PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - "Airlander". Here we go again
View Single Post
Old 9th Feb 2016, 15:38
  #14 (permalink)  
n5296s
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: LFMD
Posts: 749
Likes: 0
Received 7 Likes on 4 Posts
Seems to me it's a very niche-y mission (even more so than other non-airliner aircraft). Basically it works if you want to spend a long time up there without actually going anywhere. For sure such missions exist, just not many.

The previous "revolutionizing air transport" effort was German, and spent a couple of years down the road here at Moffett. The racket it made flying over our house all the time (3 x IO540s at 1500 feet, going veeeeery sloooowly) made me investigate it - actually I had a brief chat with the captain (a lady, and a Brit at that) courtesy of Palo Alto tower.

Bottom line is it cruised at 37 knots. It had about the same payload and fuel consumption per hour as a Trislander. Awful the latter may be, but it flies at about 100 knots, so fuel/passenger-mile is about three times better.

For the latest one, they talk about 48 passengers. REALLY??? The German one, which was seriously huge, carried 10, in a tiny underslung cabin.
n5296s is offline