Airship

Mastery of the skies proved a dominant preoccupation with French inventors in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In 1783, Jacques and Joseph Montgolfier designed the first balloon used for manned flight, while concurrently, Jean-Baptiste-Marie Meusnier had thought to streamline the balloon and maneuver it by some mechanized means. While several airships of similar design met with limited success from 1852, Meusnier's idea did not officially get off the ground until 1898. That A 1929 photo of the Graf Zeppelin airship, which used lighter-than-air hydrogen gas. The Library of Congress. year, the Brazilian aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont became the first pilot to accurately navigate a hydrogen-filled envelope and basket by means of a propeller mounted to a motorcycle engine.

Because of their non-rigid structure, the first blimps, like the balloon, were prone to collapsing as the gas contracted during descent. To counter this, Santos-Dumont introduced the ballonet, an internal airbag that helps maintain the envelope's structure and regulates pitch as well as lift, or buoyancy. Modern blimps continue to use ballonets positioned at the front and rear of the envelope, permitting the engineer to pump air into one or the other to change the pitch angle. For example, by increasing the amount of air in the aft ballonet, the airship becomes tail heavy, thus raising the nose skyward. Steering is further achieved by controlling rudders affixed to one of several types of tail fin configurations, allowing for basic left, right, up, and down directions. The long standard cross-shaped fin is slowly being replaced by an X-shaped configuration. While the X is more complicated, requiring a combination of rudders to complete a maneuver, it provides better ground clearance.

The car or gondola serves as the control center, passenger quarters and cargo hold of the airship. The envelope and car are connected by a series of suspended cables attached to the envelope by different types of load-sharing surfaces. Many modern airships use a curtain structure glued or bonded along the length of the envelope which evenly distributes the weight of the car and engines.