Stuff You Should Know - How Blimps Work

Episode Date: August 28, 2014

After newsreels captured the Hindenburg erupting in fire in 1937, the promising development of airship aviation was cut short. Today companies and militaries are taking another look at blimps and the unique qualities that may revive them. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. ["HowStuffWorks.com"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's with us,

so that makes this Stuff You Should Know. How you doing? I'm good, man. I'm excited about this one. Oh, are you? Sure. Yes, yeah, because they have like eight names. Blimp, Durigible, Zeppelin, Airship.

Yeah. Well, technically LTA, I'm counting that. Lighter than Airship. Yeah. Which I think is ultimately lighter than Airship, LTA, is the umbrella term for all of those things, which are slightly different. Yeah, an LTA and an Airship is all of them.

The Durigible is all of them. A Zeppelin is rigid and a blimp is non-rigid. Nice. And mostly we just have blimps these days. Not a lot of rigid airships. Aren't there, would they constitute? Yeah, no, but they can be semi-rigid or non-rigid, right? Yeah, and I think the future, we'll talk about that

obviously at the end, but I think some of those are more of the semi-rigid style. Right, that's very huge. Yeah, but they're made of 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 Hindenburg. They think they think the Hindenburg, and then maybe concurrently or right after the Goodyear blimp. Yeah. Those are the two that really laid it on the line for blimptom. Yeah, you want to talk about the early history, I guess, and then get to the tragedy?

Yeah, because there wasn't that much time between the two to tell you the truth. Yeah, I mean, it all started, of course, with hot air balloons, because they're not so different. In 1783, a couple of Frenchies, brothers Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michel, they said they were brothers, but they have different last names. I think Jacques Etienne is his first and middle name.

Oh, OK, that makes sense. They all had three names. Last name. They're like serial killers. Montgolfier, they invented the hot air balloon, an unmanned hot air balloon in 1783, and then later that same year, a French physicist, last name DeRosier, had the first manned balloon flight,

and they were just floating around, because that's what 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. That's 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 balloons.

No, you're subject to the winds. What is the god of wind that comes out of the cloud and blows wind? Yeah. That guy. Yeah. You're subject to his wind. So if you're headed towards something,

it's go over it or hit it? Yes. OK. And you remember there was that terrible hot air balloon accident in, I think, Virginia last year, earlier this year. I didn't hear about that. Yeah, they hit a power line, I think, and then the basket caught fire, and they had to jump.

It was really bad. Wow. But yeah, you can go up and over. And I imagine it's under, if it's like a power line. Yeah, or a tunnel, if you're really good. Wow. Or you're in a cartoon, like the Laugh Olympics. Yeah.

That's something they do in there. Totally. But I think if you're really good, you could probably know where to steer into the wind. 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 Jafar did in 1852 when he finally, someone said, we should steer these things. He built the first powered airship. And it was cigar filled, 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. Doesn't take a lot, apparently. No, it really doesn't. And those were rigid airships. It's a metal framework. And in 1900, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, that name sounds familiar.

Led Zeppelin. Of Germany. And that's where they got the name, of course. Sure. But I never understood the LED, the lead. Well, it was, I think, someone said, as a joke, you guys are going to go over like a Led Zeppelin. Or they did when they played on the BBC.

Was 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 reason you put an Oomla out over Motley Crue. This makes you cool. You know, different shapes. You've got to misspell something in your band.

I think I was just looking too deeply into it. It's the problem. Yeah, LED Zeppelin would be weird. Yeah, but I think our paradigm would have adjusted. We would think LED Zeppelin would be weird if we were used to lead Zeppelin with an A. Or if the Beatles was spelled B-E-E-T-L-E-S. Yeah.

Instead of their punny name. Very punny. All right. Boy, we get sidetracked so easy with music stuff. No, really. Zeppelin was, I think, people saw that coming before they pressed play. That's true.

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 1,300 feet with up to five people. Yes. Not bad. You could bring the whole family, as long as you encounter it, as long as you totaled no more than five.

