How Blimps Work

lighter than airship. L t A is the umbrella term for all of those things which are slightly different. Yeah. I think an l t A and an airship is all of them. The dirigible is all of them, Zeppelin is rigid, and a blimp is non rigid. Nice and mostly we just said blimps. These days, not a lot of rigid airships, aren't there? But would they would they constitute Yeah? No, but there's they can be semi rigid or non rigid, right, yeah, and I think the future

we'll talk about that obviously the end. But I think those are some of those are more the semi rigid style, right, Yeah, but they're made up some really lightweight but very strong composite materials. Yeah. Boom so Chuck. Let's talk about the history of blimps because I think when anybody thinks of blimps they think Handenburg. They think they think the Handenburg and then maybe concurrently or right after the Good Year blimp. Yeah, those are the two that really laid it on the

line for blimp them. Uh. Yeah, you know what you want to talk about the early history, I guess, and then get to the tragedy. Yeah, because there wasn't that much time in between the two to tell you the truth. Yeah, I mean that all started, of course with hot air balloons because uh, they're not so different. In a cup of frenchees. Brothers Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michelle. They said they were brothers, but they have different Last night, I

think Jacques Etienne is his first and middle name. Okay, that makes sense. They all had three names, uh, Mom, Golfier. They invented the hot air balloon, uh, an unmanned hot air balloon in three and then later that same year a French physicist last name de Rosier had the first manned balloon flight and they were just floating around because that's what our balloons do. You can go up and then if you're really good, you can come back down.

But left and right that's up to mother nature right, which is a little scary, although I think these days can they steer them at all. We have a great article on this on hot air balloon. No, you're you're subject to the winds to the the um was the god of wind that you know he comes out of the cloud and blows wind. Yeah that guy. Yeah, you're you're subject to his whim. So if if you're headed

towards something, it's go over it or hit it. Yes, And you remember there's that terrible bloom hot air balloon accident and I think Virginia last year earlier this year at Yeah, like they hit a power line I think, and then the basket caught fire and like they had to jump. It was really bad. Um, But yeah, you can go up and over and I imagine it it's like a power line, yeah, or a tunnel if you're really good, or you're in a cartoon like the laugh Olympics,

that's something they do in there totally. But the I think if you're really good, you could probably know where to steer into the wind to maybe use the wind. But no. With the blimp, the big distinction is, aside from its distinctive shape, is that you can maneuver like a pro That's right. And that's what Henry uh Jaffar did in eighteen fifty two when he finally someone said

we should steer these things. He built the first powered airship and it was cigar fielled like the classic shape that we know and love now, had a propeller like they have now, and a little engine although it was a steam engine which they don't use now. Three horsepower steam engine. Yeah, they're not huge engines. Still didn't take a lot apparently, No, it really doesn't. Um And those were rigid airships. Uh, it's a it's a metal framework.

And in nineteen hundred count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. That name sounds familiar, Zeppelin of Germany. Uh, and that's where they got the name, of course. Because but I never understood the Led the lead Well it was I think someone said as a joke, you guys are gonna go over like a led Zeppelin, or they did when they played on the BBC. Is that it? But why take the A out Because the same reason you take the A

out of def Leppard. I've never understood that either in the same wings you put it um out over Motley Crue. This makes you cool, you know, different, different. You gotta mispel something in your band. I think I was just looking too deeply into it. It's the problem. Yeah. L E A d. Zeppelin would be weird. Yeah, but I

think like our paradigm would have adjusted. We would think L E. D. Zeppelin would be weird if we were used to led Zeppelin with an A, or if the Beatles was spelled B E T L E S. Yeah, instead of their penny name very penny. All right, boy, we get sidetracks so easy with music stuff. Not really Zeppelin was I think people saw that coming before their

press play. Uh So that was the rigid airship, the first one, and those have a metal framework, and it had tail fins and rudders, had combustion engines and could cruise at about feet with up to five people. Yes, not bad. You could bring the whole family as long as you encounter, as long as you total no more than five, as long as you paid off the captain. Well then you just have to be a family of four. That's right, because the captain's gotta sit somewhere, right, they

