title: Type I and type II errors

text: Perhaps the most widely discussed false positives in medical screening come from the breast cancer screening procedure mammography. The US rate of false positive mammograms is up to 15%, the highest in world. One consequence of the high false positive rate in the US is that, in any 10-year period, half of the American women screened receive a false positive mammogram. False positive mammograms are costly, with over $100 million spent annually in the U.S. on follow-up testing and treatment. They also cause women unneeded anxiety. As a result of the high false positive rate in the US, as many as 90–95% of women who get a positive mammogram do not have the condition. The lowest rate in the world is in the Netherlands, 1%. The lowest rates are generally in Northern Europe where mammography films are read twice and a high threshold for additional testing is set (the high threshold decreases the power of the test).


title: Type I and type II errors

text: The ideal population screening test would be cheap, easy to administer, and produce zero false-negatives, if possible. Such tests usually produce more false-positives, which can subsequently be sorted out by more sophisticated (and expensive) testing.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: Type I error (false positive): "The true fact is that the patients do not have a specific disease but the physicians judges the patients was ill according to the test reports".


title: Type I and type II errors

text: False positives can also produce serious and counter-intuitive problems when the condition being searched for is rare, as in screening. If a test has a false positive rate of one in ten thousand, but only one in a million samples (or people) is a true positive, most of the positives detected by that test will be false. The probability that an observed positive result is a false positive may be calculated using Bayes' theorem.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: Type II error (false negative): "The true fact is that the disease is actually present but the test reports provide a falsely reassuring message to patients and physicians that the disease is absent".


title: Type I and type II errors

text: False negatives produce serious and counter-intuitive problems, especially when the condition being searched for is common. If a test with a false negative rate of only 10% is used to test a population with a true occurrence rate of 70%, many of the negatives detected by the test will be false.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: This sometimes leads to inappropriate or inadequate treatment of both the patient and their disease. A common example is relying on cardiac stress tests to detect coronary atherosclerosis, even though cardiac stress tests are known to only detect limitations of coronary artery blood flow due to advanced stenosis.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: Biometric matching, such as for fingerprint recognition, facial recognition or iris recognition, is susceptible to type I and type II errors.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: Type I error (false reject rate): "The true fact is that the person is someone in the searched list but the system concludes that the person is not according to the data".


title: Type I and type II errors

text: Type II error (false match rate): "The true fact is that the person is not someone in the searched list but the system concludes that the person is someone whom we are looking for according to the data".


title: Type I and type II errors

text: The probability of type I errors is called the "false reject rate" (FRR) or false non-match rate (FNMR), while the probability of type II errors is called the "false accept rate" (FAR) or false match rate (FMR).


title: Type I and type II errors

text: If the system is designed to rarely match suspects then the probability of type II errors can be called the "false alarm rate". On the other hand, if the system is used for validation (and acceptance is the norm) then the FAR is a measure of system security, while the FRR measures user inconvenience level.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: False positives are routinely found every day in airport security screening, which are ultimately visual inspection systems. The installed security alarms are intended to prevent weapons being brought onto aircraft; yet they are often set to such high sensitivity that they alarm many times a day for minor items, such as keys, belt buckles, loose change, mobile phones, and tacks in shoes.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: Here, the null hypothesis is that the item is not a weapon, while the alternative hypothesis is that the item is a weapon.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: A type I error (false positive): "The true fact is that the item is not a weapon but the system still alarms".


title: Type I and type II errors

text: Type II error (false negative) "The true fact is that the item is a weapon but the system keeps silent at this time".


title: Type I and type II errors

text: The ratio of false positives (identifying an innocent traveler as a terrorist) to true positives (detecting a would-be terrorist) is, therefore, very high; and because almost every alarm is a false positive, the positive predictive value of these screening tests is very low.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: The relative cost of false results determines the likelihood that test creators allow these events to occur. As the cost of a false negative in this scenario is extremely high (not detecting a bomb being brought onto a plane could result in hundreds of deaths) whilst the cost of a false positive is relatively low (a reasonably simple further inspection) the most appropriate test is one with a low statistical specificity but high statistical sensitivity (one that allows a high rate of false positives in return for minimal false negatives).


title: Type I and type II errors

text: The notions of false positives and false negatives have a wide currency in the realm of computers and computer applications, including computer security, spam filtering, Malware, Optical character recognition and many others.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: Type I error (false positive): "Spam filtering or spam blocking techniques wrongly classify a legitimate email message as spam and, as a result, interferes with its delivery".


title: Type I and type II errors

text: While most anti-spam tactics can block or filter a high percentage of unwanted emails, doing so without creating significant false-positive results is a much more demanding task.


title: Type I and type II errors

text: Type II error (false negative): "Spam email is not detected as spam, but is classified as non-spam". A low number of false negatives is an indicator of the efficiency of spam filtering.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: Udinese Calcio, commonly referred to as Udinese, is a professional Italian football club based in Udine, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, that currently plays in Serie A. It was founded on 30 November 1896 as a sports club, and on 5 July 1911 as a football club.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The traditional team home kit is black and white striped shirt, black shorts, and white socks. The club broadcasts on channel 110 (Udinese Channel) on digital terrestrial television in the north-east of Italy. It has many fans in Friuli and the surrounding areas.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: Udinese Calcio was established in 1896 as part of the "Società Udinese di Ginnastica e Scherma", (Udinese Society of Gymnastics and Fencing). In its inaugural year, the club won the Torneo FNGI in Treviso beating Ferrara 2–0; however this title is not recognised as official.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: On 5 July 1911, some gymnasts of Udinese, headed by Luigi Dal Dan, founded the A.C. Udinese, which joined the FIGC. The new side made its debut in a friendly match against Juventus Palmanova, and won 6–0.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: It was only in 1912–13 that Udinese first took part in an official FIGC championship. In that year they enrolled in the "Campionato Veneto di Promozione", which consisted of just three teams (the others were Petrarca and Padova). With two victories against Padova (3–1 and 5–0), Udinese finished the tournament in second place behind Petrarca and were promoted to first-level Prima Categoria. In Prima Categoria, Udinese failed to reach the national stage, always knocked out in the "Eliminatoria Veneta".


