Q?
There have been many unsuccessful attempts to build heavy lift airships. Why do you think that you will succeed where others failed?
A.
The KISS-airship follows the KISS-principle: Keep it simple and succeed. We do not suggest to build a sophisticated airship like the others. We want to simply take a very large gas bag and attach powerful engines. That‘s not rocket science, but rather promising to get an heavy lift airship into the air quickly. This ship will not fly in any weather, but we can wait for a couple of days with better weather. Remember, if there is no other way to get your 50 ton Caterpillar to some place with rich economic potential, „a couple of days“ delay is better than „not at all“.
Q?
Airships are too slow!
A.
Wrong! If you look at the block time (the time from picking up the cargo at the factory to the point in time of dropping it at the final destination), airships are actually very fast. With heavy lift airships cargo does not need to be (re)loaded between different modes of transport, e.g. from truck to ship to barge and back to truck. And these reloading procedures are very time consuming and costly. Apart from that, for a normal heavy lift transport there normally is a long planning phase involved, in order to find the best route (to avoid narrow streets, inadequate bridges or low hanging power lines), which often takes months.
Q?
Why is the KISS-Airship spherical? Traditional airships have a streamlined cigar shape.
A.
A sphere has a drag coefficient of about 0.45, a cigar shape 0.1. So a cigar shape has approx. 4 times less wind resistance. But the KISS-Airship uses a spherical shape anyway, because:
- a spherical hull is much easier to produce and therefore cheaper and more quickly available to us (“time to market”) and it requires a minimal ground area when moored as opposed to standard airships.
- a sphere has the best volume-to-lift ratio.and therefore is much smaller for the same amount of lift (a 150 meter in diameter lentil-shaped airship has a useful lift of about 150 tons, a 100 meter in diameter spherical hull can lift up to 500 tons!).
- spherical hulls can be bought „off-the-shelf“ from different suppliers in the US or Russia. Other shapes would require costly and time consuming design phases first.
- a sphere has the same wind resistance from any direction, therefore wind direction becomes less of an issue during flight and especially the landing phase.
- we want to get the KISS-Airship into the market quickly. So we deliberately take the penalty that we need stronger engines. After successful market penetration we can revisit the issue and potentially invest in more streamlined hulls and smaller engines.
Q?
You are only showing model airships. How much will your first „large scale“ prototype cost?
A.
Building on available industry components (e.g. a 22 m hull from the German balloon company „Ballonbau Wörner“), we estimate that a prototype with diesel-electric engines and a useful lift of a couple of tons could be in the air in less than 2 years at a cost of less than 7.5 million Euros.
Q?
Airships can only fly in nice weather.
A.
On the contrary, airships can “sit out” bad weather. Airships have flown successfully in arctic conditions. And during two US Navy exercises a fleet of airships were still flying (and patrolling against Russian submarines) “during a period when weather had grounded [all] other types of military and commercial aircraft. Weather was the area’s worst in years, with combinations and variations of ice, snow, rain, fog and 60-knot winds…” [Source: Ret. US Navy Commander Charles Mills]
Q?
Airships are very wind sensitive.
A.
True. But with modern sensors, avionics and engines airships counter any wind force quickly and successfully. Plus, today’s weather forecasts allow for precise mission planning. So, if you have no other way to transport your 50 ton bulldozer or 40 meter drilling rig to the potential multimillion dollar mining site in Northern Canada,
Siberia or remote Africa than with a heavy lift airship, you can wait for a week until the forecast predicts low winds and good weather.
Q?
Why do we need heavy lift airships? I have seen heavy lift trucks and ships moving oversized cargo.
A.
Yes, there is an established industry for heavy lift, mainly relying on trucks and barges, but
- a heavy lift transport normally requires months of planning to gather the required documents and find a suitable route with wide roads, load-bearing bridges and high enough underpasses.
- in remote areas there might be simply no infrastructure like roads, rivers or airstrips.
- in industrialized countries there is often too much infrastructure for long, wide and heavy .trucks, like tunnels, roundabouts, power lines etc.
- the “last mile” is often the problem, e.g. getting the wind turbine up on the hill.
- in order to fit on a heavy lift truck, engineers more often than not must use compromises to construct the load according to street parameters. If, for example, you only lose a fraction of a percent in efficiency while designing a turbine or a transformer due to these restrictions, over the lifetime of the machine this amounts to a fortune lost.
Q?
Why do you use hydrogen? Isn’t helium much safer?
A.
Helium has many disadvantages, when it comes to using it as a lifting gas for airships:
- Helium is a non-renewable resource and according to a Cornell University study the world’s helium supply could be gone in 30 years at the current rate of consumption. We should better use it for cooling medical equipment and numerous other industrial applications.
- Helium is much more expensive than hydrogen. Filling an airship with helium is insanely expensive. With helium a single filling of the hull could already costs hundreds of thousands of Euros And you are constantly losing lifting gas during a mission, either normal leaking through the hull or intentional valving of gas e.g. to descent or counter atmospheric pressure changes.
- Hydrogen is much more economical than helium. One cubic meter of hydrogen lifts about 10 % more than the same amount of helium, i.e. for the same lift my airship’s hull can be smaller (and cheaper).
- Using hydrogen is safe. It is routinely and safely used in research, medicine and industry. The world’s hydrogen consumption exceeds 500 billion cubic meters per year.
- But the biggest disadvantage of helium is that it does not burn. This seems counter-intuitive, but apart from providing lift, helium does not provide any benefit during a mission. On the contrary, in order to prevent the loss of helium, airships in the past had expensive and complicated mechanisms on board to recover ballast
water from exhaust pipes or gather rain water for the ballast tanks. Hydrogen however could be used to produce electric current in fuel cells or could be fed directly into the engines for more power. And if the necessity comes up to valve lifting gas in larger magnitude, e.g. to get into static equilibrium after delivering the cargo at its destination, it is fairly cheap to do so.
Q?
KISS is unmanned. Why?
A.
Having people on board of an aircraft requires costly features to accommodate the crew (seating, windows, restrooms, safety equipment, …), which need to be designed, built and paid for. Compare it to space rockets. Manned space flight is much more expensive than unmanned rockets.
- In its first iteration our KISS-Airship will be remote controlled from a small, manned blimp (e.g. the Good Year advertising blimps) that flies alongside. These small airships can be bought – or in the beginning rented – for a small amount of money.
- Later, the KISS-Airships will fly completely autonomous, guided by GPS or other navigation aids. But since we want to start with a real pilot, remote controlling the KISS-Airship, we expect a much easier certification process with the authorities.
Q?
If you drop your 50 ton caterpillar at the destination you have 50 tons too much lift after release of the cargo!
A.
Normally, airships require sophisticated load exchange procedures when loading or unloading cargo. But we want to keep it simple. In order to avoid complicated procedures and ground equipment for load exchange and to reduce the time on the ground (to minimize the risk of wind gusts), we simply release 50000 cubic meters of hydrogen. Because one cubic meter of hydrogen generates about 1 kilogram of lift, we have a state of equilibrium afterwards. The cost penalty is fairly low, because hydrogen is very cheap (less than 10 cent per cbm). And again, if there is no other way to get your 50 ton Caterpillar to some place with billions of dollars of minerals in the ground, the business case might very well include this 5000 Dollar penalty in our scenario.