got their little captain's chair. So everything was going quite swimmingly. Actually, Um, around the turn of the twentieth century, there there was. It was just widely assumed that we would have a future where blimps that blinds were just a regular feature of the sky. Well they were up until the Hinderberg went down. There were more than two thousand flights carried um, tens of thousands of passengers over a million miles. Like that was air travel, we should say, ultra wealthy passengers

at the time. Um. The Hinderberg in particular was it was high class. It was the pride of Nazi Germany. Yeah, And it was on its maiden voyage, wasn't it. It was almost called the Hitler by the way, was it really? Yeah? But Hitler was like, I don't want my name on that thing. Really yet, not that he like foretold the future, He just didn't. I don't know. He just didn't want

to him named after an airship. He didn't believe Freud's idea that sometimes the cigars just a cigar, yeah, or a cigar shaped airship is just a cigar shaped there and it crashed and burned too, So he was probably pretty stoked that he'd have his name on it. Yeah, he very famously went yeah when he heard the news exactly. So, uh, we should probably stopped making light of this nearly eighty year old tragedy because people did die, you know. Yeah,

I mean, should we tell the story? All right? Well, it took off on May three seven, had thirty six passengers and officers and crew members and trainees, left Frankfort at about seven fifteen and then crossed out over the Atlantic at about two am the next day. It's not super fast travel. It was compared to the ship travel at the time. It was it took about half the time to cross the Atlantic as it did in a boat. Yeah, but compared to what we're used to Oh yeah, you

were just it was leisurely. Um And apparently after reading more about the Hindenburgh, it's not as um And I guess ship travels sort of the same way, like we're going to get there when we get there, like we're heading, we're trying to get there and then but you never know what gonna happen, right, That's why they called them the leisure class, that's right. Uh, it follows followed a

northern track across the ocean. Um eventually crossed uh into North America, over the coast of Newfoundland and arrived in lake Hurst, New Jersey about twelve hours late. And um, Germans, they're always late, they're famous for it. And basically arrived there at the Naval air station, and because of poor weather, the captain and the commanding officer on the ground said, you know what, the weather is not so great. Let's wait a little bit, um, because they can fly around

forever in those things. And he said, all right, well, the Jersey shore is nice. Let's just go fly about that and tell everyone to look around and look at all those old timey bathing suits and they're up to the ankles and water. Um. By six pm, UM conditions had improved and at six twelve he sent a message sand it's suitable for landing. Recommended landing now. About seven

eight he finally UH pulled the blimp in. It was a bit of a dodgy approach, but he eventually, you know, got it down towards the ground pretty you know, uh skillfully, which, as we'll see, it's not as easy as you'd think, even though it's not in practice. No, they dropped the landing lines and then things went south like really fast. Yeah. It was filled with hydrogen, which is the lightest element, right, Yeah, and uh it's also probably the most flammable or one

of them. Yes, inflammable was a big error at the time. Um, a lot of blimps had caught on fire. This was not the first accident, and uh there was you know, people testified afterward, because not everyone died. We'll get to the numbers here at the end of the story. But um, there was testimony that, um, it appeared as if gas was pushing against the cover. Maybe it escaped from a

gas cell. The first visible aimes appeared, and it varies, but most of witness to say that the first flames are either at the top of the hall uh, forward of the vertical fin or between the rear port engine in the port fin. And they described it as a mushroom shaped flower. And it pretty much engulfed the tail like right away, and it was able to remain steady for a little while. Like people could start jumping out

at this point. Well, those are the people who died, correct Now, That's what I always heard, or that's what I have heard is that the people who stayed in the gondola lived and the people who jumped were the ones that died because the flames, because the hydrogen is light, they were burning upward. Well, it says here basically it was all depended on where you were. If you were

close to a means of exit, you generally survived. Um, if you were deep inside the ship, like in the power room along the keel, or in the smoking room. Smoking room in the end, I'm supposed it wasn't all smoking, big blimpful of hydrogen. Oh yeah, yeah, it's not a good yet. They had apparently a double um air locked door, one electric lighter and um you were allowed to smoke as long as you put it out before you left. And UM, so, like I said, if you were in

the smoking room on B deck, you're in big trouble. Um. If you were one of the nine men closest to the front of the ship, you definitely didn't survive. Yeah. So out of the ninety seven people on board sixty two survived. I think when you see the footage, I mean you can watch it on YouTube, it looks like how in the world could anyone survive it? Because it goes I mean it's fully burned in less than a