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The 1920–21 season, which ended with the Friulani eliminated in the "Eliminatoria Veneta", was memorable because it was the debut of Gino Bellotto, who is still the player who has played the most seasons with Udinese, spending 17 seasons with the "Zebrette".


title: Udinese Calcio

text: In 1922, Udinese, taking advantage of the absence of big clubs, entered the FIGC Italian Football Championship and reached the Coppa Italia final losing 1–0 against Vado, thanks to an overtime goal.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: In the league, Udinese finished second in "Girone Eliminatorio Veneto", which allowed them to remain in the top flight for the next season, despite a reform of the championships that reduced the number of teams in the competition.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The 1922–23 season was a disastrous one for Udinese, as they came last in and were relegated to the second division. The team risked failure for debts in 1923. On 24 August 1923, AS Udinese separated from AC Udinese Friuli, and the club was forced to set up a budget and an autonomous board. All debts were paid by President Alessandro Del Torso through the sale of some of his paintings and Udinese could thus join the Second Division in which they came fourth.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The 1924–25 season was memorable. The team was included in Group F II Division. The championship was very even and at the end of the tournament three teams were in contention to win: Udinese, Vicenza and Olympia River. Playoffs were needed to determine who would reach the final round.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: Udinese beat Olympia in a playoff 1–0 and drew 1–1 with Vicenza. In the play-off standings, Udinese and Vicenza were still in the lead with 3 points each. Another play-off was then played to determine the winner. After a first encounter finished 0–0, Udinese lost a replay 2–1 but were awarded the win as Vicenza fielded an ineligible player, a Hungarian called Horwart. Udinese reached the finals in place of Vicenza.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: In the final round, Udinese finished first and was promoted, alongside Parma, to First Division. In the following season, Udinese finished 10th and was relegated again. However, the format of the championship was again reformed and Udinese had another chance to reclaim their place in the top flight. They competed in play-offs with seven other sides for the right to play in Serie A. The winner would remain in the top flight. The club, however, lost the playoff against Legnano and lost their place in the top flight.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: They remained in Second Division until the end of the 1928–29 season when Serie A and Serie B were created, with Udinese falling into the third tier (Terza Serie). The first season in Terza Serie was a triumphant one and Udinese were promoted up to Serie B.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The stay in Serie B lasted only two years, and after the 1931–32 season, the team returned to the third division. Udinese remained in the third tier (later renamed Serie C in 1935) until 1938–39, when coming second in Girone Finale Nord di Serie C, they were promoted to Serie B.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The Zebrette remained in Serie B for a dozen years, with average performances and were relegated to Serie C at the end of the 1947–48 season due to a reform of the championships. This relegation, however, was followed by two consecutive promotions, and thanks to an excellent second-place finish in the Serie B 1949-50, the Friulani won a historic promotion to Serie A.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: Udinese remained in Serie A for five seasons and almost claimed an historic Scudetto in the 1954–55 season, when they came second only behind Milan. It was after that season, however, that Udinese was relegated because of an offence committed on 31 May 1953, the last day of the championship, which was exposed two years later. The Friuliani returned to Serie A after one season in B and in the following season was confirmed among the best Italian teams with an excellent fourth-place finish.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: A decline followed those good seasons, however, with Udinese first relegated back down to Serie B in 1961–62 and then to Serie C in 1963–64. Udinese remained in C for about fifteen years, missing promotion back to B on numerous occasions. It was only after the 1977–78 season that the Friuliani, led by manager Massimo Giacomini, returned to B winning Girone A. In the same season, they won the "Coppa Italia Semiprofessionisti", beating Reggina and also won the Anglo-Italian Cup.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: During the next season, Udinese with Massimo Giacomini as their manager, won Serie B and returned after more than two decades to Serie A. In their first year back after so long, the team survived after a disappointing 15th-place finish. In Europe, they fared much better, winning the Mitropa Cup, a European Cup for teams that had won the previous season of Serie B.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: In subsequent seasons the team managed to survive relegation without any particular difficulty also managing an impressive sixth place in 1982–83. At that time Udinese had on its books one of the club's all-time greatest players, the Brazilian midfielder Zico.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: At the end of the 1985–86 season, the team was embroiled in a betting scandal and was penalised nine points for the 1986–87 season. Despite a desperate comeback towards the end of the season, Udinese were relegated to Serie B. Had they not been deducted points, Udinese would have survived.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: During the following years, Udinese were promoted to Serie A and relegated back to B on several occasions. This situation lasted until the 1995–96 season, from which point on, they established themselves in Serie A.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The 1996–97 season saw Udinese qualify for the UEFA Cup, with Alberto Zaccheroni as manager. The following season, they managed a third-place finish behind Juventus and Internazionale, largely thanks to Oliver Bierhoff's 27 goals.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: In March 2001, Luciano Spalletti was appointed manager, replacing Luigi De Canio. Spalletti managed to lead the team to survival on the penultimate matchday. Following brief periods with Roy Hodgson and Giampiero Ventura on the bench, Spalletti was again appointed manager of Udinese at the beginning of the 2002–03 season, finding an organised and ambitious club which again reached the UEFA Cup, playing attacking and entertaining football.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The surprising fourth-place finish at the end of the 2004–05 season saw Udinese achieve their first qualification for the UEFA Champions League in the history of the club. At the end of that same season, Spalletti announced his intention to leave Udinese.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The following season, Udinese played in the Champions League preliminary round, beating Sporting CP 4–2 on aggregate. Udinese were drawn in a tough group alongside Panathinaikos, Werder Bremen and Barcelona.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: After a year in the Champions League, Udinese finished tenth and returned once more to mid-table mediocrity. The turning point occurred during the summer of 2007, when the club announced the appointment of Sicilian manager Pasquale Marino and also made various quality purchases including Fabio Quagliarella and Gökhan Inler.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The 2007–08 season started well with a draw at home against champions Internazionale, but the enthusiasm was quickly erased after the first home match which finished in a 5–0 loss to newly promoted Napoli. After this match, Udinese's fortunes changed, starting with a victory over Juventus thanks to a late Antonio Di Natale goal. Udinese remained in contention for the fourth Champions League spot with Milan, Fiorentina, and Sampdoria until the end of the season, but ultimately finished in seventh place, qualifying for the UEFA Cup.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: At the start of the 2008–09 season, during the press conference to present the new season's kit, the new official website was also presented, and an absolute novelty in the Italian championship, the first Web TV channel dedicated to a football club called Udinese Channel was launched, totally free and visible worldwide.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: In the 2008–09 season, Udinese had a mixed bag of results in Serie A with a 3–1 win at Roma and a 2–1 win over Juventus, but 10 losses against teams including Reggina, Chievo, and Torino dented their hopes of Champions League qualification. In the UEFA Cup, Udinese found themselves in a group with potential favourites Tottenham Hotspur, NEC, Spartak Moscow, and Dinamo Zagreb, but eased through the group with a convincing 2–0 win against Tottenham. They beat Lech Poznań in the next round 4–3 on aggregate, and then beat holders Zenit Saint Petersburg 2–1 on aggregate. In the quarter-final against Werder Bremen, with injuries to star players Antonio Di Natale, Samir Handanovič, and Felipe, they lost 6–4 on aggregate. Fabio Quagliarella managed eight goals in the campaign. They finished the season in seventh place, missing out on any European football the following year.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The 2009–10 season was an extremely disappointing one for players and fans alike. Even though Antonio Di Natale managed to score 29 goals in the league and finished top goalscorer, the season was spent battling against relegation. In the end, they finished in 15th, nine points and three places clear of the relegation zone. The only highlight of the campaign was reaching the semi-final of the Coppa Italia, beating Lumezzane in the round of 16, Milan in the quarter-finals, and eventually losing 2–1 to Roma on aggregate.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: In the summer transfer window of 2010, Udinese sold Gaetano D'Agostino, Simone Pepe, Marco Motta, and Aleksandar Luković. They also brought in players that proved to be the key to their success in the 2010–11 Serie A; Mehdi Benatia and Pablo Armero, a central defender and wingback, respectively. After a poor start to the season, losing their first four games and drawing the fifth, Udinese went on to record their highest points total in history and finished in fourth place, again earning themselves a spot in the Champions League qualifying round. Di Natale, with 28 goals, became the first back-to-back "capocannoniere" since Lazio's Giuseppe Signori accomplished the feat in 1993 and 1994. A 0–0 home draw with Milan on the final matchday secured the Champions League spot for Udinese. Coach Francesco Guidolin kept his promise of "dancing like Boateng" if they qualified for the Champions League and did a little jig in the middle of the pitch. In the Coppa Italia, Udinese lost to Sampdoria in the round of 16 on penalties after the match ended 2–2.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The 2011–12 season continued in much the same fashion, even though Udinese lost three key players to larger clubs – Alexis Sánchez to Barcelona, Gökhan Inler to Napoli, and Cristián Zapata to Villarreal. In the Champions League qualifying round, Udinese were drawn against Arsenal and lost the away leg 1–0. At the Stadio Friuli, Udinese lost 2–1, 3–1 on aggregate, and entered the Europa League group stage, Antonio Di Natale missing a penalty that at the time would have taken Udinese through. Domestically, Udinese started strong but with their quality shown in defence, conceding the least of all teams after 15 games, only seven. For the second consecutive season, Udinese qualified for the Champions League, clinching third place on the final day of the season with a 2–0 away win against Catania. In the summer transfer window, key players Kwadwo Asamoah and Mauricio Isla were both sold to champions Juventus. The club failed to reach the group stage of the year's Champions League, however, losing on penalties after extra time to Portuguese club SC Braga. Antonio Di Natale scored 23 goals to record his third consecutive season with 20+ goals in Serie A.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: Udinese started off the 2012–13 Serie A season in mixed form, with seven draws and three losses in their first thirteen games. However, starting in December the team began to pick up wins more frequently, concurrent with Di Natale finding the net on a regular basis. After a period of balancing wins with losses, the team went on a phenomenal eight game winning streak to end the season, with Luis Muriel emerging as a key player. Like the 2011–12 season, Di Natale again finished with 23 goals, becoming the first player since Gabriel Batistuta, of Fiorentina, to score 20 or more goals in four or more consecutive seasons.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: Over the coming years, Udinese would go on to finish middle to lower table in Serie A. In the 2017–18 season, Udinese manager Massimo Oddo was sacked after the club lost 11 straight games. Oddo was then replaced by Igor Tudor who guided the club to safety away from the relegation places.


