Support for stuff you should know is brought to you by TD Ameritrade, investing isn't one size fits all. Every investor has a unique style. And that's why TD Ameritrade offers two different mobile apps. There's TD Ameritrade Mobile, which lets you manage your portfolio with streamlined simplicity or THINKORSWIM mobile, which gives you the tools you need for more advanced trades and in-depth analysis. Visit TD Ameritrade dotcom apps to find the one that's right for you. Once again, that's TD Ameritrade dotcom apps.

To some, he Ziggy Stardust, to others, the thin white Duke or Major Tom, but who is David Bowie really? To answer that will have to go off the record, off the record as a new music biography podcast.

Every season profiles one legendary artist. To start, we'll explore the faces of David Bowie.

Each episode tells the story of one of his iconic personas. Together, they form an intimate portrait of the complex cultural giant.

Listen and follow off the record on the I Heart radio app Apple podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, friends. Have you ever flown in a blimp? I haven't. It's one of my goals. And on August twenty eight, twenty fourteen, I had neither. But that's what we talk about and more. And the episode how blimps work coming up right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of pilot radios HowStuffWorks.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles would be Chuck Bright and Jerry's with us. So that makes the stuff you should know. How are you doing? I'm good, man. This is I'm excited about this. Oh, are you sure? Blimps. Yeah, because they have like eight names. A blimp dirigible. Zeppelin. Yeah. Airship. Yeah. Uh, well technically LTA I'm counting that lighter than air ship.

Yeah. Which I think is ultimately lighter than airship. LTA is the umbrella term for all of those things which are slightly different. Yeah, I think an LTA and an airship is all of them.

The dirigible is all of them.

A Zeppelin is rigid and a blimp is not nice. And mostly we just have blimps these days. Not a lot of rigid airships aren't there, but would they 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 those are some of those are more the Simmi rigid style, right?

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 the 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 Blimp Dome. Yes. You know, 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, it all started, of course, with hot air balloons because they're not so different. In 1783, a couple of Frenchy's brothers, Jack Etienne and Joseph Michel there said they were brothers, but they had different.

I think Jack HCN is his first and middle name.

Oh, OK. That makes sense. They all had three names like The Real 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, De Rozier, had the first manned balloon flight and they were just floating around because that's what their 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 hot air balloon. Know 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 subject to his whim.

So if if you're headed toward something, it's go over it or hit it.

Yes. OK, and you remember there's that terrible hot air balloon accident. And I think Virginia last year, earlier this year, I didn't hear about it. 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. Wow.

But yeah, you can go up and over and I imagine it gets under if it's like a power line. Yeah. Or a tunnel.

If you're really good, uh, or you're in a cartoon like the last Olympics. Yeah. 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 Jeffard did in 1852 when he finally someone said we should steer these things.

And 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 didn't take a lot, apparently. No, it really doesn't. Um, and those were rigid airships. It's a metal framework. And in nineteen hundred count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, that name sounds familiar.

Led Zeppelin of Germany. And that's where they got the name of course. Sure.

Because 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. But why take the aout?

Because the same reason you take the air out of Def Leppard.

I've never understood that he's in the same way he put it out over Motley Crew.

This makes it cool. You know, difficult to differentiate. You've got to misspell something in your band. I think I was just looking too deeply into it is the problem.

Yeah, Led Zeppelin would be weird.

Yeah. But I think, like, our paradigm would have adjusted. We would think Led Zeppelin would be weird if we were used to Led Zeppelin with the name or if the Beatles was spelled BGT Élysées.

Yeah. Instead of their punny name.

Very Punti. All right. Before we get sidetracked so easy with the music stuff.

Not really. Zeppelin was I think people saw that coming before they press play.

That's true. So that was the rigid airship, the first one. And those have a metal framework and it had tailfins and Rutter's had combustion engines and could cruise at about 1500 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 total. No more than five.

Yeah, as long as you paid off the captain. Well, then you just have to be a family for. That's right. Because the captains get to sit somewhere. Right. I got the little captain's chair, so everything was going quite swimmingly, actually, around the turn of the 20th century, there was 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 two thousand 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 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, like, foretold the future. He just didn't uh. I don't know, he just didn't want him named 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 there. 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 through. Yeah. When he heard the news. Exactly. So, uh, 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, uh. 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 seven fifteen and then crossed out out over the Atlantic at about 2:00 a.m. the next day.