minute and on the ground went up fast. But sixty two to survive, thirteen of the thirty six passengers and twenty two of the sixty one crew. And there's still two guys alive today. Yeah, we checked two years ago, but they don't like to talk about it. I can imagine there's one kinetic experience. They're both named Verner, Verner Franz and wernerd Doner. The two Verner and one was a little cabin boy and one was a passenger with his family. And uh, they were contacted for like the

you know, the ceremony. I guess you don't call it an anniversary. I guess, uh memorial. Yeah, it just sounds like a party, you know. But they said, no, we're not coming. We don't like to talk about it. Yeah. So it's been a long standing mystery exactly what happened. And I found an article in the UK Independent from two thousand thirteen about a study from that year that found they said they they figured it out. They built like scale models of the Hindenburg, which was like two

and a half football fields long. By the way, they were building scale models that were like like sixty ft long, so good sized ones, and they tried to blow them up because there was a rumor that it was sabotage.

You know that everybody hated the Nazis even then. Um and uh, they tried all all manners stuff, and what they finally figured out was that probably what happened was from being in that stormy weather, that exterior the envelope of the blimp became um electrified, and when the ground crew ran up and grabbed the cables, they completed the current from the blimp to the ground, which caused a spark which actually um ignited a hydrogen leak that fire

caused out. Yeah. Yeah. One thing they say it definitely isn't which they long thought it was, was the actual fabric was like painted in this flammable stuff, and that's not true. It was the standard fabric. It was just a big balloon fill of hydrogen. Yeah. So when that happened, Um, the future of blimps were just pretty much like that was it for blimps. That wasn't the immediate end. But as far as like commercial blimp travel, that's tough for

an industry to get over. So it kind of fell on the wayside, although they did continue on UM in a couple of forms. Up until the sixties, the US government, especially the Navy, maintained blimps. One of the UM I think that I guess the Air Force. I don't know is the Navy, but one of the branches of the U s military use blimps as UM giant aircraft carriers of the air, not not the sea, the air, which

is pretty awesome. And apparently they had them so you could connect like a light plane to what's called like a trapeeze mechanism coming out of the bottom of the blimps and just like hook your plane on, climb up and say, hey, guys, where are we going? Or you can take off from there too. What yes, how do you take off? You just drop I think you just released the hook from the trapeez and starting of free fall and then you just go often to the distance

and go thanks for the ride, lady. That sounds really weird. UM. And they had even bigger plans that were never realized because the Navy scrapped the program, and I think nineteen two UM to have like a landing strip on top of the blimp so you could have just like planes takeoff and land and then be stored like in the blimp, which would have been pretty awesome. Well, cargo airships are

the wave of the future, perhaps, so we'll see. So, but that was the military was involved in blimps for most of the first half of the twentieth century and then um, our friends a good Year came up with a blimp that has really served them well. Like they were making blimps for the military, and then um they started using them for commercial purposes and everybody knows about

good Year thanks to those blimps. Yeah, and they're going to figure in here, of course, because you can't talk about blimps a lot without a ton of buzz marketing for good Year. Um. But you know that's where they make their name. In fact, my in laws almost wrote on the one based out of Akron because that's where they're from. And they think he was going to put in a bid on a like an auction bid to win a trip Nate, And I think it never happened.

The trip never happened. I think he either lost the bid. I'll have to ask him, but I don't think they ever wrote on the blimp. Okay, I was gonna say if the trip never happened. That doesn't sound like the good Year I know. No, No, they're very uh, they're like the Germans. So they've got there's three, um good Year blimps. Actually there's one and I believe Texas, there's one in California. There's one in Ohio orres A, Florida, California,

and Ohio is what it is. I'm sorry. Um, the spirit of good Year, the spirit of America, the spirit of innovation, and chuck. About the time this episode comes out, Robin Roberts, the TV personality, is going to be christening the newest member of the fleet, the wing foot one. Nice. So they're gonna have four, Yeah, because there's a lot of sporting events there. Sure, and you can't watch a big sporting event without hearing the words uh aerial coverage

provided by good Year. Yeah. And those shots, man, they're pretty great, they really are. We haven't been around forever. It was I think an Orange Bowl in Miami where the first one was broadcast and what like the sixties maybe I don't know, something like that, and it changed America. Yeah, well it um certainly gives them a lot of press and saves well, I don't know about saves some money. I haven't seen their balance sheet, but it's they don't

