‘Exploded’ doesn’t appear to be a fair description of the Hindenburg disaster. So the question is a little misguided.
Would a helium filled airship have met with disaster in the same circumstances?
Aeschines has it right.
The enormous difference between airships and airplanes in speed and passenger-miles per day means the former can’t be competitive for human transportation. A small (and expensive) novelty tourist market might be possible.
And the enormous difference between airships and conventional freight carriers (ships and trains) in ton-miles per day means the former can only hope for very special cargoes (such as logs lifted out of remote forests).
What about when the cost of petroleum products gets so high that nobody can afford jet travel except the very rich?? Some experts are proclaiming that the high point in barrels pumped will be ~Thanksgiving, 2005.
I was talking about a cruise experience, which I, based on the numbers I gave, think will never work.
It’s true that a Hindenburg-style airship is more fuel-efficient than a jumbo jet (I remember seeing a special on TV that such and such a [small] airship can fly for a week on what it takes a [big] airplane to taxi to the runway), but it’s also a lot slower and, most important, carries a lot fewer people. So I doubt if ultimately it uses fuel much more efficiently.
It would take a large increase in petro prices to get people to stop flying. A reduction of some degree is likely, I guess. If worse comes to worse, I suppose we’ll have to use sailing ships again.
Ah, but they were not actually separate, were they? The chambers were separately sealed at the bottom, but at the top (about 4th deck, I think) they were open to each other.
So the holed ones filled up with seawater, which eventually ran over the top and into the next one, and this continued until the whole ship sank.
Had they actually been separate sealed chambers, the Titanic would have stayed afloat much longer, at least enough to get the passengers off safely, possibly even long enough for them to have saved the ship.
P.S. The current Goodyear blimps are made this way. They have separate internal chambers where the helium gas is contained.
That accords with what I read about the Titanic back in the day.
I’d love to see a cite on this. I don’t doubt your veracity for one moment, but that’s a contradiction to the traditional concept of a blimp, though it makes far more sense from a safety standpoint than a single envelope, and I’d like very much to read more about it.
Anatomy of the Goodyear Blimp.
Multiple helium bags inside the blimp are used because the helium expands, and also helium is vented from the fore or aft ‘ballonete’ to trim pitch when not moving.
Thanks, Brutus!
But a jet airplane runs on jet fuel – which, I understand, is essentially the same thing as kerosene – a petroleum derivative. According to Bosda, the best fuel for an airship would be propane (driving a generator, which would generate power for electric fan motors). I’m not sure where they get propane – is it a natural gas? In terms of price and world reserves, how does it compare with petroleum fuels?
OK, so go super-green and use the skin of the airship as a solar panel… they have flexible ones now. That would power the batteries / motors / electrics…
I hate to be a naysayer, but aren’t people forgetting about manufacturing costs? These things are made out of aluminum and plastics, right? Well, you can’t make plastics without petrochemicals… unless someone has a different formula?
I don’t see where it says it has multiple helium bags. As far as I know, no blimps have more than one large helium compartment. The ballonets just have air in them. They increase or decrease the amount of air to keep the shape of the blimp as the helium in the main part of the envelope expands and contracts due to temperature and altitude.
There isn’t much need to have separate compartments because a blimp isn’t under much pressure. Getting a hole in it doesn’t cause all the helium to shoot out like would happen with a child’s toy balloon, you just get a slow leak.
Anyway, I think it’s very unlikely we’ll ever see large scale use of rigid airships for cargo or passenger use. As others have said, it’s technically doable, but it would be more expensive then current methods without really having any advantages. I’d love to see it, though. I’d give anything to see something the size of the Hindenburg drifting across the skyline.
If some billionaire with a major airship fixation decided to built a couple modern flying cruise ships, it might make money if people were willing to pay the high ticket price for the novelty of a few day luxury flight from the US to Europe. But I think it’s a lot more likely to happen because someone with the money to build them thinks it’d be cool than because it makes sense as a good investment.
Err, then you need to re-read it, and click on the pretty blimp picture. The Goodyear Blimp has two, fore and aft, and they are called ‘ballonetes’.
I’ll see your “Err” and raise you a “harumph”. 
If you re-read that site, it says that the ballonets hold air, not helium, and describes what they’re for.
Look over there! BOBABOOEY! STERN RULES!
Damn, didn’t throw you off…let’s see… ‘Air’ is just scientific mumbo-jumbo for ‘helium’, heh, you know those crazy scientists with their goofy nomenclature! Don’t feel bad, not too many people are as learned in science and alchemy as am I!
Still no? Well damn, it looks like I was wrong. DAMN. Thwarted, I was. Bested. Well, Mister Halper, you win this round!
Natural gas is also known as methane, chemical formula CH4. Propane has chemical formula C3H8.
It’s similar to methane in that it is a hydrocarbon, but it uses a longer carbon chain and is much more easily liquified than methane. Two more carbons down the list, there’s pentane, C5H12, which is from what I remember the base molecule for gasoline. If memory is serving me correctly, gasoline contains 2,2,4-trimethylpentane, as well as hydrocarbons containing carbon chains of 6 to 11 carbons, hexane, heptane, octane, nonane and decane are in there.
