MOFFETT FIELD, CALIF. -- NASA’s Ames Research Center here on the south side of San Francisco Bay is all about the future.
Its wind tunnels look for optimal aircraft and spaceship designs; its Astrobiology Institute studies the universe from multiple scientific viewpoints; its Advanced Supercomputing Division tackles really hard questions, like why does the climate behave as it does?
Ames is surrounded by Silicon Valley. Google is a project partner. Yahoo is next door. Lockheed Martin’s satellite factory is across the backyard fence.
But when you look at Ames from Hwy. 101 you see three huge dirigible hangars, unmistakable reminders of its past.
Moffett Field is the result of local civic leaders hustling the Navy in the late 1920s to locate its West Coast dirigible headquarters here. They won and the air field that grew out of their lobbying was named to honor the chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, Adm. William A. Moffett, who died in the crash of an early dirigible, the USS Akron.
The largest of the hangars – 211 feet high and 785 feet long -- was built to house the Akron’s sister ship, the USS Macon, which arrived here in 1932. The helium-filled Macon could launch scout aircraft and was instrumental in developing the airship/aircraft submarine-hunting techniques of those days, but it was lost in a storm in 1935.
Despite that, the Navy wasn’t done with airships. They played such a big role in World War II coastal patrols that Moffett became home to 42 of them and was expanded by two more hangars.
So it is especially fitting that Airship Ventures has selected Moffett Field as home for the country’s first commercial air ship, a 246-foot long Zeppelin.
While they can’t match the enormous size of the Macon, Hindenburg and other early dirigibles, the “new technology” Zeppelin is more than twice as long as the Goodyear blimps that are so familiar at sporting events.
Besides their size, the big difference between the two is that blimps aren’t rigid. They maintain their shape by the outward pressure of their helium.
The Zeppelin is semi rigid. Its gas is carried in bags called balonets that are suspended from the air frame. The ship is covered by a three-layer fabric skin. (The 803-foot long Hindenburg had a rigid design and was so large that passenger accommodations were provided within the airframe).
Airship Ventures begins offering sight-seeing flights around the Bay Area on Halloween, including a charter flight for a band called Abney Park that sings a song called “Airship Pirate.” You can imagine the jokes being made.
The company is the brainchild of Brian and Alexandra Hall. He is CEO of Mark/Space, a software company (this is Silicon Valley, after all!) and she was previously the executive director of the non-profit Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland.
Tickets aren’t cheap -- $495 for one hour, $950 for two – but two other Zeppelins now in operation – one in Germany, the other in Tokyo – are attracting passengers. So the Halls have high hopes.
Alex Hall says the big plan is to expand with another ship somewhere on the East Coast.
The modern Zeppelin is a product of Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH in Friedrichshafen, Germany, the successor to the builders of the Hindenburg.
Zeppelin's newer design dates to 1993 and was certification by the LBA – Germany’s FAA – in 2001. Three production ships have been built. The first is the one with the waiting list of passengers eager to fly along the German, Swiss and Austrian borders from Lake Constance. The Japanese got the second.
Monday morning’s media debut came with signature San Francisco fog. But it soon was lifting and with it so did the Zeppelin.
As the big ship hovered near one of Moffett’s historic blimp hangars, Alex Hall was recounting how it arrived on a barge from Rotterdam to Beaumont, Texas. Reassembly involved re-hanging the engines, gondola and vertical and horizontal stabilizers.
The shake-down flight to California took six days.
Looking up at the hovering airship, she says, “For me, Zeppelins are the Prozac of the air. If you’re in it you’re smiling and if you see it flying [overhead] you’re smiling.”
No kidding. One of the big deals about this new Zeppelin design is weight savings. Most of that comes in the standard structural elements that airplane designers focus on, such as using composites in the airframe and fly-by-wire flight controls.
But the Halls also save a bit of weight in small stuff, such as not including tray tables in the dozen passenger seats.
“There’s no need,” Hall explains. “Nobody wants to sit down anyway. They all want to be up moving around and looking out the windows.”
That was the case on a 30-min. demo flight that I took, fog or no fog. The gondola is nothing but picture windows, including two with fold-down hatches for photography.