have to spend money on that thirty second spot. They still do to tie into the blimp, but it's great advertising for them. Yeah. Um. They also were good Sports in a movie called Black Sunday. Did you ever see that movie? Of course I never saw it. Um, but apparently they provided Um, they provided some of the footage for the movie, and UM let their blimps be used. Uh, and let their name be used even like it wasn't like the the Good Wire blimp. You know, they didn't

try to have to change it just enough. They used Goodyear, which made the whole thing even more terrifying and realistic. Yeah, they wanted to kill everyone at the super Bowl. That was the plot. Uh, with a blimp right that shot darts, which is weird. But it was written by the guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs. Oh. Yeah, he's a good writer. Have you ever read any of his books? Oh he was the book writer. Oh no, I didn't know that. No, I haven't read any of Silence at

the way. He does very good research. Interesting guy. Um. Anyway, so good Year good Year in the military. After the Hindenburg. That was the two cases of blimps. But like you said, there is potentially a future for blimps, which we'll talk about. But first let's talk about how blimps work in general. After these messages, you want to know how blimps work, buddy, I do it pretty simple. This was the delight to learn because it was like, oh, I thought would be

just that little to it. And that's really kind of the case, right, Yeah, yeah, there's not like oh and here's where it gets really hard. They're like the pontoon boats of the sky. Yeah. Like the most complicated thing on the blimp is probably the gyroscopic camera on the front of it to film the football stadium. I think you're right. Uh So, let's talk about the anatomy of a blamp you have. You mentioned the envelope earlier. That is the thing that you're looking at. That is key

big cigar shaped balloon. It's filled nowadays with helium. It is that shape because of aerodynamics, of course, and they are super lightweight and super strong. Like you were saying, neoprene to ply neoprene polyester generally, is that what the envelopes made of. There's a company um called the i LC Dover Corporation. They make a lot of skins UM and they use the same material that they make UM

space suits out of for NASA for blimps. Too good enough for Neil Armstrong, Buddy, good enough for my blimp. This is like all about Ohio. This one. Oh was here, Ohio? Yeah, yeah, I let have done it. So it was good here. No, No I knew that. Um, there were your in laws. That's right. The envelopes they hold UM. And it depends on the blimps for all of these statistics, of course.

But between sixty seven thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet of helium and um, it's not super The pressure is really low inside point zero seven pounds per square inch. So that's why if you shot a blimp it wouldn't like fall. No, I just leak very slowly and you just land it and patch it up.

I guess, yeah, very slowly. Yeah. British Ministry of Defense fired hundreds of bullets into an airship just for fun, well, not to see what if it would could be shot down in battle basically, and uh it took many hours to deflate and land. So and they don't even deflate them. They just leave them that way, so they're they're natural structure will not natural, but their original structure UM events them from being shot down. That's one big benefit. Because

I was wondering about that. I was like, you're just providing a target for every teenager with a gun in any country that you hover a blimp over. UM. Now I understand. But secondly, as we'll see, it also has to do with the dynamics of the flight of UM

hovering in the atmosphere. UM. So you've got the envelope, and the envelope also has something called nose cone battons, which is basically like a support structure for the nose the front of it just the very very tip, and it keeps the the the the blimps front from being mashed in as it moves forward, which is pretty smart. Yeah, I think I misspoke. The nose cone is on just the very tip, and then the batons are like the

fingers that distribute the stress over the front of the cone. Okay, so they're like the the the structure that comes out of the nose, right, and then also on the nose as the mooring um hook. Because you've got to hook a blimp up to something. Yeah, it's got a little spindle there, and it's got a little wheel under the tail rudder, and that's basically how it sits. You just tie it down. Yeah, very simple. Um, just like a balloon. That's right. So there's here's where it gets a little craftier,

like nineteen century crafty, but still neat nonetheless. Um, there's something called balonetts, right, and these are basically air bladders that are located within the envelope, and you inflate or deflate them depending on whether you want the blimp to go up or down. If you wanted to go up, you deflate these balonets. You wanted to go down, you inflate them. And the reason that works is because you're inflating or you're inflating these balonettes with air and helium,

which blimps fly using now is lighter than air. So more air means the blimps heavier, so it goes down. Less air means it's lighter, so it goes up. Yeah, it's pretty easy. It's sort of like how a submarine opera rates. Um. And there's one in the four and one in the aft, so that's how you control your trim. You can just knows it up or knows it down, filling up or deflating. That's the pitch axis, that's right, or trim Okay, well, the trim is the levelness okay. Yeah.

