How do airships avoid being destroyed by thunderstorms?

by philg

I’m sure that this was a solved problem 100 years ago, but I can’t figure out how. An airplane can avoid a thunderstorm by flying around it. But an airship is so slow that I don’t see how it can escape a frontal squall line. Landing and waiting out the thunderstorm is a standard technique for an airplane or helicopter, but that works because (a) the aircraft is much faster than any front moves, (b) there are a lot of airports with hangars and/or tie-downs, (c) aside from hail, a thunderstorm is not hazardous to a tied-down airplane or helicopter (with the blades tied down).

“Helium Dreams” is a New Yorker article about various companies trying to make cargo blimps. It doesn’t address the above question, however. A blimp hangar is a rarity and some of the new airships they discuss would seemingly be too big to hangar anywhere. Is it possible to tie a blimp up so that a thunderstorm won’t harm it? We must have some experience with advertising blimps, which often are operating in cities that lack blimp-size hangars. But if the airship is going over an ocean?

How does it work to combine an airship with real-world heavy weather?

[The article has some other interesting points. The market for cargo blimps is non-existent, but there is already plenty of litigation: “most of the airship designers I talked to had competed for the same Defense Department funding, and engineers skipped in and out of one another’s projects, their lips supposedly sealed but probably not, and so there were squabbles, lawsuits, and settlements.” It seems that military-funded technology gets a sharp discount in the civilian world: “[English airship engineer Roger Munk’s] Skycat design had been awarded a five-hundred-million-dollar contract from the U.S. Army. The Army wanted a surveillance ship that could fly twenty thousand feet above the war zone in Afghanistan for weeks at a time. The team in Bedford, under contract to Northrop Grumman, built the ship, and the Army named it the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, or LEMV. On August 7, 2012, it made its first test flight, at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, in Lakehurst, New Jersey, the same field where the Hindenburg exploded. … But the budget sequestration in 2013 abruptly ended the Army’s experiment, and the blimp was auctioned for scrap. Hybrid Air Vehicles paid a little more than three hundred thousand dollars for it, dismantled it, packaged it in dozens of wooden crates, and sent it, by ship, back to Bedford, [England].”]

11 thoughts on “How do airships avoid being destroyed by thunderstorms?”

  2. I was going to post the loss of the Macon and the Akron, both destroyed by thunderstorms. We have better materials technology now, so maybe they can survive stronger storms, but they need to be near a hangar.

  3. Thunderstorms are one problem. Rednecks with high-powered rifles is another. One of these engineers told me that every time they flew their prototype cross-country they had to repair bullet holes.

  4. Simple. Kids are invited to inhale all the Helium and do Yoda voices, the airship is packed up for the storm, and reinflated at huge cost afterwards. Problem solved.

  5. Dirigibles are the safest form of air transportation. Zero civilian fatalities since 1938. (And another lesson in pop statistics.)

  6. As late as the 1970’s, there was a brisk lighter-than-air culture at Goodyear in Akron. They developed the first cargo containers for the 747, and on a plant visit there they gave me a beautiful blueprint (remember those?) general arrangement drawing of the Akron, about 4 feet long. It hung in my cubicle for years.

  7. Phil, you might enjoy Nevil Shute’s autobiography, which includes his stint as a young engineer working for a company making a dirigible for the British government, the results of which convinced the UK to pursue heavier than air craft and abandon dirigible technology. Shute then goes on to start an aircraft company, which was successful enough that the BOD fired him, leaving him free to travel and pursue his writing hobby, for which he was ultimately best known. One of my favorite writers.

    Slide Rule (Vintage International) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003WUYP3I/ref=cm_sw_r_other_awd_bez5wbD11SJHR

  8. I’ve read most, if not all, of Nevil Shute’s novels, plus this his autobiography, but the title that most strongly remains in my mind, indeed admiration that somebody could write so clearly and entertainingly about “metal fatigue” (of which I knew nothing in these days) is his “No Highway,” which btw. should have been discussed in some depth in the [2005] engineers portrayed positively by Hohollywood thread (haven’t seen that movie though.)

    There are stacks of pages devoted to Nevil Shute’s literary oeuvre on the web; this one speaks volumes to me: http://abriefhistory.org/?page_id=2919

  10. These guys say their blimps are fine up to 100kts on a mooring mast (and I imagine a mooring mast is quite a bit cheaper than a blimp hangar to build)
    http://www.skyshipservices.com/faq.html

    You gotta admit: the silver “Dragon Dream”, scaled up to carry a shipping container or two, is bound to be popular with the billionaire burning man club. (you could have your own burning man in Antarctica, if you wanted to)

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