It's not super fast travel.

It was compared to the ship travel at the time it was Shrout 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 trouble 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. That's why they call them the leisure class. That's right.

Uh, it, uh, followed a northern track across the ocean, um, eventually crossed into North America over the coast of Newfoundland and arrived in Lakehurst, 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 they can fly around forever in those things. Right. 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 that basically they're up to the ankles in water.

Um, by 6:00 PM, conditions had improved. And at six, 12, he sent a message saying it's suitable for landing, recommended landing. Now, at about seven or eight, he finally pulled the blimp in.

There's a bit of a dodgy approach, but he eventually got it down toward the ground pretty, you know, skillfully, which, as we'll see, is not as easy as you'd think, even though it's not in practice.

No.

Uh, they dropped the landing lines and then things went south, like, really fast.

Yeah, well, 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. Inflammable was a big error at the time. A lot of blimps had caught on fire.

This is not the first accident. And, uh, there was you know, people testified afterward because not everyone died will 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. Well, at seven twenty five, the first visible flames appeared and. It varies, but most witnesses say the first flames were either at the top of the hall 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 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 depended 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, smoking room in the Hindenburg.

I'm surprised it wasn't all smoking with a big blimp full of hydrogen. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I thought it was not a good idea.

They had apparently a double airlock door, one electric glider, and 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.

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. I think when you see the footage, I mean, you 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, 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. Yes. Checked as of two years ago, but they don't like to talk about it. I can imagine. Yeah, there's one traumatic experience.

They're both named Verner, Verner Frons and Bernard Donor, the two Vernors and one was a little cabin boy and one was a passenger with his family.

And they were contacted for, like, the, you know, the ceremony.

I guess you don't call it an anniversary, I guess, uh, Memorial Day anniversary. 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 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 like scale models of the Hindenburg, which was like two and a half football fields long, by the way. Yeah. They were building scale models that were like like 60 feet long. So good sized ones. And they tried to blow them up because there was a rumor that it was sabotage.

Right. 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. Oh, yeah.

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 by pushing 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. Right. And that's not true. It was the standard fabric, OK? It was just big balloon full of hydrogen and spark. Yeah. Yeah.

So when that happened, the 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, yeah. That's tough for an industry to get over. So it kind of fell by the wayside, although they did continue on in a couple of forms up until the sixties, the US government, especially the Navy, maintain blimps. One of the I think I guess the Air Force, I don't know is the Navy.

But one of the branches of the US military used blimps as 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 trapeze mechanism coming out of the bottom of the blimp. So just like hook your plane on, climb up and say, hey, guys, where are we going? Or you can take off from there to what?

Yes. How do you take off? You just drop.

I think you just released the hook from the trapeze and start of freefall and then you just go off into the distance. You go. Thanks for the ride, lady. That sounds really weird.

And they had even bigger plans that were never realized because the Navy scrapped the program and I think nineteen sixty two to have a landing strip on top of the blimp so you could have just like planes take off and land and then be stored like in the blimp. It would have been pretty awesome. Well cargo airships or the wave of the future perhaps. We'll see. Yeah.

So but there was the the military was involved in blimps for most of the first half of the twentieth century. And then 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 they started using them for commercial purposes. And everybody knows. Goodyear thinks that 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. 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. And I think it never happened. The trip never happened. I think he either lost the bid. I have to ask him, but I don't think they ever wrote on the blimp.

OK, I was going to say the trip never happened. That doesn't sound like the Goodyear I know.

No, no. They are 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. Yeah. 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 and what, like the 60s maybe, I don't know, something like that. And it changed America.

Yeah, well it certainly gives them a lot of press and say, well I don't know, but save some money. Haven't seen their balance sheet. But it's they don't to spend money on that 30 second spot. They still do to tie into the blimp. Right. But it's great advertising for them. Yeah. They also were good sports in a movie called Black Sunday Night. You ever see that movie? Oh, of course I never saw it, but apparently the 70s, they provided they provided some of the footage for the movie and let their blimps be used 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 use 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.

Yeah, which is weird, but it was written by the guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs.

Oh, yeah. He's a good writer. If you ever read any of his books.

Uh oh. He was the book writer. Yeah. Oh, no, I didn't know that. Yeah. No, I haven't read any science.

