would come from was through the sale of special airmail issues, created by the U.S. Postal Service and other postal administrations around the world. The airship had created astounding publicity, as the crew of its inaugural transatlantic flight was welcomed with tickertape parades and a visit with President Coolidge at the White House.

[don]

Re: Hot Air Whimsey

Falling Short of the North Pole

By SARA WHEELER

THE ICE BALLOON


S. A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration


By Alec Wilkinson
Illustrated. 239 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

The history of 19th-century Arctic exploration is gruesome. Ice floes throttle creaky ships, men vanish into the white silence, and the North Pole remains elusive. At that time, nobody even knew if that sacred spot lay on land or sea. Then a Swedish aeronaut had a new idea. Approaches by sledge and ship had failed, so why not fly to the pole?

Salomon August Andrée was born in 1854 in a small town 300 miles southwest of Stockholm. He studied at the Royal Institute of Technology and in his late 20s conducted experiments in geomagnetism and aero-electricity in the Arctic before being appointed head of the Technical Department of the Swedish Patent Office, a position he held until he left for the pole. Andrée was tall and handsome, with a big nose (a feature that, according to Alec Wilkinson, “people in Sweden regard as an augury of success”). He was, Wilkinson adds, an “aloof, somewhat stern, even monumental figure,” devoted to his mother. He never married.

Convinced of the potential of the hydrogen balloon, Andrée traveled to America, intending to visit the scientific exhibits at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where he also made the acquaintance of the “piano-polisher” and wizard balloonist John Wise. By then, balloons could in theory retain gas long enough for a 30-day flight, though in practice no one had stayed up for more than 15 days. Andrée convinced himself that if a balloon started as close to 90 degrees north as possible, it could sail over the pole and land on the other side — in Alaska. To this end, he designed special equipment, inventing, for example, a system of guide ropes and sails that might allow a balloon to maneuver “at cross-purposes to the wind.” Many experts called the plan a stunt. But Alfred Nobel didn’t, and neither did the Swedish king, Oscar II, who also made a sizable financial contribution to the project.

Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker whose previous book was “The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger,” writes with insight and flair, artfully interleaving Andrée’s story with a brief history of Arctic exploration. He devotes particular attention to the tale of a horrific expedition in the early 1880s led by an American, Adolphus Greely. Thus Wilkinson allows danger and disaster to foreshadow his central narrative while setting his man in historical context. According to Wilkinson, “Andrée exemplified a conceit that outlived him — the belief, then nascent, that science, in the form of technology, could subdue the last obstacles to possession of the world’s territories, if not also its mysteries.”

The balloon was made in Paris from layers of varnished silk. It was 97 feet tall and weighed a ton and a half. Hydrogen is so combustible that the cookstove had to be hung outside the basket and ignited through a tube. As basketmates, Andrée selected Knut Fraenkel, a 26-year-old civil engineer, and Nils Strindberg, a young physics professor who had just acquired a fiancée. (Wilkinson’s description of Strindberg’s parting from her is especially moving.) The team made headlines across the globe when, on July 11, 1897, their balloon rose from an island in the Svalbard archipelago. This newspaper’s front-page article read “Andrée Off for the Pole.” The balloon lofted into the Arctic blue. The men were never seen again.

Thirty-three years later, a boat carrying geologists and seal hunters landed on uninhabited White Island, now called Kvitoya. Amid the ruins of a camp, a skull, bleached by the sun, “lay there dreadfully smiling.” Diaries and tins of film picked up the story. The men had remained in the balloon for almost three days. It was supposed to travel above the fog but below the clouds, at about 250 meters. Instead, it bumped along the ice, no matter how much cargo went over the side. Andrée finally landed it 300 miles from the pole and 300 miles from where he had started.

The three men built a makeshift boat and set off, pulling ashwood sledges. Initially, they remained in good humor, shooting so many bears that they were able to eat six pounds of meat a day. Andrée was deeply affected by the scenery. “Magnificent Venetian landscape,” he wrote in his journal, “with canals between lofty hummock edges on both sides, water-square with ice fountain.” This sledging trip is the emotional climax of the book, and Wilkinson handles it well. At the end of September, the men began building a winter house from blocks of ice, then abandoned it when the surrounding ice began to crack. A second house was never finished. When he perished, Strindberg had his fiancée’s photograph in his pocket. Decades later, upon her death, she asked for the ashes of her heart to be buried with him.

Unlike many chroniclers of the Andrée fiasco, Wilkinson states (in my view, correctly) that we can’t be sure how the men died. He more or less rejects the theory that they contracted trichinosis from bear meat. It seems most likely that they perished from exposure.

Wilkinson’s prose style suits the spare polar landscape, making his occasional poetic touches even more effective. (He describes, for example, the men rowing over the icy sea “as if already in the afterlife.”) The book is slow to take off, but once Wilkinson establishes his voice, the narrative sails along. That voice is refreshingly sane and nonjudgmental. “Not all of us want the same things,” he writes, assessing Andrée’s somewhat chilly nature. And Wilkinson doesn’t get bogged down in too much detail. He understands that the value of polar stories isn’t to be found in guy ropes and provisions. It lies elsewhere, in our endless love of discovery and the drama of being human.

Sara Wheeler’s latest book is “The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/books/review/the-ice-balloon-s-a-andree-and-the-heroic-age-of-arctic-exploration-by-alec-wilkinson-book-review.html?scp=6&sq=back to earth&st=cse

To the Poles . . . evergreen

[oddlots]

Re: Hot Air Whimsey

Excellent.

So who's in!?!

[LazyBoy]

Re: Hot Air Whimsey

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-...to-atmosphere/

Two teens send a (lego) man to "space" for $400.

[oddlots]

Re: Hot Air Whimsey

Two teens send a (lego) man to "space" for $400.

Loved that story:

There's also the mysterious Lego Men washing up on shore:



Boing Boing reader Jeff Hindman says he chanced across a "giant Legoman washed ashore" today while strolling on the beach at Siesta Key Village, Fla.
"It is very big, about 8 ft. tall," Hindman said. " ... I worked with Lego in my younger days, but this piece is amazing, it's still there on the beach."
A photo of the creature shows it beached on a sandbank, in otherwise good condition. On its chest is the message, "No real than you are."

This suggests it has the same origin as Lego men who washed ashore in Zandvoort, Holland, three years ago, and then in Brighton, England.

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/25/gia...n-florida.html

[don]

Re: Hot Air Whimsey

from my son-in-law

I met the guy that tracked the whales from this airship. He works at NOAA and got in trouble when he did his expense report. Somewhere at NOAA, they need to have approval before they use something to aid in doing the job when it falls outside of "approved modes of transportation". They paid him after a discussion.

[oddlots]

Re: Hot Air Whimsey

Airships. Always tragically misunderstood.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Hot Air Whimsey

Airships. Always tragically misunderstood.

I'm with you, oddlots, in that I have a soft spot for abandoned technologies in general and airships in particular.
Until a truly talented business person gets a crack team involved with airships, they won't be effectively capitalized, marketed or managed, and remain a tantalizing curiosity.