title: Udinese Calcio

text: The following is a provisional list of players that were international while playing for Udinese, sorted by nationality.


title: Airship

text: An airship or dirigible balloon is a type of aerostat or lighter-than-air aircraft that can navigate through the air under its own power. Aerostats gain their lift from a lifting gas that is less dense than the surrounding air.


title: Airship

text: In early dirigibles, the lifting gas used was hydrogen, due to its high lifting capacity and ready availability. Helium gas has almost the same lifting capacity and is not flammable, unlike hydrogen, but is rare and relatively expensive. Significant amounts were first discovered in the United States and for a while helium was only available for airships in that country. Most airships built since the 1960s have used helium, though some have used hot air.


title: Airship

text: The envelope of an airship may form the gasbag, or it may contain a number of gas-filled cells. An airship also has engines, crew, and optionally also payload accommodation, typically housed in one or more gondolas suspended below the envelope.


title: Airship

text: The main types of airship are non-rigid, semi-rigid, and rigid. Non-rigid airships, often called "blimps", rely on internal pressure to maintain their shape. Semi-rigid airships maintain the envelope shape by internal pressure, but have some form of supporting structure, such as a fixed keel, attached to it. Rigid airships have an outer structural framework that maintains the shape and carries all structural loads, while the lifting gas is contained in one or more internal gasbags or cells. Rigid airships were first flown by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and the vast majority of rigid airships built were manufactured by the firm he founded, Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. As a result, rigid airships are often called zeppelins.


title: Airship

text: Airships were the first aircraft capable of controlled powered flight, and were most commonly used before the 1940s; their use decreased as their capabilities were surpassed by those of aeroplanes. Their decline was accelerated by a series of high-profile accidents, including the 1930 crash and burning of the British R101 in France, the 1933 and 1935 storm-related crashes of the twin airborne aircraft carrier U.S. Navy helium-filled rigids, the and USS "Macon" respectively, and the 1937 burning of the German hydrogen-filled "Hindenburg". From the 1960s, helium airships have been used where the ability to hover for a long time outweighs the need for speed and manoeuvrability, such as advertising, tourism, camera platforms, geological surveys and aerial observation.


title: Airship

text: During the pioneer years of aeronautics, terms such as "airship", "air-ship", "air ship" and "ship of the air" meant any kind of navigable or dirigible flying machine. In 1919 Frederick Handley Page was reported as referring to "ships of the air," with smaller passenger types as "air yachts." In the 1930s, large intercontinental flying boats were also sometimes referred to as "ships of the air" or "flying-ships". Nowadays the term "airship" is used only for powered, dirigible balloons, with sub-types being classified as rigid, semi-rigid or non-rigid. Semi-rigid architecture is the more recent, following advances in deformable structures and the exigency of reducing weight and volume of the airships. They have a minimal structure that keeps the shape jointly with overpressure of the gas envelope.


title: Airship

text: An aerostat is an aircraft that remains aloft using buoyancy or static lift, as opposed to the aerodyne, which obtains lift by moving through the air. Airships are a type of aerostat. The term "aerostat" has also been used to indicate a tethered or moored balloon as opposed to a free-floating balloon. Aerostats today are capable of lifting a payload of to an altitude of more than above sea level. They can also stay in the air for extended periods of time, particularly when powered by an on-board generator or if the tether contains electrical conductors. Due to this capability, aerostats can be used as platforms for telecommunication services. For instance, Platform Wireless International Corporation announced in 2001 that it would use a tethered airborne payload to deliver cellular phone service to a region in Brazil. The European Union's ABSOLUTE project was also reportedly exploring the use of tethered aerostat stations to provide telecommunications during disaster response.


title: Airship

text: Airships were originally called "dirigible balloons", from the French "ballon dirigeable" often shortened to "dirigeable" (meaning "steerable", from the French "diriger" – to direct, guide or steer). This was the name that inventor Henri Giffard gave to his machine that made its first flight on 24 September 1852.


