Hacker News Reader

Comment by wipfli | Hacker News Reader

That's a very cool project! I am a hot-air balloon pilot and I love everything that flies with the lighter-than-air principle.

One limitation I could see for your business model is that airships can only be flown in a controlled direction at rather slow wind speeds. That is because they just have such a huge attack surface and the motors have limited thrust.

Did you do an estimate how many days per year you could fly your vehicle in a given economic area of interest? I fly balloons in Switzerland and I think you can get at most 100 days of good flight conditions a year. But yeah, with some climate data and your operational limitations you can probably estimate how many days you get in a given area...

View on HN

Thank you very much for your support!

We've made research and we aim to resist to 10 to 11m/s of wind speed. This would allow us to fly in 80% of regions of Europe, 80% of the time!

Also: for inspecting wind turbines (which I imagine would be a use-case), the operators usually want to work on low-wind days anyway.

I used to work at a large offshore wind operator, and the approach we used there for leading-edge inspection of blades was a telephoto lens from a neighboring turbine. As anything involving technicians off-shore, this was very expensive.

thank you for the insight that's so interesting

That sounds like a very enjoyable endeavor! I was wondering, what are the benefits and drawbacks to flying a lighter-than-air ship under 1,000 feet? Or even closer to the ground/tops of buildings? <500 feet? Are there simply too many regulatory issues?

I have a dream that some day there will be airships floating around cities, ferrying passengers and freight, and they will float only 30-100 meters above the tallest buildings.

The issue is they’re quite slow and not exactly nimble craft so flying low you need to be very sure you’re well clear of the surrounding hazards.

What tolerances can helicopters operate at, for comparison? I can imagine you don't want what looks like an inherently unstable aircraft to be close to power lines at higher winds.

More has to do with gusts for helicopters, partly because they can point into the wind which is no different from forward flight if it’s steady.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com