And the axis where the nose and the back go up and down, that's the trim axis. You know, the pitch axis, right, yeah, okay, no one can see not in agreement, okay, um chuck. Then there's the caternary curtain and the suspension cables, which I didn't get the caternary curtain really I understood. The suspension cable is just fine. Uh. It's on the on the inside about off center. Um. And it basically if you look, it sort of looks like the where you attach the basket to the hot

air balloon. They all, um, you know, there's a number of these lines that run down and I'll meet at a single point, um near the gondola, right, and that's what you attach the gondola to the blimp using right. Yeah. So basically, if if you if the blimp envelope wasn't there, it would sort of look like a hot air balloon. It would have these lines that run up from the gondola a k A basket up to the top, so they would be like the um vertical lines are the

horizontal lines. Okay, I understand exact amundo. Um. Then you've got the really technical stuff, the flight control surfaces. So everything we've just described as basically balloons and then the structure that gives the balloon it's shape, right and then um, the flight control surfaces are basically a rudder and elevators and they're the things that you can control to make the balloon till upward or side to side. That's pretty

much it. Yeah, there's that one rudder on the top and bottom and that controls your yaw and you do it with little If you look at the captain's sherry, he's got a little little foot pedals. It's like a clutch pedal you would put in, push in and um. On the bottom very bottom back of the rudder, there's something called a boost tab and that's just a little additional, uh,

sectioned off piece of the rudder that's also controllable. It's like a little mini rudder and um it assists with the rudder I think to make an even tighter turn. So if you imagine just the smaller rudder as part of the main rudder, just to give you that extra boost, I guess when you need to turn. Uh. And then there's two elevators and they um. If you are sitting in your little captain's chair, imagine a car steering wheel placed vertically like by your side. And that's just a

wheel that you turn up and turn down. It's really very basic. It sounds like the Wizard of Oz. The curtain, like all the machineries messing with it looks very steampunky when you look at it. Uh. So you steer up or down with that wheel, and uh, that's pretty much it. I don't know. Don't forget the engines. Oh well yeah, I mean as far as like driving this puppy. Yeah. The flight control Yeah, this is what separates it from

hot air balloons. Don't forget the engines. Know the hot the well, yeah, the engines, but also the flight control services. But the engines are turbo prop engines. Right. There's twin ones, which means there's two one on each side of the gondola at the rear, and they're pretty cool because they

propeled the thing forward but very cleverly. There's also something called air scoops that are basically these funnels that face the back of the turbo prop and they catch the vented air out of the props and they use those to inflate the balonetts. Yeah, that's called prop wash. This is all the lingo I've learned. That's good stuff. Uh. And the engines are just six cylinder engines. Like I said that, you don't need a ton of power to power these things. And you can go at about thirty

the seventy This says miles per hour, not knots. So how about that? And seventies cruising apparently, like fifty is where you want to be get this. I did the calculations. So one of the um one of the great advantages blimps have, which is the reason we've been talking about these things, or anybody's talking about still making blimps, is that they can stay aloft for days, weeks, even um, which gives them a huge advantage of our airplanes, which

have to stop and refuel and stop and refuel. But going seventy miles per hour chuck, a blimp NonStop at that rate could travel the circumference of the Earth around the equator in fourteen days. That in the fuel, yeah, which I think is not very hard. No, they at thirty knots. The sky ship, which is this one example. UM consumes about eight gallons of fuel per hour, so apparently during an entire week of operations, it consumes less fuel than a seven sixties seven commercial jet uses to

move away from the gate. So it's super green, which is kind of cool. You can understand why cargo companies are looking at them too. Yeah, and that's it runs on av gas, of course, not just regular old gas. You couldn't pull it up to a gas station like your car because I think av gas is still leaded or a lot of it is. Oh and that's the diff that's not that cream. Yeah, true, but they're not burning much of it. Uh. So let's see what else is there. The valves. You've got to be able to

let air in and out. You also want to be able to let air in and out of the envelope itself in case things become too pressurized. You don't want to pop. Yeah, that's true. So you've got your air valves for the UM for the bladders inside, and they're underneath. Uh to tow up front, two in the back, and then you have your helium valve and you can either vent it and you don't have to do this much because you should have it pretty like the pressure set um.

