Saturday, March 31, 2007

Balloons need helium to fly high

Since I didn't post on friday night the news items are piling up in my inbox, I'm trying to publish some of them.
So first I would like to point you to SOUTHERN BALLOON WORKS, INC. they offer a wide variety of advertsing inflatables and LTA stuff. In their line up are tethered blimps, rc controlled blimps, giant balloons and tradeshow balloons. All their products are custom made and offer a wide variety of options in colors and sizes. They also have a few pictures and videos on their site. Their biggest remote controlled blimps are around 4 meters in size. It's not big but for marketing it's definetly worth a look. So go check them out, if you are interested in advertising airships.
The next item is a new blog that just launched this week by two guys Alex & Brian Hall it is called Up Ship! and documents their plan to bring a zeppelin to the US. It accompanies thier website Airship Ventures, which is just a redicrect to the blog right now. I don't know if they want to build their own airship or blimp or if they actually want to buy one. I'm trying to contact them to find out more information.
Last up is a little tidbit about helium. This is more for people who do not know much about how Lighter Than Air (LTA) Technology works in all this airships and blimps. So the first article called "How Much Can a Helium Balloon Lift?" is a pretty complete Science Experiment calculating and measuring the exact lift of a standard helium balloon. The second article called "Helium makes the balloon fly!" is from a swedish website also explains why helium baloons fly, and what the differences between hydrogen, helium and hot air lift are. The artice even presents some formulars to calculate the lift. The article conludes with a short explanation about where helium comes from. It's worth a read for the interested. This is it, fr today, if you would lik eto leave a comment, please do so, any feedback is greatly appreciated. If you have a business having to do with LTA Aircrafts or technology and would like to get some information out please send us an email. We would also like to present books that are currently in the writing and other media formats, so please contact us via email airshipworld@gmail.com. In the next couple of days I'm gonna be rereleasing quite a lot of information that was previously published in the airshipworld yahoogroup. Hope to get some more exposure on the web through it.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Yahoo Group screwup

So last night I happily announced the Blog in the two earlier mentioned Yahoogroups
Airshiplist and Airshipworld with a post, just to turn into a massive spammer afterwards. What happened? Well The people at Yahoo where "upgrading" the Servers to make email delivering faster, well but instead of delivering one message 10 times faster then before they delivered one message 10 times at the same speed than before. Which resulted in up to 20 exactly the same Emails in those peoples Inboxes who subscribed to both Groups mailinglists. The YahooGroups team put up a Blogentry about the Issue that they called "Duplicate Messages and Email Delivery" in which they explain what happened and also announced the fix. Unfortunately I had already made pretty much everyone on the Groups mailinglists mad, because they got my message 20 times. So I apologize for this rough start, it really wasn't my fault just unfortunate circumstances. I promise I will not spam anyone, if you email me at airshipworld (at) gmail (dot) com then I can guarantee I will only reply to your emails and never send any mass email stuff out if it is not of any real interest like the move of the URL of the Blog or something big like that.

So I have some news today, but I will keep them for tomorrow, since it's already late and I have to get some sleep. So no news tody but double the news tomorrow. And don't worry our week isn't over on friday we blog 7 Days a week.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The Zeppelin NT is flying again

So good news for european airship enthusiasts, the Deutsche Zeppelin Rederei has resumed flights over Lake Constance, Germany as of March 27th 2007. So you can now go to their Website and Book you flight in the new Zeppelin-NT the only real Zeppelin, everything else is just an airship. I have seen the Zeppelin-NT a few times now and it is breathtaking just seeing it, I can not imagine how great it would be to actually fly in one. So if you are interested, check out the Deutsche Zeppelin Rederei website, there you will also find pricing information. To give you a quick overview flights start from € 145,- for 20 minutes all the way up to € 715,- for a full 2 hour tour.
If you have already done something like that, if you have pictures that you would like to share or stories, please email them to our brand new email address which is airshipworld@gmail.com, yes we have an email address now, so please don't hesitate to contact us, with any question you have we will be more than happy to help you find an answer to your question or just recieve feedback from you. If you don't want to write an email just pot a comment on the site.
So Yesterday I announced the Airshipworld Yahoo Group, today I would like to point to another Yahoo Group wich is frequented by a lot of the same people that are on the Airshipworld group. The Yahoo Group is Called Airshiplist, quoting from their description:
A list for the discussion of topics related to airships, blimps, semi-rigids, Zeppelins and any other dirigibles together with LTA (lighter than air) issues in general.