Pilot Katharine Board and co-pilot Fritz Guenther are seated right with the passengers and didn’t mind them looking over their shoulders. They use side-stick controllers and work from an electronic instrument flight display.
The last Zeppelin in the U.S. was the ill-fated Hindenburg. You’ll recall that one because in 1937 it crashed and burned while landing at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, N.J., in the heyday of luxurious dirigible flight.
In a Tuesday blog, my colleague Jennifer Michels recalls an interview she did with Herbert Morrison, whose dramatic radio account of the disaster is a classic in reporting.
Of course, this Zeppelin gets its lift from helium, not explosive hydrogen. It is propelled by three Lycoming IO-360, horizontally opposed, four cylinder, fuel-injected engines. They are a derivative of those used on Cessna 172Rs and Piper Arrows.
The airship carries 850 kilograms of fuel (312 gallons) and burns about 50 kg./hour with a headwind, as little as 30 kg/hour without. Each engine has a fuel tank and fuel can be shifted between them.
Wind is the Zeppelin’s big restriction. It can handle 30 knot headwinds but at that point things get a bit bumpy, says Board. People paying $500 an hour to sight see don’t want bumpy. Especially as some of them are likely to be sipping wine. So, as a practical matter, the Zeppelin won’t take off if winds are above 20 knots.
The two engines on each side and one in the tail swivel to provide a vertical takeoff and landing. The ship’s design means that if it lost helium it could land like a helicopter.
The rear engine drives a rotor blade like a helicopter’s for directional stability. The vertical and horizontal stabilizers all have movable surfaces.
The ceiling is 8,000 feet but the Zeppelin is unlikely to operate much above 1,000 feet because anything higher makes it too hard to see things.
“What would be the point?” asks Board.
Because it can hover, or even fly backwards, the Zeppelin will give the tourists a chance to stop and look down on big sights in the Bay Area, such as the Golden Gate Bridge or Alcatraz Island.
Besides Moffett Field, the Zeppelin also will be located at Oakland International Airport’s north field for general aviation and at the Charles M. Schultz Airport in Santa Rosa, from which it will offer tours of Sonoma and Napa Counties wine region.
Guenther works for Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik and is in San Francisco for the shake-down flights. Normally, Board will pilot the Zeppelin alone and a flight attendant will sit in the co-pilot’s seat.
Others have tried using blimps for commercial operations but weren’t successful. Alex Hall thinks one reason was because blimps’ non-rigid design requires a lot more crew, driving up their overhead. The Zeppelin’s can be operated with just three crew.
The ship is grounded by a “mast truck,” a heavy rig with a telescoping mast that connects with the Zeppelin's nose using a ball joint. The ship's tail drags on a swiveling landing gear.
When we boarded, the airship was carrying water ballast. The engines were running and we approached two-by-two, stepping up the boarding ladder one-at-a-time. As we prepared to take off, the water ballast was dumped.
After we returned, the humans on board became the ballast since another flight would take off immediately and there was no reason to refill the ballast tanks. For that reason, for every two passengers stepping off, another two boarded.
Those of us who had just flown were escorted a short distance away –within the shadow of the Zeppelin, actually – and permitted to watch it lift off again. Then we cleared the airfield.
Modern Zeppelins have achieved some special missions, including carrying booms out the side that sensed gravitational fields while hunting for diamonds in Botswana on behalf of DeBeers.
NASA Ames will make use of the airship as a research platform. It can carry instruments suspended from the gondola or on a “roof rack” for taking air pollution samples and the like. With its operating altitude so close to the ground it will offer advantages that other aircraft can’t.
The Halls began Airship Ventures in April 2007 and are helping pioneer FAA regulations for commercial airship operations. They’d like to achieve a FAR Part 135 status, the same as commuter airlines.
But the current regs anticipate only fixed and rotary-wing aircraft in that category, not lighter-than-air ships. There was talk that they might qualify under the Part 119 rule governing air tour operators (now Part 136) but that, also, was written specifically for fixed and rotary wing aircraft.
So, Airship Ventures is operating under an amended Part 91 general aviation authorization. The Halls want a Part 135 designation because they think it’s good business for passengers to know that they follow the same safety and inspection standards as “real” airlines.