But if something does happen, you can either manually do it or it's set to automatically release. And if you look at the good Year blimp, it's sort of been the y of a Year, just looks like a little gas cap. You really know you're blimps man. Well, I mean I went to the good Year site. It's awesome. You can like there's all sorts of animated jifts and or is it gifts? I never could yeah, yeah, graphic interface. Yeah, but there is a correct way. I just don't know

what it is. Well, the guy who created gifts says he pronounces it Jeff oh wrench in the works, but I disagree with him. Morgellons give the good Year Blimp gondola, which is where we are now, is twenty two point seven five ft long. It is aluminum on welded steel frame and that's where everyone rides. Um. Depending on your blimp, it's gonna hold up to well. It depends on how big the blimp, but usually you don't see a blimp with more than twelve passengers or so. Yeah, and it's

not even necessarily passengers. The gondola can also be the place where it holds all of the surveillance equipment to depending on what you use it for, or it can also be the massive cargo hold. Yeah, you've got your communications up there, your flight surface controls, any KNAB equipment, UM propeller controls. That's where all the there's there's not much else to it besides what what you got there

in the gondola. What's funny is um I always thought blimps were basically like, you know, you you get the blimp in the air and it takes off and then that's it. But it's it's at least with good Year. It's kind of like UM got helicopter parents almost because when the blimp. When you see the blimp, if you look around, you'll also find a ground crew with a bus, uh eighteen wheeler and a bunch of vans that follow

it everywhere because I guess those things break down. Yeah, and apparently the pilots to their f A certified and Goodyear pilots also have another training program. But the pilots are even it's all sort of everyone is cross trained. It sounds like to work on the ground or make repairs and um, yeah, it's like a little self contained unit, all just traveling around together like a like h tornado chasers.

Oh and you talked about um the end. You know, if they just took off and floated around, if the engines did stop, that's exactly what you're doing. You're basically a hot air balloon at that point, so you lose control of the flight service controls. Yeah. Well, I mean if it's they call it a free balloon, so it's buoyant um, and it's kept aloft obviously, But if they lose all the power, then all you can do is

ascend and descend. Because I think I guess the rudders and the elevators are also powered mechanisms, just not just attached to a cable attached to a pedal attached to a wheel of the ne's It sounds like it is though, And as far as weather goes, they compare it to roughly operating is about as similar as a helicopter. Like we can fly in bad weather, um, but we try to avoid super bad weather. Yeah. I don't blame them because I mean, that's not fun you want to be

above the rose bowl in like seventy degree weather. So coming up, we're gonna talk about how blimps fly, and then also the future of blimps and if there is such a thing after this. So chuck. The way blimps flies pretty simple and beautiful and elegant if you ask me, yeah, yeah, So you have helium, right, yeah, which is they used to use hydrogen. Helium slightly heavier than um hydrogen, but

not that much more. You don't notice the difference, I would guess, Yeah, I mean you get why they use hydrogen. They weren't dummies. It was lighter than air, the lightest of all the gas of all the elements from what I understand um. And when hydrogen blew up, they said, okay, not hydrogen. What else do we have? And they said, well,

helium works, and so they started using helium. And helium has a lift of lift capacity of point seventy pounds per square foot, right, which is one point one kilograms per square meter um, which means it can lift a pretty decent amount of wait for just a little bit amount. And since they're filling these balloons with hundreds of thousands of cubic feet or cubic meters of these um of helium. They can look tons and tons of weight, and they do it by just simple physics, since helium is lighter

than air. As long as the helium has enough lifting power to lift whatever the envelope and the gondola and all of the mechanisms way, and it will rise more than the air. It will rise into the air. Yeah, it's called positive buoyancy, and what you want as a

blimp pilot is neutral buoyancy. So that's why you're gonna control, like we talked about your air bladders to uh get that thing where it's Once you've got your cruising altitude, you just want to be at the same level you want and you want to fill it up by blowing exhausted into your air scoops which fill up your balonets.