title: Airship

text: A blimp is a non-rigid aerostat. In British usage it refers to any non-rigid aerostat, including barrage balloons and other kite balloons, having a streamlined shape and stabilising tail fins. Some blimps may be powered dirigibles, as in early versions of the Goodyear Blimp. Later Goodyear dirigibles, though technically "semi-rigid airships," have still been called "blimps" by the company.


title: Airship

text: The term zeppelin originally referred to airships manufactured by the German Zeppelin Company, which built and operated the first rigid airships in the early years of the twentieth century. The initials LZ, for (German for "Zeppelin airship"), usually prefixed their craft's serial identifiers.


title: Airship

text: Streamlined rigid (or semi-rigid) airships are often referred to as "Zeppelins", because of the fame that this company acquired due to the number of airships it produced.


title: Airship

text: Hybrid airships fly with a positive aerostatic contribution, usually equal to the empty weight of the system, and the variable payload is sustained by propulsion or aerodynamic contribution.


title: Airship

text: Airships are classified according to their method of construction into rigid, semi-rigid and non-rigid types.


title: Airship

text: A rigid airship has a rigid framework covered by an outer skin or envelope. The interior contains one or more gasbags, cells or balloons to provide lift. Rigid airships are typically unpressurised and can be made to virtually any size. Most, but not all, of the German Zeppelin airships have been of this type.


title: Airship

text: A semi-rigid airship has some kind of supporting structure but the main envelope is held in shape by the internal pressure of the lifting gas. Typically the airship has an extended, usually articulated keel running along the bottom of the envelope to stop it kinking in the middle by distributing suspension loads into the envelope, while also allowing lower envelope pressures.


title: Airship

text: Non-rigid airships are often called "blimps". Most, but not all, of the American Goodyear airships have been blimps.


title: Airship

text: A non-rigid airship relies entirely on internal gas pressure to retain its shape during flight. Unlike the rigid design, the non-rigid airship's gas envelope has no compartments. It typically has smaller internal bags or "ballonets". At sea level, these are filled with air. As altitude is increased, the lifting gas expands and air from the ballonets is expelled through valves to maintain the hull's shape. To return to sea level, the process is reversed: air is forced back into the ballonets by scooping air from the engine exhaust and using auxiliary blowers.


title: Airship

text: The envelope itself is the structure, including textiles that contain the buoyant gas. Internally two ballonets placed in the front part and in the rear part of the hull contains air.


title: Airship

text: The problem of the exact determination of the pressure on an airship envelope is still problematic and has fascinated major scientists such as Theodor Von Karman.


title: Airship

text: A few airships have been metal-clad, with rigid and nonrigid examples made. Each kind used a thin gastight metal envelope, rather than the usual rubber-coated fabric envelope. Only four metal-clad ships are known to have been built, and only two actually flew: Schwarz's first aluminum rigid airship of 1893 collapsed, while his second flew; the nonrigid ZMC-2 built for the U.S. Navy flew from 1929 to 1941 when it was scrapped as too small for operational use on anti-submarine patrols; while the 1929 nonrigid Slate Aircraft Corporation "City of Glendale" collapsed on its first flight attempt.


title: Airship

text: Thermal airships use a heated lifting gas, usually air, in a fashion similar to hot air balloons. The first to do so was flown in 1973 by the British company Cameron Balloons.


title: Airship

text: Small airships carry their engine(s) in their gondola. Where there were multiple engines on larger airships, these were placed in separate nacelles, termed "power cars" or "engine cars". To allow asymmetric thrust to be applied for maneuvering, these power cars were mounted towards the sides of the envelope, away from the center line gondola. This also raised them above the ground, reducing the risk of a propeller strike when landing. Widely spaced power cars were also termed "wing cars", from the use of "wing" to mean being on the side of something, as in a theater, rather than the aerodynamic device. These engine cars carried a crew during flight who maintained the engines as needed, but who also worked the engine controls, throttle etc., mounted directly on the engine. Instructions were relayed to them from the pilot's station by a telegraph system, as on a ship.


title: Airship

text: The main advantage of airships with respect to any other vehicle is of environmental nature. They require less energy to remain in flight, if compared to any other air vehicle. The proposed Varialift airship, powered by a mixture of solar-powered engines and conventional jet engines, would use only an estimated 8 percent of the fuel required by jet aircraft. Furthermore, utilizing the jet stream could allow for a faster and more energy-efficient cargo transport alternative to maritime shipping. This is one of the reasons why China has embraced their use recently.


title: Airship

text: In 1670, the Jesuit Father Francesco Lana de Terzi, sometimes referred to as the "Father of Aeronautics", published a description of an "Aerial Ship" supported by four copper spheres from which the air was evacuated. Although the basic principle is sound, such a craft was unrealizable then and remains so to the present day, since external air pressure would cause the spheres to collapse unless their thickness was such as to make them too heavy to be buoyant. A hypothetical craft constructed using this principle is known as a "vacuum airship".


title: Airship

text: In 1709, the Brazilian-Portuguese Jesuit priest Bartolomeu de Gusmão made a hot air balloon, the Passarola, ascend to the skies, before an astonished Portuguese court. It would have been on August 8, 1709, when Father Bartolomeu de Gusmão held, in the courtyard of the Casa da Índia, in the city of Lisbon, the first Passarola demonstration. The balloon caught fire without leaving the ground, but, in a second demonstration, it rose to 95 meters in height. It was a small balloon of thick brown paper, filled with hot air, produced by the "fire of material contained in a clay bowl embedded in the base of a waxed wooden tray". The event was witnessed by King John V of Portugal and the future Pope Innocent XIII.


title: Airship

text: A more practical dirigible airship was described by Lieutenant Jean Baptiste Marie Meusnier in a paper entitled ""Mémoire sur l’équilibre des machines aérostatiques"" (Memorandum on the equilibrium of aerostatic machines) presented to the French Academy on 3 December 1783. The 16 water-color drawings published the following year depict a streamlined envelope with internal ballonets that could be used for regulating lift: this was attached to a long carriage that could be used as a boat if the vehicle was forced to land in water. The airship was designed to be driven by three propellers and steered with a sail-like aft rudder. In 1784, Jean-Pierre Blanchard fitted a hand-powered propeller to a balloon, the first recorded means of propulsion carried aloft. In 1785, he crossed the English Channel in a balloon equipped with flapping wings for propulsion and a birdlike tail for steering.


title: Airship

text: The 19th century saw continued attempts to add methods of propulsion to balloons. The Australian William Bland sent designs for his "Atomic Airship" to the Great Exhibition held in London in 1851, where a model was displayed. This was an elongated balloon with a steam engine driving twin propellers suspended underneath. The lift of the balloon was estimated as 5 tons and the car with the fuel as weighing 3.5 tons, giving a payload of 1.5 tons. Bland believed that the machine could be driven at and could fly from Sydney to London in less than a week.