He does very good research. Interesting. Nice. Um, anyway, so good. You're good. You're 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.

Who is David Bowie? Well, it depends on who you ask or which records you play. To some, he's Ziggy Stardust, to others, the thin. Why do more Major Tom? But who is David Bowie, really? To answer that question will have to go off the record.

My name is Jordan Ron Talk and I'm the host of Off the Record, a new music biography podcast from my heart. Radio Off the record goes beyond the songs and into the hearts and minds of rock's greatest legends. Every season profiles one classic artist taking listeners on a wild ride through their extraordinary career. The first season examines the life or rather lives of David Bowie. Each episode of the 11 part audio event tells the story of one of his iconic personas.

Together, these faces form an intimate portrait of one of the 20th century's most influential figures. So who was David Bowie?

Tune in to. Off the record to find out, listen and follow on the radio Apple podcast wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, guys, I'm Marcia below, and I am Troy Millions, and we are the host of the Ernie Ilija podcast, where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance.

We talk to the legends of business, sports and entertainment about how they got their start and most importantly, how they make their money earning.

Elysha is a college business class mixed with pop culture.

The annual Lesia podcast is available now. Listen to earn your Liljana I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or whatever you listen to podcast.

You want to know how blimps work, buddy, I do the pretty simple there. This is a delight to learn because it's like, oh, I thought that 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 right there, like the pontoon boats of this guy. Yeah.

Like 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 have you mentioned the envelope earlier. That is the thing that you're looking at. That is a big cigar shaped balloon that'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, two ply, neoprene polyester generally.

Is that what the envelope is 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 spacesuits out of for NASA, for blimps to good enough for Neil Armstrong, buddy. Yeah, good enough for my blimp.

This is all about Ohio. This one. Oh, is he Ohio? Yeah. Yeah, I have done it. So it was good, you know. No, I knew that. So are your in-laws. That's right.

Uh, the envelopes they hold and it depends on the blimps for all of these statistics, of course, but between sixty seven thousand two hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet of helium. And 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, it just leak very slowly and you just land it and patch it up, I guess.

Yeah, very slowly. Yeah.

1994, the British Ministry of Defence fired hundreds of bullets into an airship just for fun. Well, now to see if it would could be shot down in battle, basically. Oh God. 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 the flight of hovering in the atmosphere. Yeah. So you got the envelope and the envelope also has something called nose cone batten's. Yeah. Which is basically like a support structure for the nose. The front of it. Yeah. 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 just the very tip and then the batten's are like the fingers that distribute the stress over the front of the cone.

Gotcha. OK, so there like the um the the structure that comes out of the nose, right. Yeah. And then also on the nose is the mooring hook because you got a 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 tied down. Yeah. Very simple. Um, 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 balance, right? Yeah, and these are basically air bladders that are located within the envelope. Yeah. 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 balance. You wanted to go down, you inflate them. And the reason that works is because you're inflating or you're inflating these balance 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 operates and there's one in the four 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 Levinas, OK, yeah, and the axe is where the nose and the back go up and down, that's the trim axis, you know, the the pitch axis, right? Yeah.

OK, no one can see you nodding in agreement.

OK, Chuck. Then there's the category curtain and the suspension cables, which I didn't get the category curtain really.

I understood the suspension cables just fine.

It's on the on the inside, about 30 percent off center.

And basically, if you look it sort of looks like the where you attach the basket to the hot air balloon, they all you know, there's a number of these lines that run down.

And I'll 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 you if the blimp envelope was it 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, OK, up to the top.

So they would be like the vertical lines. Yeah. Is it a V the horizontal line. Yeah. OK, I understand exactly. Mundo 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 services are basically a rudder and elevators and they're the things that you can control to make the balloon tilt 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 yard and you do it with little. If you look at the captain's chair, he's got a little wheel foot pedals. It's like a clutch pedal you would put in push in and on the bottom, very bottom back of the rudder. There's something called the booster 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, 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. It totally the curtain, like all the machine is messing with it blown out.

It looks very steampunk when you look at it, huh? So you say you're up or down with that wheel and that's pretty much it. Oh, no, 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 air the well. Yeah. The engines but also the flight control surfaces. 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 propel 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 balance.

