Did they claim that the Military don't have UFOs !
Well watch the skies and beware :P
This should be something that well look like one !
The massive blimp-like aircraft flies but just barely, hovering only a dozen feet off a military hangar floor during flight testing south of Los Angeles.
Still, the fact that the hulking 230-foot-long Aeroscraft could fly for just a few minutes represents a step forward in aviation, according to the engineers who developed it. The Department of Defense and NASA have invested $35 million in the prototype because of its potential to one day carry more cargo than any other aircraft to disaster zones and forward military bases.
"I realized that I put a little dot in the line of aviation history. A little dot for something that has never been demonstrated before, now it's feasible," said flight control engineer Munir Jojo-Verge.
The airship is undergoing testing this month at Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin, and must go through several more rounds of flight testing before it could be used in a disaster zone or anywhere else. The first major flight test took place Jan. 3.
The biggest challenge for engineers is making sure the airship will be able to withstand high winds and other extreme weather conditions, Jojo-Verge said.
"Their vulnerability is their large size," said aviation expert and former Navy test pilot Pete Field. "There's a lot of surface area so wind affects it tremendously."
Worldwide Aeros, the company that developed the aircraft, said it also must secure more funding for the next round of flight tests, but is hopeful the Defense Department and others will step in again as investors.
http://news.yahoo.com/high-tech-cargo-airship-being-built-california-100513071--finance.html
Hopefully they can keep this one in the air.
A similar blimp had some sort of malfunction 2 years ago and had to make an emergency landing outside of Pittsburgh PA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAGZ8Y8Oj0s
The zeppelin was completely infeasible as an aircraft. It wasn't only the Hindenburg that crashed. Given my own level of interest in Steampunk, I looked up the history of them a bit back; they were disastrously unreliable.
This article claims that it isn't a zeppelin, because it has multiple balloons within a rigid frame; but as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't matter. The central problem with zeppelins of any kind, (particularly for military applications) is that the balloon(s) are unavoidably vulnerable. You can't attach a sufficient amount of armor to protect the balloon, to a craft which needs to be close to lighter than air, and has no means of ascending other than the helium itself. Navigation is also an issue. Going up and down works reliably enough, but how on Earth do you steer it? You can weight the sides, sure; but then you don't have turning so much as listing, which is not good.
If the people using these things are smart, then they won't use them for transporting anything or anyone of a critical nature; because sooner or later, several of them will crash. Even with helium being non-flammable, a hard impact crash with these craft can be bad enough on its' own. They should abandon the idea.
(http://i1073.photobucket.com/albums/w400/thorfourwinds/target1-751.gif)
"Their vulnerability is their large size," said aviation expert and former Navy test pilot Pete Field.
Nary a mention of how this $35 million boondoggle reacts to 20 mikemike... :P
Quote from: thorfourwinds on January 31, 2013, 02:47:21 PM
Nary a mention of how this $35 million boondoggle reacts to 20 mikemike... :P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgWHbpMVQ1U
Thou shalt not prototype under load.