title: Airship

text: In 1852, Henri Giffard became the first person to make an engine-powered flight when he flew in a steam-powered airship. Airships would develop considerably over the next two decades. In 1863, Solomon Andrews flew his aereon design, an unpowered, controllable dirigible in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and offered the device to the U.S. Military during the Civil War. He flew a later design in 1866 around New York City and as far as Oyster Bay, New York. This concept used changes in lift to provide propulsive force, and did not need a powerplant. In 1872, the French naval architect Dupuy de Lome launched a large navigable balloon, which was driven by a large propeller turned by eight men. It was developed during the Franco-Prussian war and was intended as an improvement to the balloons used for communications between Paris and the countryside during the siege of Paris, but was completed only after the end of the war.


title: Airship

text: In 1872, Paul Haenlein flew an airship with an internal combustion engine running on the coal gas used to inflate the envelope, the first use of such an engine to power an aircraft. Charles F. Ritchel made a public demonstration flight in 1878 of his hand-powered one-man rigid airship, and went on to build and sell five of his aircraft.


title: Airship

text: In 1874, Micajah Clark Dyer filed U.S. Patent 154,654 "Apparatus for Navigating the Air". It is believed successful trial flights were made between 1872–1874, but detailed dates are not available. The apparatus used a combination of wings and paddle wheels for navigation and propulsion.


title: Airship

text: In 1883, the first electric-powered flight was made by Gaston Tissandier, who fitted a Siemens electric motor to an airship.


title: Airship

text: The first fully controllable free flight was made in 1884 by Charles Renard and Arthur Constantin Krebs in the French Army airship "La France". La France made the first flight of an airship that landed where it took off; the long, airship covered in 23 minutes with the aid of an electric motor, and a battery. It made seven flights in 1884 and 1885.


title: Airship

text: In 1888, the design of the Campbell Air Ship, designed by Professor Peter C. Campbell, was submitted to aeronautic engineer Carl Edgar Myers for examination. After his approval it was built by the Novelty Air Ship Company. It was lost at sea in 1889 while being flown by Professor Hogan during an exhibition flight.


title: Airship

text: From 1888 to 1897, Friedrich Wölfert built three airships powered by Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft-built petrol engines, the last of which caught fire in flight and killed both occupants in 1897. The 1888 version used a single cylinder Daimler engine and flew from Canstatt to Kornwestheim.


title: Airship

text: In 1897, an airship with an aluminum envelope was built by the Hungarian-Croatian engineer David Schwarz. It made its first flight at Tempelhof field in Berlin after Schwarz had died. His widow, Melanie Schwarz, was paid 15,000 marks by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin to release the industrialist Carl Berg from his exclusive contract to supply Schwartz with aluminium.


title: Airship

text: From 1897 to 1899, Konstantin Danilewsky, medical doctor and inventor from Kharkiv (now Ukraine, then Russian Empire), built four muscle-powered airships, of gas volume . About 200 ascents were made within a framework of experimental flight program, at two locations, with no significant incidents.


title: Airship

text: In July 1900, the Luftschiff Zeppelin LZ1 made its first flight. This led to the most successful airships of all time: the Zeppelins, named after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin who began working on rigid airship designs in the 1890s, leading to the flawed LZ1 in 1900 and the more successful LZ2 in 1906. The Zeppelin airships had a framework composed of triangular lattice girders covered with fabric that contained separate gas cells. At first multiplane tail surfaces were used for control and stability: later designs had simpler cruciform tail surfaces. The engines and crew were accommodated in "gondolas" hung beneath the hull driving propellers attached to the sides of the frame by means of long drive shafts. Additionally, there was a passenger compartment (later a bomb bay) located halfway between the two engine compartments.


title: Airship

text: Alberto Santos-Dumont was a wealthy young Brazilian who lived in France and had a passion for flying. He designed 18 balloons and dirigibles before turning his attention to fixed-winged aircraft.


title: Airship

text: On 19 October 1901 he flew his airship "Number 6", from the Parc Saint Cloud to and around the Eiffel Tower and back in under thirty minutes. This feat earned him the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize of 100,000 francs. Many inventors were inspired by Santos-Dumont's small airships. Many airship pioneers, such as the American Thomas Scott Baldwin, financed their activities through passenger flights and public demonstration flights. Stanley Spencer built the first British airship with funds from advertising baby food on the sides of the envelope. Others, such as Walter Wellman and Melvin Vaniman, set their sights on loftier goals, attempting two polar flights in 1907 and 1909, and two trans-Atlantic flights in 1910 and 1912.


title: Airship

text: In 1902 the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres y Quevedo published details of an innovative airship design in Spain and France. With a non-rigid body and internal bracing wires, it overcame the flaws of these types of aircraft as regards both rigid structure (zeppelin type) and flexibility, providing the airships with more stability during flight, and the capability of using heavier engines and a greater passenger load. In 1905, helped by Captain A. Kindelán, he built the airship "España" at the Guadalajara military base. Next year he patented his design without attracting official interest. In 1909 he patented an improved design that he offered to the French Astra company, who started mass-producing it in 1911 as the Astra-Torres airship. The distinctive three-lobed design was widely used during the Great War by the Entente powers. To find a resolution to the slew of problems faced by airship engineers to dock dirigibles, Torres y Quevedo also drew up designs of a ‘docking station’ and made alterations to airship designs. In 1910, Torres y Quevedo proposed the idea of attaching an airships nose to a mooring mast and allowing the airship to weathervane with changes of wind direction. The use of a metal column erected on the ground, the top of which the bow or stem would be directly attached to (by a cable) would allow a dirigible to be moored at any time, in the open, regardless of wind speeds. Additionally, Torres y Quevedo's design called for the improvement and accessibility of temporary landing sites, where airships were to be moored for the purpose of disembarkation of passengers. The final patent was presented in February 1911.


title: Airship

text: Other airship builders were also active before the war: from 1902 the French company Lebaudy Frères specialized in semirigid airships such as the "Patrie" and the "République", designed by their engineer Henri Julliot, who later worked for the American company Goodrich; the German firm Schütte-Lanz built the wooden-framed SL series from 1911, introducing important technical innovations; another German firm Luft-Fahrzeug-Gesellschaft built the "Parseval-Luftschiff" (PL) series from 1909, and Italian Enrico Forlanini's firm had built and flown the first two Forlanini airships.


title: Airship

text: On May 12, 1902, the inventor and Brazilian aeronaut Augusto Severo de Albuquerque Maranhao and his French mechanic, Georges Saché, died when they were flying over Paris in the airship called Pax. A marble plaque at number 81 of the Avenue du Maine in Paris, commemorates the location of Augusto Severo accident. The Catastrophe of the Balloon "Le Pax" is a 1902 short silent film recreation of the catastrophe, directed by Georges Méliès.


title: Airship

text: In Britain, the Army built their first dirigible, the "Nulli Secundus", in 1907. The Navy ordered the construction of an experimental rigid in 1908. Officially known as His Majesty's Airship No. 1 and nicknamed the "Mayfly", it broke its back in 1911 before making a single flight. Work on a successor did not start until 1913.


