The Blimp - Stories of an aerial vehicle whose onomatopoetic name is at least 100 years old.

How does one launch a blimp? The answer is "slowly"…blimps do nothing rapidly. I became aware of that years ago when The Ohio State University Airport was visited on occasion by the Goodyear blimps that covered major sports events in the Columbus area. When the flight schedule permitted, the OSU Department of Aviation folks were welcomed aboard for a low-altitude, low-airspeed tour of the city. That blimp ride was a first-time experience for me and given my zero knowledge of airship operations I wondered how this bagful of helium would get off the ground.
 

 

The neutrally bouyant blimp was resting lightly on its single wheel and anchored, so to speak, by the ground crew holding the mooring lines attached to the nose. There was a hand rail running completely around the bottom of the gondola and when the pilot was ready the launch crew lifted the blimp to arms' length then pulled it down briskly.

The wheel strut compressed when it contacted the ground and the gas bag sagged a bit around the gondola, resulting in an upward rebound (Newton's third law of motion at work—equal and opposite reaction) whereupon the pilot opened the throttles and the blimp climbed away…an AVTO (Almost Vertical Takeoff). The entire procedure took place in graceful, ponderous slow motion.

 

Between a rock and a hard place: Too slow to take off, too fast to stop.

Years ago, when the Federal Aviation Administration was cranking out training films on nearly every conceivable aviation subject, there was a frequent flow of movies between my aviation classrooms at The Ohio State University and the lending facility in Washington, DC. Most of these films were good teaching aids and some were not worth the cost of shipping them back and forth.   

One of the best FAA movies featured a fictional commercial photographer/pilot who embarked from a sea-level airport in his brand new A-36 Bonanza on an assignment to cover the American west.

 

Typical Beech A-36 Bonanza

  

That was a rather daunting project to say the least…the American west is a huge area. The situation wasn’t helped at all by the pilot's false expectation that "this baby can take me anywhere I need to go." As he ventured farther west into higher terrain he discovered his non-supercharged Bonanza was losing performance on takeoff and climb and finally, after a frightening episode at a short grass strip high in the Colorado mountains, he understood the meaning of density altitude…which of course was the subject of that FAA film.

Wiley Post and the Winnie Mae: Around the world twice with one eye in much less time than Jules Verne's legendary "80 days."

I noticed recently a news item that caused my eyebrows to elevate a bit. A Bombardier Dash-8 was on final approach to the Belfast City Airport in Ireland when the captain's prosthetic forearm became detached from a special clamp fitted to the plane's yoke…oops. The momentary loss of control probably contributed to the bounce when the airplane touched down but no one was injured. The captain has pledged to be more careful in the future about checking the attachment on his artificial limb. Good for you, sir…fly on.

Bombardier Dash-8

That prosthesis-failure event prompted me to consider another unusual impairment for aviators, namely monocular vision…i.e. having only one operative eyeball. You would think a pilot thus handicapped would be hard-pressed to operate an airplane safely, especially during the approach and landing phases of a flight.

But as it turns out, many (if not most) pilots in the one-eye category are able to overcome the limitations imposed by monocular vision and fly quite safely. A case in point is Wiley Hardeman Post, who managed to fly around the world by himself in 1933 despite the fact that an accident seven years earlier had resulted in a complete loss of vision in his left eye.