Yeah, as long as you paid off the captain. Well, then you'd just have to be a family of four. That's right. Because the captain's got to sit somewhere, right? Yeah, they got their little captain's chair. So everything was going quite swimmingly. Actually, around the turn of the 20th century, it was just widely assumed that we would have a future where

blimps, zeppelins were just a regular feature of the sky. Well, they were. Up until the Hindenburg went down, there were more than 2,000 flights, carried tens of thousands of passengers over a million miles. Like, that was air travel. We should say ultra-wealthy passengers at the time. Sure.

The Hindenburg, in particular, 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's like, I don't want my name on that thing.

Really? Yeah, not that he foretold the future. He just didn't. I don't know. He just didn't want his name after an airship. He didn't believe Freud's idea that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Yeah, or a cigar-shaped airship is just a cigar-shaped airship.

And it crashed and burned, too. So he was probably pretty stoked that he didn't have his name on it. Yeah. He very famously went, whew, when he heard the news. Exactly. So we should probably stop making light of this nearly 80-year-old tragedy,

because people did die. You know? Yeah. I mean, should we tell the story? Let's. All right, well, it took off on May 3rd, 1937. Had 36 passengers and 61 officers and crew members and trainees.

Left Frankfurt at about 7.15. And then crossed out over the Atlantic at about 2 AM the next day. It's not super fast travel. It was compared to the ship travel at the time. It was about, 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. Right. And apparently, after reading more about the Hindenburg, it's not as, and I guess ship travel is 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 then, but you never know what's going to happen.

Right, that's why they called them the leisure class. That's right. It followed a northern track across the ocean, eventually crossed into North America over the coast of Newfoundland and arrived in Lake Hurst, New Jersey about 12 hours late. And Germans, they're always late. Yeah. 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's not so great. Let's wait a little bit because I can fly around forever in those things. Right. And he said, all right, well, the Jersey Shore is nice.

Let's just go fly above that and tell everyone to look around. And look at all those old-timey bathing suits on everybody. They're up to the ankles and water. By 6 p.m., conditions had improved. And at 6.12, he sent a message saying it's suitable for landing, recommended landing now. At about 7.08, he finally pulled the blimp in. It was a bit of a dodgy approach, but he eventually got it down

toward the ground pretty skillfully. Which, as we'll see, is not as easy as you'd think, even though it sounds easy. It's not in practice. No. They dropped the landing lines. And then things went south like really fast. Yeah.

But it was filled with hydrogen, which is the lightest element, right? Yeah. And it's also probably the most flammable, or one of them. Yes, and flammable was a big error at the time. A lot of blimps had caught on fire. This was not the first accident. And people testified afterward, because not everyone died.

We'll get to the numbers here at the end of the story. But there was testimony that it appeared as if gas was pushing against the cover. Maybe it escaped from a gas cell at 725. The first visible flames appeared. And it varies. But most witnesses say that the first flames were either at the top of the hull, forward of the vertical fin,

or between the rear port engine and the port fin. And they described it as a mushroom-shaped flower. And it pretty much engulfed the tail 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? No. 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 hydrogen is light, they were burning upward. Well, it says here, basically, it was all dependent on where you were. If you were close to a means of exit, you generally survived. If you were deep inside the ship,

like in the power room, along the keel, or in the smoking room, there's a smoking room in the Hindenburg. I'm surprised it wasn't all smoking. Big blimpful of hydrogen? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I hadn't thought about it. They had apparently a double airlocked door,

one electric lighter. And you were allowed to smoke as long as you put it out before you left. And so like I said, if you were in the smoking room on B-deck, you were in big trouble. If you were one of the nine men closest to the front of the ship, you definitely didn't survive. Really?

Yeah. So out of the 97 people on board, 62 survived. And 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. Yeah, it went up fast.

But 62 did survive, 13 of the 36 passengers and 22 of the 61 crew. And there's still two guys alive today. Yeah, wow. I still checked. Wow. It was two years ago. But they don't like to talk about it.

I can imagine. Yeah, there's one. Pretty kinetic experience. They're both named Werner, Werner Franz and Werner Donner. The two Werners. And one was a little cabin boy and one was a passenger with his family. And they were contacted for like the ceremony.