And the higher you get into the atmosphere, the less pressure there is, which means the higher up you could float conceivably, So you want to make sure you get that air in so you don't just float away and you achieve is it negative buoyancy or neutral buoyancy? You said, that's what you want, and then when you want to land, you do just the opposite. Um, you fill it up with even more air and then you make the blimp heavier than the helium inside can lift and it just

slowly comes down to the ground. And I mean that's it. That's how blimps rise and fall. Yeah, it is pretty simple. And when they're on the ground, they just tie it to that little spindle. You've got your little wheel under the rear. You got a little tractor to tow it around, maybe a hanger. And uh, that's the life of a blimp. And it's like I said, they don't inflate and deflate these. I'm sure it's a time and expense. Uh. And I think they're running out of helium too. Didn't we learn that? Yeah?

Do you know much about that? Well, we we covered it and uh, the probably the Mars turbine up Mars turbine. Yeah, that was it. But I read a really interesting article

and I think the New Republic, I can't remember. I found it online last night, and um, it's about the helium shortage and why we have a helium shortage and apparently the US has had a reserve, a strategic helium reserve since in a cave in Texas and Apparently during the Clinton era, the government said, let's make some money off of this, or let's make our money back off of it, so they passed it all that said start selling the stuff off Bureau of Land Management, but only

make enough money off of it to recoup whatever we've put into it over the years, which is like one billion dollars. So they started selling it, and by setting the price artificially, they created an artificial market. Because this is like of the world's helium reserves in this cave in Texas. So whatever the BLM was selling it for, that's how much the market value was. But it was artificial, so you had artificially cheap helium flooding the market, which

had a two pronged effect. One, it led to these scarcities that we're running into now because they just started selling it off in a fire sale the private industry. But the other more positive effect it had was that it spurred all of this technological innovation because nuclear magnetic resonance, the technology behind m ri I superconductivity UM molecular analysis, uses helium two super cool magnets to turn them into superconductors, right,

so you need helium for that. So all these industries were using this helium from the Beer of land management to like advanced technology by leaps and bounds, which is one of the big reasons why we are where we are right now technologically speaking because of helium. But now

we're starting to run out. There's I think nine billion cubic feet of helium left in the reserve in Texas, which is about a third of what they had when they started selling it off in the nineties, which would be fine if we just clamped it out and said, okay, this is a reserve again. But instead, for some reason, the government just doubled down and issued another decree to the beer of land management is like, keep selling this stuff. Let's just get rid of all of it for no

good reason. I don't understand why. Like it made sense in the nineties maybe, and it had all these great effects, but now it's like, okay, we understand that helium is literally irreplaceable, as the article put it, like there's once there's no helium. There's no helium, Like we can't go get it anywhere else for manufacturer, and we have no technology to recycle it. I wonder what the reason is.

I guess money private industry has a lot of interest in it, and there's good interest too, like using it for m R S or pharmaceutical researcher that kind of parties. Well, that's the thing. So med, the med and pharma sectors use tent of helium worldwide welding used. The seventeen percent because they use helium to weld party balloons equals eight percent of worldwide helium use. I have a feeling that party balloons are going to go the way of the

dinosaur very soon, if they haven't already. And half of that is the stoner kid who operates the helium tank, right, just talking funny. Yeah, So that's the helium shortage. That's the skinny on it. So that I wonder if there's any other gas they could use for blimps. I don't know. It seems like a giant waste. Or I wonder if they could, Like, do you like a hybrid so it's fueled by hot air like a balloon? Huh? Probably wouldn't.

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. Uh. Well, I guess we are at the future then in the future, and depending on who you ask, the future of airships is either super exciting and awesome and when you look at these they are or it's not going to be funded enough to really Um, there's not a lot of money being pumped into it. Well, the government was for a little while with the Afghanistan war. The Department of Defense was like, give us new blimps. We want these

things now. And all these companies ran in and we're like, here's your blimps, here's your blimps, give us some money. The problem is is the whole program got scrapped because nobody could fulfill the enormous orders. The d D was placing four helium Well that makes sense. Uh. And the military is interested because they basically, um could be uh a satellite function as a satellite like a ten ft satellite. Yeah,

