BLIMPS & THE WORLDWIDE
HELIUM SHORTAGE
Helium. It’s the stuff of childhood birthday balloons and weird
chipmunk voices, but it’s got some critical uses, too. It’s used
in MRI machines and semiconductor manufacturing and cool-
ing—it’s critical to the large hadron collider at CERN as well
as, oh yeah, airship operations. How bad is the situation? And
are there any alternatives?
The first thing to know about helium is that it’s hard to get
and hard to keep. Even though it is the second most common
element in the universe, it’s also one of the hardest to keep
track of. It’s outrageously expensive to get it from the air, so just
about all of our helium is a by-product of natural gas extraction,
though there are only a handful of refineries that collect the gas.
And because it’s so light, it can escape earth’s atmosphere, and
good luck tracking it down in space.
And helium is getting scarce, which also means it’s getting
more expensive. In part that’s because there are so few produc-
ers and in part because its fate is tied closely to natural gas
production, and carbon fuel markets are notoriously volatile and
affected by geopolitics perhaps more than any other commodity.
The United States has not helped with the situation. Its National
Helium Reserve, located in Helium City, U.S.A, otherwise known
as Amarillo, Texas, went on the auction block in 1996 and
private producers have not made helium a priority. While the
world’s production of the gas has held steady of late, demand
for it worldwide has increased, with countries including China
and Russia wanting more of the gas than ever. Back to basic
economics. With the higher demand, you get higher prices.Airships are cool machines, but in the grand scheme how
critical are they, and how much can their operators afford to pay
for a fill-up at the HE pump? It costs Goodyear about $100,000
to put helium in each one of its three airships. Because the gas
is so slippery, blimps need to be topped off every few days or
they go soft.
So what, we hear you asking, about going back to hydrogen?
It’s a great idea, except for all the infernos. And I mean “all” of
them. The New Jersey Hindenburg catastrophe wasn’t the only
one of its kind. Not even close. Before blimp operators aban-
doned hydrogen altogether, nearly 40 airships caught fire and
burned for one reason after another (everything from lightning
strikes to hitting power lines). There were hundreds of deaths
and just as many injuries.
The reason that blimp operators’ dangerous attachment to
hydrogen was so hard to give up is that it’s the perfect stuff for
the application. The gas is plentiful and cheap to produce and,
perhaps most importantly, it weighs half of what helium does.
But the whole explosion thing makes hydrogen a non-starter
for any lifting gas applications where, says the government,
flammability is to be avoided, such as...everything we can think
of. So the alternative to helium in airships is...well, helium.
The good thing is that we’re not really running out of helium
so much as not producing as much as we need. How that goes
in the future has more to do with the profitability of extracting
the stuff, the worldwide demand for it and the appetite for pay-
ing more for it.The stuff is hard to get and nearly impossible to hold on to.
Can airships survive without the light stuff? // By Isabel Goyer
to fly. And as I mentioned, the Goodyear Blimp is world-
class at doing what it’s supposed to do, spreading the
Goodyear name.
IS THERE MORE?
But are airships good for more than that? If so, they’re
not doing it yet.
Still, over the years we’ve seen numerous attempts by
companies to reintroduce airships of different varieties as
a way to move people about. They’ve all failed before they
even launched service. So new companies are looking for
new ways to market their admittedly cool new designs
while they continue to sell airships for their old roles.
The highest-profile one in recent years, the Hybrid
Air Vehicles Airlander 10, is the largest aircraft in the
world at 301 feet in length, more than 85 feet high with a
wingspan of more than 142 feet. Weight is a trickier subject
with airships than with their heavier-than-air relatives,
because for a time, airships weigh less than nothing. But
the weight of their structure is always known, and the
Airlander 10 tips the scales in at a max takeoff weight of
better than 73,000 pounds, a third again heavier than an
Embraer regional jet.
And the Airlander does have an interesting design, that
is, if being simultaneously cringeworthy and luxurious can
be classified as interesting.
The cringey part? To some folks, the twin-chamber
design looks like a giant butt, an assessment that people
with whom I’ve shared photos of the airship agree.
Luckily, the really interesting and innovative bits out-
weigh the naughty variety. The most noteworthy is the
passenger deck, which features glass floors and 360-degree38 SEPTEMBER 2019 ÇPlane&Pilot