I guess you don't call it an anniversary, I guess. Memorial? Yeah, it's an anniversary. Yeah, it just sounds like a party. But they said, no, we're not coming. We don't like to talk about it. So it's been a longstanding mystery exactly what happened. I found an article in the UK Independent from 2013

about a study from that year that found, they said, they figured it out. They built 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 60 feet long, so good sized ones. And they tried to blow them up because there was a rumor that it was sabotage, that everybody hated the Nazis

even then. And they tried all manner of 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 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 ignited a hydrogen leak. That fire caused the explosion. That must have been the gas pushing out. Yeah. Yeah, one thing they say definitely isn't, which they long thought it was, was the actual fabric, was painted in this flammable stuff. And that's not true.

It was the standard fabric. It was just a big balloon filled hydrogen. That caught fire. So when that happened, the future of blimps were just pretty much like that was it for blimps. That wasn't the immediate end, but as far as commercial blimp travel, that's tough for an industry to get over.

So it kind of fell the wayside, although they did continue on in a couple of forms. Up until the 60s, the US government, especially the Navy, maintained blimps, one of the, I think, I guess, the Air Force. I don't know if it was the Navy, but one of the branches of the US military used blimps as giant aircraft carriers of the air, 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 a trapeze mechanism coming out of the bottom of the blimp, so you just 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 release the hook from the trapeze and start to free fall, and then you just go vroom off into the distance and go, thanks for the ride, lady. That sounds really weird. And they had even bigger planes that were never realized, because the Navy scrapped the program in, I think, 1962 to have like a landing strip on top of the blimp.

So you could have just planes take off and land and then be stored in the blimp, which would have been pretty awesome. Well, cargo airships are the wave of the future, perhaps, so we'll see. Yeah. But that was the military was involved in blimps for most of the first half of the 20th century.

And then our friends at Goodyear came up with a blimp that has really served them well. They were making blimps for the military, and then they started using them for commercial purposes. And everybody knows about Goodyear, 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 Goodyear. Yeah. But 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 an auction bid to win a trip. 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. OK, I was going to say, if the trip never happened, that doesn't sound like the Goodyear I know. No, no. They're very, they're like the Germans. So they've got, there's three Goodyear blimps, actually.

There's one in, I believe, Texas. There's one in California. There's one in Ohio. Or is it Florida? California and Ohio is what it is. I'm sorry. The spirit of Goodyear? 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 Wingfoot One. Nice. So they're going to have four? Yeah, because there's a lot of sporting events.

There sure are. And you can't watch a big sporting event without hearing the words aerial coverage provided by Goodyear. Yeah. And those shots, man, they're pretty great. They really are. They haven't been around forever.

It was, I think, an orange bowl in Miami where the first one was broadcast in the 60s, maybe. Something like that. And it changed America. Yeah, well, it certainly gives them a lot of press and saves, well, I don't know about saves of money. I haven't seen their balance sheet. But they don't have to spend money on that 30-second spot.

They still do, to tie into the blimp. But it's great advertising for them. Yeah. They also were good sports in a movie called Black Sunday. Did you ever see that movie? Oh, of course. I never saw it. But apparently, they provided some of the footage

for the movie and let their blimp be used and let their name be used, even. Like, it wasn't like the good wire blimp. 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.

Right. 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? Yeah. Oh, no, I didn't know that. No, I haven't read any of Silence of the Lambs. He does very good research. Interesting guy. Nice.

Anyway, so Goodyear 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. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

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Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You want to know how blimps work, buddy? I do. They're pretty simple.

They are. This was the delight to learn, because it was like, oh, I thought there 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, the most complicated thing on the blimp

is probably the gyroscopic camera on the front of it to film the football stadium. Yep, I think you're right. So let's talk about the anatomy of a blimp. You mentioned the envelope earlier. That is the thing that you're looking at. That is the 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, a neoprene, two-ply neoprene polyester, generally. Is that what the envelope's made of? Yeah. There's a company called the ILC Dover Corporation. They make a lot of skins, and they

use the same material that they make space suits out of for NASA for blimps, too. Good enough for Neil Armstrong, buddy. Yeah. Good enough for my blimp. This is like all about Ohio, this one. Oh, is he Ohio? Yeah, I had it done it.

So it was good year. No, no, I knew that. So were your in-laws. That's right. The envelopes they hold, and it depends on the blimps for all of these statistics, of course. But between 67,250,000 cubic feet of helium, and it's not super.

