One big ass airplane of your choice that will carry a swimming pool and it’s water. Enough openings and big ass pumps for even faster water removal in emergency and big enough dump valves to dump all water in 7 seconds. or whatever speed safety requires.
A line attached to swimmer/s to yank them out of the water quickly.
A water tight lid with baffles attached that could be slammed down on the pool if there is no need to dump the weight of the water.
Rent the AN 225 and have the system built as a module that will fit inside with dump openings that will replace the rear door if you need to cut repetitive overhead. ( but $$$ no problem so just have another AN-225 built for your swim pool.
There are helicopters that can lift this amount of weight, aren’t there? That would be the truly living-on-the-edge experience – swimming beneath the open sky in a pool carried along by chopper. Use clear plastic for the pool and the cleanest water possible, and you’d feel like you were flying. The rotor downwash would be unpleasant, I suppose; perhaps a stiff canopy would be needed over the top.
A blimp or a hot-air balloon would be more tranquil, but I guess they wouldn’t work.
Though I think a retractable cover is still not enough to protect against a sudden turbulence or change in attitude. If it closed fast enough to respond to such emergencies, it would be very dangerous for the swimmer. I think the pool needs to be in a small room (not much bigger than the pool itself) with hard watertight doors, so there’s no chance of water pouring out away from the pool, upsetting the plane’s balance.
Free Surface is a well-recognised problem in warship design (in the days of coal-fired ships it was held to be negligible), especially in the damaged condition. Basically, you want tanks of liquid to be either completely full or empty, if you can manage it, and you transfer liquids around to achieve this condition.
Baffles are easy. If your pool is 8’ wide, a sheet of plywood dropped in every x’, even if not totally watertight would create a number of smaller containers where the water doesn’t get enough force to be a danger when it sloshes.
Could it be possible to devise a system that would pump out the water into a series of battled trim tanks in various places in the plane, or whatever weight distribution is optimal for takeoff or landing (could be different I suppose) , but while at cruising altitude, remove the water and put it into the pool for the pool party? Also, would the pool be well placed at the center of mass?
You’d be taking a risk that your pool would have some sort of free surface effect while in more or less steady-state filght, but you’d be able to control it effectively for landing and takeoff, and potentially even use it to improve the plane’s characteristics.
That was proposed for an luxury airliner. A set of pumps could drain or fill a pool from a holding tank in the cargo area. I seriously doubt it’s been actually implemented.
The 747 BI carries over 60K gallons of fuel. My backyard pool is about 15K gallons.
Easy-Peasy. Just convert some of that fuel storage space for water (using some sort of bladder-type thing) and have a method to transfer the water once you’re at cruising altitude. Plan on little to no acceleration while the pool is full.
I’ve been wondering about those planes that offer showers. How much water do they have to carry for that? I’m assuming they have an amazing filter that cleans the ick washed off each person in between showers?
You could hoist a very small pool into the air with an airship or helicopter but even the largest of those in the world generate fairly little lift compared to even medium sized airliners.
The giant airship probably could lift some kind of smallish pool as long as you could build a suitable tank but the downwash on the largest helicopters would be completely prohibitive. The water would be blown out of an open-air pool as soon as the engine was started and the “swimmers” would become involuntary attempted flyers. Even small helicopters produce extreme downwash forces. I would still like to see that video on Youtube though.
I should amend my post above. The Airlander 10 airship above is already undergoing test flights (the 10 refers to its lifting weight in tons so it can lift about 20,000 lbs). However, there is a much big brother also in the works, the Airlander 50, that will have about five times the lifting capacity. That is firmly within full-sized swimming pool weight.
If they ever finish the larger airship, it could theoretically lift a swimming pool as long as you can build a container strong enough, can get the CG right, and have attachment points that won’t cause a structural failure and destroy the entire thing thousands of feet in the air. That would be fun, but, if you get any of those wrong, it will be like the Hindenburg on a Girls Gone Wild video with water instead of fire.
Again, I would like to see that one on Youtube as well.
I suppose you could just go for a swim in the tanks of the 747 Supertanker firefighting aircraft while it’s loaded. Probably would want some scuba gear too.
If you google some pictures of the interior tank setup you’ll see some of the problems others have brought up addressed. Rather than one large tank or pool, you have several distributed and baffled systems for weight distribution. I don’t think there’s sent sound way to have a traditional open type swimming pool in an aircraft that can encounter turbulence at any time. Turbulence would lead to sloshing, and an uneven weight distribution would bring the rest of the water to the lowest point in the plane, putting it fatally out of balance.
I’m not saying you might not get away with quickly filling a pool from distributed baffled tanks and taking a quick swim, but any real turbulence means death.
