The Cargo Airship That Wasn't

Helium has been, and always will be, too scarce and expensive to vent to regulate lift in airship operations. Designers have explored many concepts to overcome the limitation of helium’s fixed ascensive force in the effort to make a practical cargo airship. One long held hope has been to mate the helium bag to some sort of lifting rotors. One example, the cyclocrane prototype, mounted propeller engines on controllable surfaces, allowing vectored thrust. Another, the Piasecki Helistat, got Government funding to mate four existing Korean-war era helicopters to a framework made of irrigation tubing attached to a spare ZPG-2 bag. Before the deadly crash of that lashup, Goodyear Aerospace joined in with their own design. Reaching the model stage as seen in this promotional video, the idea was made more cost-effective by the elimination of the complex and expensive helicopter rotor heads. One can see forward or reverse thrust would have been provided by smaller tractor props on the structure, while the larger rotors via throttle control could lift and carry the weight of the payload. This promised to overcome the limitation of not being able to vent lifting gas, since the air by the envelope displaced lifted the basic weight of the vehicle. The deadly crash of the Piasecki Helistat effectively ended this design philosophy, ironically before the concept of placing large spinning rotors adjacent to the rather fragile gas containment could be tested in operational conditions.

[@t.o.6953]

For anyone wondering why we dont see these flying around nowadays, look up the "Piasecki Helistat"

[@steffen19k]

You mean Piasecki Helistat crash

[@HiNickCares]

That was pilot error.

[@monkeyboy4746]

It looks like it flies great, I'm gonna buy two.

[@X-JAKA7]

Dark Skies needs to see this.

[@HiNickCares]

Great to see.

[@bearshield7138]

very cool

[@MFKR696]

Would have been nice if you had summed the audio track to mono, and put it dead-center. There's no excuse for having all the sound coming out the right channel.

[@AnomymAnonym]

so why didnt this happend? seems like a great idea

[@t.o.6953]

They tried making one (the Piasecki Helistat) and it crashed on its first attempted flight. There wasn't really a way to make it safe to have spinning blades right next to the gas bag.
You might be able to do it now with shrouded fans though

[@steffen19k]

@@t.o.6953 it had more to do with using hand-me-down parts and a lack of proper vibratory stress calculations and the resulting vibration damping literally shook the frame apart.

[@t.o.6953]

@@steffen19k true, the helistat was a shitshow

[@Superkuh2]

Helium cost went way up, the offloading of cargo mass and taking on of required ballast problem, and the getting pushed around all over by the wind when landing/landed problem.

[@HiNickCares]

It failed due to pilot error.

[@toddwebb7521]

One spark of static and the whole thing catches fire and everyone is all "oh the humanity"

[@leifvejby8023]

No

[@RoyJNg]

Unless the blimp or airship is filled with hydrogen, the blimp/airship will not exploded into a fire ball. If there's a fire, it'll probably be the gondola catches on fire and explode in that portion of the blimp and whatever is left will just crash but not in a giant fireball like the Hindenburg. But then again, that won't stop anybody from saying "oh the humanity" though.

[@toddwebb7521]

And it looks like at least 2 of you don't watch Archer

[@HiNickCares]

🥱