The pressure's really low inside, 0.07 pounds per square inch. So that's why if you shot a blimp, it wouldn't like fall. No. It would just leak very slowly, and you just land it and patch it up, I guess. Yeah, very slowly. Yeah, in 1994, the British Ministry of Defense fired hundreds of bullets into an airship.

Just for fun? Well, no, to see if it could be shot down in battle, basically. And it took many hours to deflate and land, so. Cool. And they don't even deflate them. They just leave them that way. So their natural structure, well, not natural,

but their original structure prevents 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've hover a blimp over. Sure. Now I understand.

But secondly, as we'll see, it also has to do with the dynamics of flight, of hovering in the atmosphere. So you've got the envelope. And the envelope also has something called nose cone battens, which is basically like a support structure for the nose, the front of it. Yeah, just a very, very tip.

And it keeps the blimp's 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 battens are like the fingers that distribute the stress over the front of the cone. Gotcha, OK, so they're like the structure that comes out of the nose, right?

Yeah. And then also on the nose is the mooring 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.

Just like a balloon. That's right. So here's where it gets a little craftier, like 19th century crafty, but still neat nonetheless. Sure. There's something called ballonettes, 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 want it to go up, you deflate these ballonettes. You want it to go down, you inflate them. And the reason that works is because you're inflating these ballonettes with air. And helium, which blimps fly using now, is lighter than air. So more air means the blimp's 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 operates. And there's one in the fore and one in the aft. So that's how you control your trim. You can just nose it up or nose it down, filling up or deflating. That's the pitch axis.

That's right. Or trim. OK. Well, the trim is the levelness. Oh, OK. Yeah. And the axis where the nose and the back go up and down, that's the trim axis.

Or no, the pitch axis. Right? Yeah. OK. No one can see you nod in agreement. OK. Chuck, then there's the catenary curtain and the suspension cables.

Which I didn't get the catenary curtain, really. I understood the suspension cable was just fine. It's on the inside, about 30% off-center. And it basically, if you look, it sort of looks like where you attach the basket to the hot air balloon. They all, there's a number of these lines that run down and all meet at a single point near the gondola.

Right. And that's what you attach the gondola to the blimp using, right? Yeah. So basically, 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 vertical lines, whereas the fattings are the horizontal lines. Yeah. OK, I understand that. Exactamundo. Then you've got the really technical stuff, the flight control surfaces. So everything we've just described

is basically balloons and then the structure that gives the balloon its shape, right? Yeah. And then 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 chair, he's got little foot pedals, just like a clutch pedal you would push in. And on the bottom, very bottom back of the rudder, there's something called a boost tab. And that's just a little additional sectioned off

piece of the rudder that's also controllable. It's like a little mini rudder. And it assists with the rudder, I think, to make an even tighter turn. Gotcha. 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.

And then there's two elevators, and they, 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 behind the curtain, like all the machine he's messing with.

It does. There's steam blowing out. It looks very steam-punky when you look at it. So you steer up or down with that wheel, and that's pretty much it. I don't know. Don't forget the engines. Oh, well, yeah.

I mean, as far as driving this puppy. Yeah, the flight control. Yeah. This is what separates it from hot air balloons. Don't forget. The engines. No, the hot air, the, well, yeah, the engines, but also the flight control services.

But the engines are turboprop 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 profile the thing forward, but very cleverly. There's also something called air scoops that are basically these funnels that face the back of the turboprop.

And they catch the vented air out of the props, and they use those to inflate the ballonettes. Yeah, that's called prop wash. This is all the lingo I've learned. That's good stuff. 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 30 to 70. This is miles per hour, not knots. So how about that? And 70 is cruising, apparently, like 30 to 50 is where you want to be. Get this, I did the calculations. So one of the great advantages blimps have, which is the reason we're even talking about these

things, or anybody's talking about still making blimps, is that they can stay aloft for days, weeks even. Which gives them a huge advantage over airplanes, which have to stop and refuel and stop and refuel. But going 70 miles per hour, Chuck, a blimp, nonstop at that rate, could travel the circumference of the Earth around the equator in 14 days. Wow, with that and the fuel?