title: Airship

text: German airship passenger service known as DELAG (Deutsche-Luftschiffahrts AG) was established in 1910.


title: Airship

text: In 1910 Walter Wellman unsuccessfully attempted an aerial crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in the airship "America".


title: Airship

text: The prospect of airships as bombers had been recognized in Europe well before the airships were up to the task. H. G. Wells' "The War in the Air" (1908) described the obliteration of entire fleets and cities by airship attack. The Italian forces became the first to use dirigibles for a military purpose during the Italo–Turkish War, the first bombing mission being flown on 10 March 1912. World War I marked the airship's real debut as a weapon. The Germans, French, and Italians all used airships for scouting and tactical bombing roles early in the war, and all learned that the airship was too vulnerable for operations over the front. The decision to end operations in direct support of armies was made by all in 1917.


title: Airship

text: Many in the German military believed they had found the ideal weapon with which to counteract British naval superiority and strike at Britain itself, while more realistic airship advocates believed the zeppelin's value was as a long range scout/attack craft for naval operations. Raids on England began in January 1915 and peaked in 1916: following losses to the British defenses only a few raids were made in 1917–18, the last in August 1918. Zeppelins proved to be terrifying but inaccurate weapons. Navigation, target selection and bomb-aiming proved to be difficult under the best of conditions, and the cloud cover that was frequently encountered by the airships reduced accuracy even further. The physical damage done by airships over the course of the war was insignificant, and the deaths that they caused amounted to a few hundred. Nevertheless, the raid caused a significant diversion of British resources to defense efforts. The airships were initially immune to attack by aircraft and anti-aircraft guns: as the pressure in their envelopes was only just higher than ambient air, holes had little effect. But following the introduction of a combination of incendiary and explosive ammunition in 1916, their flammable hydrogen lifting gas made them vulnerable to the defending aeroplanes. Several were shot down in flames by British defenders, and many others destroyed in accidents. New designs capable of reaching greater altitude were developed, but although this made them immune from attack it made their bombing accuracy even worse.


title: Airship

text: Countermeasures by the British included sound detection equipment, searchlights and anti-aircraft artillery, followed by night fighters in 1915. One tactic used early in the war, when their limited range meant the airships had to fly from forward bases and the only zeppelin production facilities were in Friedrichshafen, was the bombing of airship sheds by the British Royal Naval Air Service. Later in the war, the development of the aircraft carrier led to the first successful carrier-based air strike in history: on the morning of 19 July 1918, seven Sopwith 2F.1 Camels were launched from and struck the airship base at Tønder, destroying zeppelins L 54 and L 60.


title: Airship

text: The British Army had abandoned airship development in favour of aeroplanes before the start of the war, but the Royal Navy had recognized the need for small airships to counteract the submarine and mine threat in coastal waters. Beginning in February 1915, they began to develop the SS (Sea Scout) class of blimp. These had a small envelope of and at first used aircraft fuselages without the wing and tail surfaces as control cars. Later, more advanced blimps with purpose-built gondolas were used. The NS class (North Sea) were the largest and most effective non-rigid airships in British service, with a gas capacity of , a crew of 10 and an endurance of 24 hours. Six bombs were carried, as well as three to five machine guns. British blimps were used for scouting, mine clearance, and convoy patrol duties. During the war, the British operated over 200 non-rigid airships. Several were sold to Russia, France, the United States, and Italy. The large number of trained crews, low attrition rate and constant experimentation in handling techniques meant that at the war's end Britain was the world leader in non-rigid airship technology.


title: Airship

text: The Royal Navy continued development of rigid airships until the end of the war. Eight rigid airships had been completed by the armistice, (No. 9r, four 23 Class, two R23X Class and one R31 Class), although several more were in an advanced state of completion by the war's end. Both France and Italy continued to use airships throughout the war. France preferred the non-rigid type, whereas Italy flew 49 semi-rigid airships in both the scouting and bombing roles.


title: Airship

text: Aeroplanes had essentially replaced airships as bombers by the end of the war, and Germany's remaining zeppelins were destroyed by their crews, scrapped or handed over to the Allied powers as war reparations. The British rigid airship program, which had mainly been a reaction to the potential threat of the German airships, was wound down.


title: Airship

text: Britain, the United States and Germany built rigid airships between the two world wars. Italy and France made limited use of Zeppelins handed over as war reparations. Italy, the Soviet Union, the United States and Japan mainly operated semi-rigid airships.


title: Airship

text: Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was not allowed to build airships of greater capacity than a million cubic feet. Two small passenger airships, LZ 120 "Bodensee" and its sister ship LZ 121 "Nordstern", were built immediately after the war but were confiscated following the sabotage of the wartime Zeppelins that were to have been handed over as war reparations: "Bodensee" was given to Italy and "Nordstern" to France. On May 12, 1926, the Italian built semi-rigid airship "Norge" was the first aircraft to fly over the North Pole.


title: Airship

text: The British R33 and R34 were near-identical copies of the German L 33, which had come down almost intact in Yorkshire on 24 September 1916. Despite being almost three years out of date by the time they were launched in 1919, they became two of the most successful airships in British service. The creation of the Royal Air Force (RAF) in early 1918 created a hybrid British airship program. The RAF was not interested in airships while the Admiralty was, so a deal was made where the Admiralty would design any future military airships and the RAF would handle manpower, facilities and operations. On 2 July 1919, R34 began the first double crossing of the Atlantic by an aircraft. It landed at Mineola, Long Island on 6 July after 108 hours in the air; the return crossing began on 8 July and took 75 hours. This feat failed to generate enthusiasm for continued airship development, and the British airship program was rapidly wound down.


title: Airship

text: During World War One, the U.S. Navy acquired its first airship, the DH-1, but it was destroyed while being inflated shortly after delivery to the Navy. After the war, the U.S. Navy contracted to buy the R 38, which was being built in Britain, but before it was handed over it was destroyed because of a structural failure during a test flight.


title: Airship

text: America then started constructing the , designed by the Bureau of Aeronautics and based on the Zeppelin L 49. Assembled in Hangar No. 1 and first flown on 4 September 1923 at Lakehurst, New Jersey, it was the first airship to be inflated with the noble gas helium, which was then so scarce that the "Shenandoah" contained most of the world's supply. A second airship, , was built by the Zeppelin company as compensation for the airships that should have been handed over as war reparations according to the terms of the Versailles Treaty but had been sabotaged by their crews. This construction order saved the Zeppelin works from the threat of closure. The success of the "Los Angeles", which was flown successfully for eight years, encouraged the U.S. Navy to invest in its own, larger airships. When the "Los Angeles" was delivered, the two airships had to share the limited supply of helium, and thus alternated operating and overhauls.


