Biggest Mobile Hydrogen Fuel Cell In The World To Power Sergey Brin’s Mysterious Airship
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Hydrogen Fuel News.
This is the introductory paragraph.
LTA Research and Exploration, the secretive and mysterious airship company owned by Google co-founder and former Alphabet President Sergey Brin, will use the biggest mobile hydrogen fuel cell in the world to power its disaster relief airship.
The size of the fuel cell appears to be 1.5 MW according to the Hydrogen Fuel News article.
The company has a web site with a title of The Future Off 21st Century Airships.
The web site talks about vision, focus and their response to Covid-19, so it is certainly not vapourware, although it seems to be more about building the team.
Conclusion
Sergey Brin has his heart in the right place
But he is ploughing a furrow, that has been attempted many times and sadly most attempts have ended in failure.
If Cows Could Fly!
Well their intestines did in the First World War according to this story in the Daily Mail and other newspapers. The title says it all.
How Germans were banned from eating sausages during WWI because intestines of 250,000 cows were needed to make each Zeppelin
It was effective wasn’t it!
The Goodyear Blimp Over the Balls Pond Road
I took this picture, as I came back from getting my paper this morning.
If looked to me, that the Goodyear Blimp was flying along the Balls Pond Road toward Highbury Corner for the Arsenal Chelsea match at lunchtime. I’m not sure about the flying rules for airships, but if the pilot was in the left hand seat, he could have been flying just to the north of the road. That would be standard procedure in a fixed wing aircraft, when flying visually.
The Goodyear Blimp Over The Balls Pond Road
I see the blimp is down to be over the London Marathon tomorrow.
More R101 Pictures
They are small so I scanned them together.
The house is probably my in-laws’ house in Crescent Road, New Barnet.
A Photo of an Airship
Last night I was going through some old photos of my mother-in-law’s and found a couple of pictures of an airship.
Here’s the best one.
The Airship Photo
On reading the call-sign on the side as G-FAAW, it became obvious with a bit of searching the Internet, that the airship, was the ill-fated R101, which crashed on its first flight in France.
The R101 is one of those projects, that suffered from bad design and management. It should also be said that there appears to have been a lot of political interference. After all the R101 was the government’s project to rival the capitalist R100, so I don’t think they wanted it to fail.
But was this pressure worth the lives of the 48 people, who died with the R101?
The picture looks like it was taken in the area of Cardington, but it might be elsewhere.
My mother-in-law and in fact others in North London, including my own mother, were somewhat fascinated by airships. A lot of this was probably due to the shooting down of the German airship by Captain Leefe Robinson in September 1916 at Cuffley, the fire of which could be seen a hundred miles away. I think both would have been about four at the time and it was something that must have made an impression on both their lives. Somewhere, I’ve seen a tin box of the remains of the downed airship, that had been scavanged by perhaps a child at the time.
The Anonymous Widower 