Yeah, which I think is not very hard. No, at 30 knots, the sky ship, which is this one example, consumes about eight gallons of fuel per hour. So apparently, during an entire week of operations, it consumes less fuel than a 767 commercial jet uses to move away from the gate. Wow. So it's super green, which is kind of cool.

You can understand why cargo companies are looking at them, too. Yeah, and it runs on avgas, of course, not just regular old gas. You couldn't pull it up to a gas station like your car, because I think avgas is still leaded, or a lot of it is. And that's the diff. That's not that green.

Yeah, true, but they're not burning much of it. 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 it to pop. Yeah, that's true. So you've got your air valves for the bladders inside,

and they're underneath, two 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. But if something does happen, you can either manually do it, or it's set to automatically release. And if you look at the Goodyear blimp,

it's sort of in the Y of year. Wow. Just looks like a little gas cap. You really know your blimps, man. Well, I mean, I went to the Goodyear site. It's awesome. You can like, there's all sorts of animated gifs, and, or is it GIFs, I never could remember.

I say GIF. Yeah. Yeah. Graphic interface. Yeah, but there is a correct way. I just don't know what it is. Well, the guy who created GIF says he pronounces it GIF. Oh, well then it's GIF.

Which kind of throws a wrench in the works, but I disagree with him. Morgulons. GIF. The Goodyear blimp gondola, which is where we are now, is 22.75 feet long. It is aluminum on welded steel frame, and that's where everyone rides.

Depending on your blimp, it's going to hold up to, well, it depends on how big the blimp is, but usually you don't see a blimp with more than 12 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, too. Sure.

Depending on what you use it for, or it can also be the massive cargo hold. Yeah, and you've got your communications up there, your flight surface controls, any nav equipment, propeller controls. That's where all the, there's not much else to it, besides what you got there in the gondola. Yeah.

What's funny is, I always thought blimps were basically like, you know, you get the blimp in the air and it takes off and then that's it. But it's, at least with Goodyear, it's kind of like, 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, a 18-wheeler, and a bunch of vans

that follow it everywhere. Because I guess those things break down. Yeah, and apparently the pilots, too, they're FAA 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 yeah, it's like a little self-contained unit. All just traveling around together, like tornado chasers. Right. Oh, and you talked about, 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, they call it a free balloon. So it's buoyant, 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. I gotcha. It's not just attached to a cable, attached to a pedal.

Attached to a wheel that the guy moves next to. 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, but we try to avoid super bad weather. Yeah, I don't blame them.

Sure, because, I mean, that's not fun. No. You want to be above the Rose Bowl in like 70 degree weather. Sure. Yeah. So coming up, we're going to talk about how blimps fly, and then also the future of blimps.

And if there is such a thing, after this. Stuff you shouldn't know. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. -♪ Stuff you should know. So, Chuck, the way blimps fly is 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's slightly heavier than hydrogen, but not that much more. You don't notice a difference, I would guess. Yeah, I mean, you get why they use hydrogen. They weren't dummies. Right, it was lighter than air.

Sure. The lightest of all the gas. Yes. Of all the elements, from what I understand. 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 capacity of 0.70 pounds per square foot, right? Yeah. Which is 1.1 kilograms per square meter. Which means it can lift a pretty decent amount of weight for just a little bit of amount. Sure. And since they're filling these balloons

with hundreds of thousands of cubic feet or cubic meters of helium, they can lift 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 weigh,

then it will rise more than the air. It will rise into the air. Yeah, it's called positive buoyancy. Yep. 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 get that thing where it's,

once you've got your cruising altitude, you just wanna be at the same level. You're going to go up and down. And you wanna fill it up by blowing exhaust into your air scoops, which fill up your ballonets. And the higher you get into the atmosphere, the less pressure there is, which means the higher up you could float conceivably.

So you wanna 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? Yeah, that's what you want. And then when you wanna land, you do just the opposite. 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 that's the life of a blimp. And like I said, they don't inflate and deflate these. I'm sure it's a time and an expense. And I think they're running out of helium too, didn't we learn that? Yeah, do you know much about that?

Well, we covered it in the, I probably, the Mars turbine up, Mars turbine, yeah, that was it. But I read a really interesting article in I think the New Republic, I can't remember. I found it online last night. And 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 1925 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 a law that said, start selling the stuff off Bureau of Land Management.