title: Airship

text: In 1922, Sir Dennistoun Burney suggested a plan for a subsidised air service throughout the British Empire using airships (the Burney Scheme). Following the coming to power of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government in 1924, the scheme was transformed into the Imperial Airship Scheme, under which two airships were built, one by a private company and the other by the Royal Airship Works under Air Ministry control. The two designs were radically different. The "capitalist" ship, the "R100", was more conventional, while the "socialist" ship, the R101, had many innovative design features. Construction of both took longer than expected, and the airships did not fly until 1929. Neither airship was capable of the service intended, though the R100 did complete a proving flight to Canada and back in 1930. On 5 October 1930, the R101, which had not been thoroughly tested after major modifications, crashed on its maiden voyage to India at Beauvais in France killing 48 of the 54 people aboard. Among the dead were the craft's chief designer and the Secretary of State for Air. The disaster ended British interest in airships.


title: Airship

text: The Locarno Treaties of 1925 lifted the restrictions on German airship construction, and the Zeppelin company started construction of the "Graf Zeppelin" (LZ 127), the largest airship that could be built in the company's existing shed, and intended to stimulate interest in passenger airships. The "Graf Zeppelin" burned "blau gas", similar to propane, stored in large gas bags below the hydrogen cells, as fuel. Since its density was similar to that of air, it avoided the weight change as fuel was used, and thus the need to valve hydrogen. The "Graf Zeppelin" had an impressive safety record, flying over (including the first circumnavigation of the globe by airship) without a single passenger injury.


title: Airship

text: The U.S. Navy experimented with the use of airships as airborne aircraft carriers, developing an idea pioneered by the British. The USS "Los Angeles" was used for initial experiments, and the and , the world's largest at the time, were used to test the principle in naval operations. Each carried four F9C Sparrowhawk fighters in its hangar, and could carry a fifth on the trapeze. The idea had mixed results. By the time the Navy started to develop a sound doctrine for using the ZRS-type airships, the last of the two built, USS "Macon", had been wrecked. Meanwhile, the seaplane had become more capable, and was considered a better investment.


title: Airship

text: Eventually, the U.S. Navy lost all three U.S.-built rigid airships to accidents. USS "Shenandoah" flew into a severe thunderstorm over Noble County, Ohio while on a poorly planned publicity flight on 3 September 1925. It broke into pieces, killing 14 of its crew. USS "Akron" was caught in a severe storm and flown into the surface of the sea off the shore of New Jersey on 3 April 1933. It carried no life boats and few life vests, so 73 of its crew of 76 died from drowning or hypothermia. USS "Macon" was lost after suffering a structural failure offshore near Point Sur Lighthouse on 12 February 1935. The failure caused a loss of gas, which was made much worse when the aircraft was driven over pressure height causing it to lose too much helium to maintain flight. Only two of its crew of 83 died in the crash thanks to the inclusion of life jackets and inflatable rafts after the "Akron" disaster.


title: Airship

text: The Empire State Building was completed in 1931 with a dirigible mast, in anticipation of future passenger airship service, but no airship ever used the mast. Various entrepreneurs experimented with commuting and shipping freight via airship.


title: Airship

text: In the 1930s, the German Zeppelins successfully competed with other means of transport. They could carry significantly more passengers than other contemporary aircraft while providing amenities similar to those on ocean liners, such as private cabins, observation decks, and dining rooms. Less importantly, the technology was potentially more energy-efficient than heavier-than-air designs. Zeppelins were also faster than ocean liners. On the other hand, operating airships was quite involved. Often the crew would outnumber passengers, and on the ground large teams were necessary to assist mooring and very large hangars were required at airports.


title: Airship

text: By the mid-1930s, only Germany still pursued airship development. The Zeppelin company continued to operate the "Graf Zeppelin" on passenger service between Frankfurt and Recife in Brazil, taking 68 hours. Even with the small "Graf Zeppelin", the operation was almost profitable. In the mid-1930s, work began on an airship designed specifically to operate a passenger service across the Atlantic. The "Hindenburg" (LZ 129) completed a successful 1936 season, carrying passengers between Lakehurst, New Jersey and Germany. The year 1937 started with the most spectacular and widely remembered airship accident. Approaching the Lakehurst mooring mast minutes before landing on 6 May 1937, the "Hindenburg" suddenly burst into flames and crashed to the ground. Of the 97 people aboard, 35 died: 13 passengers, 22 aircrew, along with one American ground-crewman. The disaster happened before a large crowd, was filmed and a radio news reporter was recording the arrival. This was a disaster that theater goers could see and hear in newsreels. The "Hindenburg" disaster shattered public confidence in airships, and brought a definitive end to their "golden age". The day after the "Hindenburg" disaster, the "Graf Zeppelin" landed safely in Germany after its return flight from Brazil. This was the last international passenger airship flight.


title: Airship

text: "Hindenburg"s identical sister ship, the "Graf Zeppelin II" (LZ 130), could not carry commercial passengers without helium, which the United States refused to sell to Germany. The "Graf Zeppelin" made several test flights and conducted some electronic espionage until 1939 when it was grounded due to the beginning of the war. The two "Graf Zeppelins" were scrapped in April, 1940.


title: Airship

text: Development of airships continued only in the United States, and to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had several semi-rigid and non-rigid airships. The semi-rigid dirigible SSSR-V6 OSOAVIAKhIM was among the largest of these craft, and it set the longest endurance flight at the time of over 130 hours. It crashed into a mountain in 1938, killing 13 of the 19 people on board. While this was a severe blow to the Soviet airship program, they continued to operate non-rigid airships until 1950.


title: Airship

text: While Germany determined that airships were obsolete for military purposes in the coming war and concentrated on the development of aeroplanes, the United States pursued a program of military airship construction even though it had not developed a clear military doctrine for airship use. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, bringing the United States into World War II, the U.S. Navy had 10 nonrigid airships:


title: Airship

text: Only "K"- and "TC"-class airships were suitable for combat and they were quickly pressed into service against Japanese and German submarines, which were then sinking American shipping within visual range of the American coast. U.S. Navy command, remembering airship's anti-submarine success in World War I, immediately requested new modern antisubmarine airships and on 2 January 1942 formed the ZP-12 patrol unit based in Lakehurst from the four "K" airships. The ZP-32 patrol unit was formed from two "TC" and two "L" airships a month later, based at NAS Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, California. An airship training base was created there as well. The status of submarine-hunting Goodyear airships in the early days of World War II has created significant confusion. Although various accounts refer to airships "Resolute" and "Volunteer" as operating as "privateers" under a Letter of Marque, Congress never authorized a commission, nor did the President sign one.


title: Airship

text: In the years 1942–44, approximately 1,400 airship pilots and 3,000 support crew members were trained in the military airship crew training program and the airship military personnel grew from 430 to 12,400. The U.S. airships were produced by the Goodyear factory in Akron, Ohio. From 1942 till 1945, 154 airships were built for the U.S. Navy (133 "K"-class, 10 "L"-class, seven "G"-class, four "M"-class) and five "L"-class for civilian customers (serial numbers "L-4" to "L-8").