So this is a more general and technical group which, if you are interested in airships, you should join. Efforts are on the way to join together those two groups into one even stronger group, everything with the goal of creating one big community for the Airship Industry. So I will keep you posted on that.
At last I would like to point you to the Website http://www.aeroscraft.com/ it's a Site dedicated to the Aeroscraft being developed by the Worldwide Aeros Corporation, they already have a few smaller blimps in production but haven't been able to deliver the huge Aeroscraft, which is also participating in the DARPA Walrus Program, I will have more about the Walrus Programm in a later post. For now this completes todays news. Please spread the word about this blog, and contribute with news, press releases and stories, also any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Airshipworld Yahoo Group and new X Prize Challenge

Well I guess it has been a pretty quiet day on the Interweb when it comes to airship news. So I decided to tweak the Blog a bit to make it look a little bit more modern. Tell me if you like it or not. So I also added a Link list to the Sidebar which will contain Links that I recommend to check out. If I mention a Website of interest I will most likely put it into the Recommended links, also, when it has any long term value and is not just a news topic.
So the first link there is to the Airshipworld Yahoo Group this Yahoo Group is dedicated to the upcoming International Airship Investors' Conference in Cape Town which I blogged about before. It currently has 124 Members and is quite active. Right now this blog is not yet officially affiliated with this group but this might happen soon. I will blog about it as soon as there are news available.
There was a post in this Group today by a Guy called Grant Morgan he wrote about that the X-Prize people are looking for new prize goals and pointed out that Airships or the advantages of Airships could be made a challenge, speaking of like fuel efficient transport to remote locations. I think that this is a brilliant Idea. The Same post was made on a Blog called Current Airships which I assume is his blog, which is also available in the "Recommended Links" list on the Sidebar.
The quest for new challenges of the X-Prize is set up as a contest by Zannel.com you can read more about the idea behind the contenst in a Blogpost called "The X PRIZE's Participatory Video Contest" from the WorldChanging Website.
That's all for today, please leave feedback in the comments and if you haven't already, sign up for the Yahoo Group. An Email adres for the blog will be available shortly. All that's left to say is, till tomorrow.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Airshipworld Website and News Roundup

Well thing are progressing, so a new Website has been registered today which will be the Information hub about Airships and the upcoming First International Airship Investors Conference(IAIC) in Cape Town, South Africa, to be held from January 15th-17th 2008. The Website is not online yet so linking to it doesn't really make sense, but as soon as there is more information available I will post it here.
Since there isn't really an Airship News website out there I will try to collect some interesting Links and news about Airships, Blimps and LTA Research everyday. Today I have two interesting things, both more fiction than reality but still.

Extreme resorts: Airship hotel brings a touch of 1930s glamour to the skies
The first Item is from FX Magazine a british design Magazine, they released an article about a flying hotel which of course is going to be an airship. The article has some quite inspiring computer renderings in it, and maybe we hear about this airship called Clipper again, it's presumably designed by a guy called Seymour Powell.

The Captain Mors Page
The next newsitem for today is a small website dedicated to the German Dime-Novel series Der Luftpirat und sein Lenkbares Luftschiff. ["The Pirate of the Air and his Navigable Airship."], also known as Kapitän Mors der Luftpirat. The series was published from 1908-11 it's interesting to see the images and sketches of the airship in this novel, but it's sience-fiction even today almost 100 years later, quite unbelievable, we flew to the moon but having airships cruise the sky is still a dream.


So this is it for todays news Items any comments on the blog would be greatly appreciated. Also if you have news that hasn't been covered here, please leave a comment on the blog, in a few days I will have set up an email adress for the blog to contact me. See you again tomorrow same place, same time.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Welcome

Welcome airship enthusiasts,
Airshipworld is a new Blog about anything Airship and nothing but Airships, if they are LTA or HTA doesn't matter, what matters is that we are wanting to bring the community together. This site should become the central hub for all Airship news, events, announcements, sightings and everything else of interest for the Airship community. In the next weeks there is going to be a lot happening, so stay tuned.