Yeah, but only make enough money off of it to recoup whatever we've put into it over the years, which is like $1 billion. So they started selling it. And by setting the price artificially, they created an artificial market because this is like 80, 90% 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 MRI, superconductivity, molecular analysis, uses helium to 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 Bureau 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 90s, 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 Bureau of Land Management to keep selling this stuff.

Let's just get rid of all of it for no good reason. I don't understand why. Interesting. Like it made sense in the 90s 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 once there's no helium, there's no helium.

We can't go get it anywhere else or manufacture it. 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 MRIs or pharmaceutical research or that kind of stuff. Birthday parties.

Well, that's the thing. So the med and pharma sectors use 29% of helium worldwide. Welding uses 17% because they use helium to weld. Yeah. Party balloons equals 8% of worldwide helium use. Wow. I have a feeling that party balloons are gonna 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.

Wow. So 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 do like a hybrid so it's fueled by hot air, like a balloon. Probably wouldn't, I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know either. 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. Yeah. Or it's not gonna be funded enough to really, 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 were 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 DOD was placing for helium. Right. Well, that makes sense. And the military's interested because they basically could be a satellite, function as a satellite. Yeah, like a 10,000 foot satellite.

Yeah, pretty much. There are people doing it though. Lockheed Martin has a P791 that is super cool looking. And it is a tri-hole. If you look at it from the front, it looks sort of like three blimps squashed together. And it has four big, it looks like feet, these disc-shaped cushions that are apparently for landing.

And these are all so cool. There's another one in California from Worldwide Arrows Corp called the Dragon Dream. And it's different looking. It sort of looks like a whale shark, did you see it? Yeah. It's a single hull, I guess, but it's sort of kind of flattened out.

Yeah, it looks like a whale shark. They actually submitted that design to the DOD. And when the DOD scrapped the program, they bought their design back because they wanna 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 hangar, yeah.

And they don't know if they have the money to even fix it and then continue. Well, they have another model called the ML866 that it sounds like they're putting their energy into. It supposedly can carry 250 tons, which is more than twice the cargo payload of a cargo 777. Wow.

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 gonna 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 launch the surface to air missile at it? You know, it's still full of helium. That's, it didn't sound like, I don't know. I mean, 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 are preposterous, especially considering that we could be using that helium for medical purposes instead.

Yeah. You know? I agree. You got anything else on blimps? We got nothing else. I got one other thing. If you were fascinated by the way blimps float, I think it's cool for some reason.

I did a brain stuff video. Oh, nice. 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 go to brainstuffshow.com and check it out. Nice.

And if you want to read this article, you can go to howstuffworks.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 mail. I'm going to call this sterilizing addicts. Remember that old one? Did a show on whether or not it's legal to sterilize addicts.

Turns out it is. Yeah, and that's the thing. And this is from someone who had a personal stake in it. It's long, but I'm going to edit it in my head as I go. OK. Hey, guys. Just recently listened to your podcast on sterilization of addicts.

I had a personal story to share. 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, 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. And when my mother was sent to prison when I was 10, I was sent to live with my father. Always had food, a shower, and clean clothes. Was never in fear for being homeless. I lived 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 and stability, 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 addictions cold turkey because, wow, she could see it was damaging to me

and my brother. She's been clean for 11 years now, and is an amazing mother, an amazing grandmother, to my nephew. I like to believe that seeing the harder side of life made me appreciate such things and be more humble and responsible 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. However, I do believe that we are all in control of our own lives, and that is anonymized as Cornelius Jacobs, the seventh. Cornelius Jacobs, the seventh. Yeah, he said, yeah, you can read it. And I said, I'll anonymize it. Is there some sort of name anonymizer on the internet?

No, he said, please do just make it something awesome like Cornelius Jacobs, the seventh. That's great. And I said, cool. P.S., I've been secretly wanting Jerry to be the Tyler Durden of your podcast. I don't know what that even means. Like made up, but we think she's real, but she's not.

Oh, 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.

Yeah, nice going. D-I-I. Uh, if you want to get in touch with me and Chuck to tell us any story like Cornelius Jacobs, the seventh, please do. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast

at howstuffworks.com. And as always, go to our cool home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Attention, Bachelor Nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all. And now he's telling all.

It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.