Yeah, that's called prop wash 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 nuts. So how about that in 70 is cruising apparently like 30 to 50 is where you want to be.

Get this, I did the calculations. So one of the one of the great advantages blimps have, which is the reason we're even talking about this thing or anybody's talking about still making blimps, is that they can stay aloft for days, weeks even. Yeah. 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. They had enough fuel. Yeah. Which I think is not very hard now.

They at 30 knots, the Sky ship, which is just 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.

Just kind of cool. You can understand why cargo companies are looking at them, too. Yeah, and that's it runs on AVX gas, of course, not just regular old gas. You couldn't pull it up to a gas station like your car because I think our gas is still leaded or a lot of it is. Oh, 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 got to be able to let air in and out. You also want to be able to 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 for the bladders inside and they're underneath to to up front to 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 way of year.

Wow. It 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 thinking, like there's all sorts of animated GIFs and or is it gifts? I never could 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 Jeff. Oh, it's kind of throws a wrench in the works but I disagree with him.

Morgellons give, uh, the Goodyear Blimp Gondola, which is where we are now, is twenty two point seventy five feet long. And 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 to shore, 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 service controls any nav equipment, um, 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 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, 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, a 18 wheeler and a bunch of vans that follow it everywhere, because I guess those things break down.

Yeah.

And apparently the pilots to their 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. Yeah. To work on the ground or make repairs. And yeah, it's like a little self-contained unit.

All just traveling around together like a like a tornado chasers, right? Oh, and you talked about the 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.

You so you lose control of the flight service controls.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's they call it a free balloon, so it's buoyant and it's kept aloft, obviously. But if they lose all the power, then you can do is send in descent, because I think I guess the rudders in the elevators are also powered mechanisms.

I got as not just attached to a cable attached to a petal attached to a wheel that the guy who's 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 no 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 feature of blimps and if there is such a thing after this.

Never thought you'd make a great switchboard operator or seltzer man or professional royal mistress if full time jobs are your jam.

We've got a podcast just for you.

I'm Helen Hong and I'm at Beat and we host the new podcast job Sulit, taking a look at jobs that used to be a thing and now not so much.

My Heart Radio's number one for podcasts, but don't take our word for it. Fine job salute on the I Heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Alec Baldwin. Listen to my podcast, here's the thing I heart radio, it's my chance to talk with artists, policy makers and performers like the actress Kristen Bell.

And the moment I said, you know what, I have a thing. And it's a quirky, weird, fun thing that can be snarky and I love doing it.

I do it pretty well. Why not lean into it? And that is when I felt like I started becoming happier.

Music legend Mick Fleetwood Fleetwood Mac was always about change so that you were accepted for who you were.

Former governor of Vermont Howard Dean. I took the call in this quavering voice and the other end of the phone says, I regret to inform you that the governor has died of a heart attack and you're the governor.

That was the end of my medical practice and best selling author Isabel Wilkerson.

People come up to me of all different backgrounds. I would say to me, I had no idea that this happened in our country.

If you like listening as much as I like talking with interesting people, go to here's the thing, Doug, and subscribe now on the I Heart app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

So, Chuck, the 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, 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, OK, 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 70 pounds per square foot. Right. Yeah. Which is one point one kilograms per square meter, which means it can with a pretty decent amount of. Wait, yeah, for just a little bit about sure.

And since they're filling these balloons with hundreds of thousands of cubic feet or cubic meters of these 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 in 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. And what you want as a blimp pilot is neutral buoyancy. So that's why you're going to control, like we talked about your air bladders to get that thing where it's once you've got your cruising altitude, you just want to be at the same level.

You want up and down and you want to fill it up by blowing exhaust into your air scoops which fill up your balance sheet. 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 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 want to 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 expense. And I think they're running on helium, too. Didn't we learn that? Yeah. Do you know much about that?

Well, we covered it in the probably the Mars turbine up far 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 one billion dollars.

Yeah. So they started selling it and by setting the price artificially, they created an artificial market because this is like 80, 90 percent 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. Yeah, but it was artificial. So you had artificially cheap helium flooding the market, which had a two pronged effect. One led to these scarcities that we're running into now because they just started selling it off in a fire sale to private industry. But the other more positive effect it had was that it spurred all of this technological innovation because make 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 advance 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. Yeah, which would be fine if we just clamped down and said, OK, 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. It's like, keep selling this stuff.

