Hybrid aircraft touted for future

Anchorage Daily News ^ | November 12, 2006 | JULIA O'MALLEY

[Jack Black]

Helium is a very scarce element. It is found in only a few places, often as a biproduct of natural gas.

Among things that we are likely to run out of sooner, rather than later, helium is right at the front of the list.

[Jack Black]

Helium is a very scarce element. It is found in only a few places, often as a biproduct of natural gas.

Among things that we are likely to run out of sooner, rather than later, helium is right at the front of the list.

[RightWhale]

Don't know if it's dense, but it is shallow. Sea level is the same pressure. In the summer the ravens fly a mile up on a thermal, but in winter they rarely get over 200 feet up. A hard landing by one of those membranes might be more interesting than a mere sprung airframe.

[Moonman62]

They should figure out a safe way to use hydrogen.

[Spirochete]

Might as well build zeppelins with modern materials. You mean like these folks are doing?

Exactly. The Germans had great success with zeppelins because they took pains to avoid flying through bad weather, whereas U.S. and British captains made no such attempts, and lost most of their zeppelins to storms.

The zeppelin was a great and workable concept. With modern materials, radar, and satellite meteorology there's no reason it can't work again.

[null and void]

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Hardcover: 0-374-13781-1
Paperback: 0-374-51635-9

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed tells the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the airplane and the rigid airship--huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. It flies aerodynamically. It floats aerostatically. It carries bridges, buildings, fleets of trucks. It is a flying warehouse. It eliminates the need for roads, railroads, prepared harbors. Or so goes the dream. With an arching back and a deep belly, it looks like a tremendous pumpkin seed.

Its early and secret experimental development took twelve years' time and one and a half million dollars. None of this capital was put up by the government or by a big aircraft company. It came from private individuals. Much of it was raised by the minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Trenton, New Jersey, who initiated the project.

McPhee chronicles the perhaps unfathomable perseverance of the aircraft 30's progenitors. Eight years after the founding of the Aereon Corporation, its tangible assets were the wrecks of many models and the wreckage of one eighty-foot-long triple-hulled rigid airship.

The book has some of the ingredients of a spy story, reads as smoothly as a good novel, and is totally true. Some six or eight characters are developed in the round. The first flight of a deltoid Aereon is achieved by a master builder of model aircraft whose talent goes beyond the kit builder's imagination. The twenty-six-foot, manned, proof-of-concept Aereon is constructed singlehanded by a rigger of naval airships who, of course, no longer has other airships to rig. The company is held together for twelve years by (successively) two theologians who dream separately of the missionary effect of the aircraft but share very little harmony together. The test pilot, an aeronautical engineer, has more courage than the front line of the Light Brigade, and a calculated disinterest. He works for pay. Extraordinary people. An extraordinary story. Its characters live on the page as in life.

Reviews

It's a book Leonardo da Vinci would have warmed to, a set of experiments he'd have cheered. --Paul West, The Washington Post

What gives [McPhee's] writing its powerful fascination is the strange, raw quality of fact: it all really happened, just this way…McPhee watches so intently that the Aereon and its people become real and important to the reader. --John Skow, Los Angeles Times

McPhee has a genius for writing about unusual people whose activities border on the eccentric, and the Aereon project abounded with them. His engrossing account can be read at a sitting. --Donald R. Morris, The Houston Post