pretty much. Um. There are people doing it though. Lockheed Martin has a P seven ninety one UM that is super cool looking. It is a try hall. If you look at it from the front, it looks sort of like three blimps squashed together. Um. And it has four big it looks like feet these disc shaped cushions that apparently for landing and these are also cool. There's um another one in California from Worldwide Aeroscorp. Called the dragon Dream and it's different look and it sort of looks

like a whale shark. Did you see it. It's a single hall, I guess, but it's sort of kind of flattened out. Um, yeah, it looks like a whale shark. They they actually submitted that design to the d o D and when the d D scrapped the program. Um, they bought their design back because they want to go commercial like cargo carrier with it. Yeah. Well they're in trouble though, because the dragon died well, it had a roof collapse and a hangarya and they don't know if

they have the money to even fix it and then continue. Well, they have another model called the mL eight sixties six that it sounds like they're putting their energy into. It's supposedly can carry two and fifty tons, which is more than twice the cargo payload of a cargo seven seventy twice. And again you mentioned how little fuel it takes to power these things. So it'll take a little while for you to get your package, but the company shipping it

isn't going to spend too much money delivering it. I still say, if it's a military like to use as a cargo plane. I know you can't shoot a hole in it, but what if you launched the surface to air missile at it. You know it's still full of helium. That's doesn't sound like I don't know. They're so high up there you can't the fact that we have satellites and drones. It seems to me like the surveillance uses of blimps or preposterous, especially considering that we could be

using that helium for medical purposes instead. You know, I agree, you got anything else on blimps? We got nothing else. Um, I got one other thing. If you were fascinated by the um the way blimps float, I think it's cool for some reason. I did a brain stuff video about that. You can calculate how many balloons it would take, like regular party balloons to lift yourself into the sky, and I made a video about it. So you go to

a brain stuff show dot com and check it out. Uh, And if you want to read this article, you can go to how stuff works dot com type in how blimps work and it will bring it up. And I said, how stuff works. I think So that means it's time for listener, ma'am. I'm gonna call this, uh, sterilizing addicts. Remember that Old One did a show on whether or not it's legal to sterilize addicts. It turns out it is, yeah, and that's the thing. Uh. And this is from someone

who had a personal uh stake in it. Um. It's long, but I'm gonna edit it in my head as I go. Hey, guys, just recently listen to your podcasts and sterilation sterilization of addicts had a personal story to share. Um. Until my mother is a fully recovered heroin addict and I'm grateful just to be alive. Until I was six, she was only an alcoholic. However, a drug addiction set in fast.

My mother, brother, and myself, along with whatever scumbag boyfriend she had at the time, were constantly on the run from the police, looking for shelter and searching for food. My father is an upper middle class blue collar worker who always had a sound home environment. When my mother was sent to prison when I was ten, I was sent to live with my father. Always had food, a shower, and clean clothes. Was never in fear for being homeless. Uh. I live with my father for three years until I

finally ran away. Once I regained contact with my mother. My father, even with his financial support, instability was never there, even though he was only a few feet away. My mother, even while on drugs, always listened and always cared about my thoughts and feelings, and that was what was important as a child. My mother eventually overcame her adictions cold Turkey because she could see it was damaging to me

and my brother. And she's been cleaned for eleven years now and it's an amazing mother, an amazing grandmother to my nephew. I like to believe that seeing the harder side of life made me appreciate, uh, such things and be more humble and responsible, uh and fearful of what could happen if I slipped or did not take care of myself. I don't want to be the poster child for children of addicts. Whoever, I do believe that we are all in control of our own lives. Uh. And

that is anonymized as Cornelius Jacobs, the seventh Corney Jake seven. Yeah, he said, yeah, you can read it. And I said, all anonymous anonymous size it is there some sort of name anonymizer on the internet. Now? He said, please do just make it something awesome, like Cornelius Jacobs the seventh, that's great and that's a cool ps. I've been secretly wanting Jerry to be the Tyler Dirden of your podcast. That even means like made up, but like we think

she's real, but she's not. Okay, are you real, Jerry? Jerry says no, Nope, that answers that. Cornelius Jacobs the seventh and you read the Roman numerals correctly. Chuck this time? Good going? I I yeah. Uh. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck to tell us any story like Cornelius Jacobs the seventh, um, please do. You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff

you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always, go to our cool home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com