Let's get rid of all of it for no good reason. I don't understand why. Interesting. Like, it made sense in the 90s. Maybe you had all these great effects, but now it's like, OK, we understand that helium is literally irreplaceable, as the article put it. Like there's once there's no helium, there's no helium. You 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.

Yeah. And there's good interest to like using it for MRI's or pharmaceutical research or like birthday parties. Well, that's the thing. So the med and pharma sectors use twenty nine percent of helium worldwide. Welding uses 17 percent because they use helium to weld. Yeah, party balloons equals eight percent of. Worldwide helium use. Wow, I have a feeling the 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. 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 like do like a hybrid. So it's fueled by hot air. Like a balloon.

Mm hmm. Probably wouldn't. I don't know. 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 going to 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. Yeah. And all these companies ran in and we're like, here's your blimps, here's your blimp. So 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 is interested because they basically could be a satellite function as a satellite.

Yeah, like a 10000 foot satellite. Yeah, pretty much. There are people doing it, though. Lockheed Martin has a piece of Ninety-One that is super cool looking and it is a trial.

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 apparently for landing.

Mm hmm. And these are all so cool. There's another one in California from worldwide Eros Corp. called the Dragon Dream. Yeah. And it's different. Look. And 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 they actually submitted that design to the DOD. And when the DOD scrapped the program, they bought their design back because they want to go commercial like cargo carrier with it.

Yeah, and they're in trouble, though, because the dragon died.

Well, it had a roof collapse in an area 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 66 that it sounds like they're putting their energy into. It supposedly can carry two hundred and fifty 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. Yeah. So it'll take a little while for you to get your package, but the company's 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 a surface to air missile at it? You know, it's still full of helium. That's. Didn't sound like, I don't know, maybe 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. Anything else on blimps? We got nothing else. I got one other thing. If you were fascinated by the 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 you go to brain stuff, show dotcom and check it out. Nice.

And if you want to read this article, you can go to HowStuffWorks Dotcom type in how blimps work and it will bring it up. And I said HowStuffWorks. 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, listen to your podcast and sterilization.

Sterilization of addicts had personal story to share until my mother is a fully recovered heroin addict and I'm grateful just to be alive. Till 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.

When my mother was sent to prison when I was 10, I was sent to live with my father. Always had food, shower and clean clothes, was never in fear for being homeless. I love 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, well, she could see it was damaging to me and my brother. She's been clean for 11 years now and is an amazing mother and 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.

Corney Jake seven. Yeah, he said, yeah, you can read it.

And I said, I'll 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. That's a cool piece.

I've been secretly wanting Jerry to be the Tyler Durden of your podcast.

Oh, that even means like made up. But like, we think she's real, but she's not. Oh, OK. Are you real, Jerry? Jerry says no.

Nope. That answers that. Cornelius Jacobs, the seven. And you read the Roman numerals correctly. Chuck this time. Good. Go.

Yeah let's go the 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 that s why podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff. You should know you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and as always, go to our cool home on the web stuff.

You should know dot com. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, my radio, the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, with that, it's just hilarious and I'm just making sure y'all know that I got a book, it's called Caerphilly Reckless on the Black Effect Network.

I'm going to be telling you all my business and some of your other people's business, too. And ain't no limits to the things I talk about. You know that if y'all know me from baby mama drama to healthy relationships, from child support to stimulus checks, look, will you take a step back and you realize that we all go through crazy stuff, but we got stories to tell. Those situations do not define you, but they do make for real good conversation in the world with click bait and cancel calls and can tell your story before you do.

I'm creating the outlet to remind people that we still human crazy and we can all laugh about it. Don't stress over it. Bring your problems to me. I promise I won't judge you, but I might crack a joke to you.

Don't be scared. It'll be respectful and messy at the same time. Just make sure you tune in. Listen to Carefully Reckless every Wednesday on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

I was Deputy Mayor Carlos Miller, Squashy Gilbane, and we are of the 85 self show and we've got some of the best guess where we had to change. Tim came. Jay Prince came. Yeah, everybody. Everybody. But guess what? You got to catch up on all the episodes that you missed, like Fabo killer Mike, plus the like Busta Rhymes. He bust a couple of times.

Listen to the eighty five s show on the radio app on Apple podcast or wherever you get your iPod.