These things are all alkanes, and so are all part of the same hydrocarbon family having one bond between each carbon and being surrounded by hydrogen, for example:
H H H
| | |
H-C-C-C-H
| | |
H H H
is an example of the chain of carbons in propane.
Methane’s commonly found in the same areas as petroluem deposits, and does burn cleaner than those hydrocarbons further up the chain. Propane burns fairly cleanly, as does butane (4 carbons). Beyond that I think they become liquid and you end up with more impurities and less efficient burns.
Either way, same chemical family.
Gah. Shoulda previewed.
The code didn’t come out quite right.
Each carbon has 4 bonds. The two carbons on the end have 3 hydrogens attached, and one carbon. The one in the middle has 2 carbons attached, and 2 hydrogens.
OK, but what does propane cost, compared to kerosene? And where does propane come from? Is it a limited-supply, non-renewable resource like petroleum? Or is it something we could manufacture? These are crucial points when we’re trying to determine whether a propane-powered airship is more or less fuel-efficient and economical than a kerosene-powered jet airplane.
BTW: On the subject of hydgrogen (not as fuel, but as lifting gas) vs. helium: Maybe hydrogen didn’t really destroy the Hindenberg. But I still would stick with helium even though it’s slighly less buoyant. Hydrogen might or might not be explosive, but it is definitely corrosive. It’s a one-proton atom which will bond with anything. That’s one of the reasons they haven’t yet perfected a hydrogen-fueled car – the fuel tends to corrode the parts. Helium will not bond with or corrode anything.
Lovely job on bollixing chemistry and mineralogy here, folks.
Yes, monatomic hydrogen is extremely active, and will bond with nearly anything. Including itself. That is why it is not found in nature, save in rarefied gases in astronomical spectroscopy. Hydrogen itself is H[sub]2[/sub], a diatomic molecule, and is fairly stable, though quite combustible – hence the idea of hydrogen-fueled cars, discussed in this space a few weeks past.
When organic matter is buried and decays, it is converted to a wide variety of chemicals, some of which are solid, black, principally carbon compounds – called coal. Some of which are a thick, gooey mixture of liquids, called crude oil. And some of which are a mixture of the half dozen or so gaseous hydrocarbon compounds, with methane (CH[sub]4[/sub] as the principal component, and that mixture is called natural gas.
Propane (C[sub]3[/sub]H[sub]8[/sub]) can be extracted from natural gas and is easily liquefied at room temperature by being compressed to a certain easily-maintained pressure, hence LNG. It can also be produced from the more volatile components of crude oil by one of the innumerable “cracking” processes. As noted, butane (C[sub]4[/sub]H[sub]10[/sub]) is also gaseous, and even more easily liquefied – your typical butane disposable lighter contains liquid butane, which vaporizes when the stopcock is held down and hence will combust when it encounters the spark of flint and steel from the roller flimdingie adjacent to the stopcock.
Gasoline is a mixture of liquid alkanes, including pentane and isooctane – the “octane” rating of gasoline indicates how “knock-free” its combustion is compared to pure isooctane, which has an “octane rating” of 100.
For any lighter-than-air entity (hydrogen or helium plus load), the degree to which it ascends is defined by the amount of ballast (load) counteracting its buoyancy. Compressed air is used to “trim” airships; water is typically carried as ballast – you may vent water to rise, or vent helium (or hydrogen) to descend.
In the absence of direct fire or spark, hydrogen is perfectly safe – unlike a few unstable compounds, it will not spontaneously explode. However, an air-hydrogen mixture is dangerously explosive, requiring a flame or spark to ignite but then burning rapidly (and producing water vapor). In the Hindenburg fire, it’s believed that the fabric burned rapidly, the hydrogen caught from it (but rose), and most of the severe burns suffered by the crew and passengers resulted from the burning fabric and accouterments, or from the frame (warped into structurally unstable shape and heated to high temperature by the fire surrounding it), not from the hydrogen, which was burning with an invisible flame above the collapsing Zeppelin.
So, propane, like gasoline and kerosene, is made from stuff that’s in the ground and of which we have a limited all-time supply and no way of renewing it, right?
So – how do the world reserves of natural gas compare with the world’s reserves of petroleum? I’m trying to figure out whether reviving airship travel might give us a fallback position for long-distance aviation, in the event of another fuel crisis.
According to a Montana university website which was the first source on Google with numbers, crude oil reserves will last 50 years or less (50 at current rate, which has been increasing annually), and natural gas reserves will last 125 years. This site shows coal reserves as good for 200-300 years; I was going to volunteer the 300 year figure, which I’ve seen cited numerous times, if I couldn’t come up with numbers. Additional hydrocarbon sources are noted there which it is not economical to extract fuels from – tar sands and oil shale. It might also be noted that a number of crops will produce quite plentiful and renewable oils – the bottle of Puritan or Wesson Canola oil on your stove (you are using that rather than corn oil, right?) is an oil which is combustible under the right circumstances – atomized by a jet, IIRC – and produced from the rapeseed plant, which can be grown in fairly arid climates not suitable to most other crops.