title: Airship

text: The primary airship tasks were patrol and convoy escort near the American coastline. They also served as an organization centre for the convoys to direct ship movements, and were used in naval search and rescue operations. Rarer duties of the airships included aerophoto reconnaissance, naval mine-laying and mine-sweeping, parachute unit transport and deployment, cargo and personnel transportation. They were deemed quite successful in their duties with the highest combat readiness factor in the entire U.S. air force (87%).


title: Airship

text: During the war, some 532 ships without airship escort were sunk near the U.S. coast by enemy submarines. Only one ship, the tanker "Persephone", of the 89,000 or so in convoys escorted by blimps was sunk by the enemy. Airships engaged submarines with depth charges and, less frequently, with other on-board weapons. They were excellent at driving submarines down, where their limited speed and range prevented them from attacking convoys. The weapons available to airships were so limited that until the advent of the homing torpedo they had little chance of sinking a submarine.


title: Airship

text: Only one airship was ever destroyed by U-boat: on the night of 18/19 July 1943, the "K-74" from ZP-21 division was patrolling the coastline near Florida. Using radar, the airship located a surfaced German submarine. The "K-74" made her attack run but the U-boat opened fire first. "K-74"s depth charges did not release as she crossed the U-boat and the "K-74" received serious damage, losing gas pressure and an engine but landing in the water without loss of life. The crew was rescued by patrol boats in the morning, but one crewman, Aviation Machinist's Mate Second Class Isadore Stessel, died from a shark attack. The U-boat, , was slightly damaged and the next day or so was attacked by aircraft, sustaining damage that forced it to return to base. It was finally sunk on 24 August 1943 by a British Vickers Wellington near Vigo, Spain.


title: Airship

text: Fleet Airship Wing One operated from Lakehurst, New Jersey, Glynco, Georgia, Weeksville, North Carolina, South Weymouth NAS Massachusetts, Brunswick NAS and Bar Harbor Maine, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and Argentia, Newfoundland.


title: Airship

text: Some Navy blimps saw action in the European war theater. In 1944–45, the U.S. Navy moved an entire squadron of eight Goodyear K class blimps (K-89, K-101, K-109, K-112, K-114, K-123, K-130, & K-134) with flight and maintenance crews from Weeksville Naval Air Station in North Carolina to Naval Air Station Port Lyautey, French Morocco. Their mission was to locate and destroy German U-boats in the relatively shallow waters around the Strait of Gibraltar where magnetic anomaly detection (MAD) was viable. PBY aircraft had been searching these waters but MAD required low altitude flying that was dangerous at night for these aircraft. The blimps were considered a perfect solution to establish a 24/7 MAD barrier (fence) at the Straits of Gibraltar with the PBYs flying the day shift and the blimps flying the night shift. The first two blimps (K-123 & K-130) left South Weymouth NAS on 28 May 1944 and flew to Argentia, Newfoundland, the Azores, and finally to Port Lyautey where they completed the first transatlantic crossing by nonrigid airships on 1 June 1944. The blimps of USN Blimp Squadron ZP-14 (Blimpron 14, aka "The Africa Squadron") also conducted mine-spotting and mine-sweeping operations in key Mediterranean ports and various escorts including the convoy carrying United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the Yalta Conference in 1945. Airships from the ZP-12 unit took part in the sinking of the last U-boat before German capitulation, sinking the "U-881" on 6 May 1945 together with destroyers USS Atherton and USS Moberly.


title: Airship

text: Other airships patrolled the Caribbean, Fleet Airship Wing Two, Headquartered at NAS Richmond, Florida, covered the Gulf of Mexico from Richmond and Key West, Florida, Houma, Louisiana, as well as Hitchcock and Brownsville, Texas. FAW 2 also patrolled the northern Caribbean from San Julian, the Isle of Pines (now called Isla de la Juventud) and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba as well as Vernam Field, Jamaica.


title: Airship

text: Navy blimps of Fleet Airship Wing Five, (ZP-51) operated from bases in Trinidad, British Guiana and Paramaribo, Suriname. Fleet Airship Wing Four operated along the coast of Brazil. Two squadrons, VP-41 and VP-42 flew from bases at Amapá, Igarapé-Açu, São Luís Fortaleza, Fernando de Noronha, Recife, Maceió, Ipitanga (near Salvador, Bahia), Caravelas, Vitória and the hangar built for the "Graf Zeppelin" at Santa Cruz, Rio de Janeiro.


title: Airship

text: Fleet Airship Wing Three operated squadrons, ZP-32 from Moffett Field, ZP-31 at NAS Santa Ana, and ZP-33 at NAS Tillamook, Oregon. Auxiliary fields were at Del Mar, Lompoc, Watsonville and Eureka, California, North Bend and Astoria, Oregon, as well as Shelton and Quillayute in Washington.


title: Airship

text: From 2 January 1942 until the end of war airship operations in the Atlantic, the blimps of the Atlantic fleet made 37,554 flights and flew 378,237 hours. Of the over 70,000 ships in convoys protected by blimps, only one was sunk by a submarine while under blimp escort.


title: Airship

text: The Soviet Union flew a single airship during the war. The "W-12", built in 1939, entered service in 1942 for paratrooper training and equipment transport. It made 1432 flights with 300 metric tons of cargo until 1945. On 1 February 1945, the Soviets constructed a second airship, a "Pobeda"-class ("Victory"-class) unit (used for mine-sweeping and wreckage clearing in the Black Sea) that crashed on 21 January 1947. Another "W"-class – W-12bis "Patriot" – was commissioned in 1947 and was mostly used until the mid 1950s for crew training, parades and propaganda.


title: Airship

text: Although airships are no longer used for major cargo and passenger transport, they are still used for other purposes such as advertising, sightseeing, surveillance, research and advocacy.


title: Airship

text: There were several studies and proposals for nuclear-powered airships, starting with a 1954 study by F.W. Locke Jr for US Navy. In 1957 Edwin J. Kirschner published the book "The Zeppelin in the Atomic Age", which promoted the use of atomic airships. In 1959 Goodyear presented a plan for nuclear-powered airship for both military and commercial use. Several other proposals and papers were published during the next decades.


title: Airship

text: In the 1980s, Per Lindstrand and his team introduced the "GA-42" airship, the first airship to use fly-by-wire flight control, which considerably reduced the pilot's workload.


title: Airship

text: An airship was prominently featured in the James Bond film "A View to a Kill", released in 1985. The Skyship 500 had the livery of Zorin Industries.


title: Airship

text: The world's largest thermal airship () was constructed by the Per Lindstrand company for French botanists in 1993. The "AS-300" carried an underslung raft, which was positioned by the airship on top of tree canopies in the rain forest, allowing the botanists to carry out their treetop research without significant damage to the rainforest. When research was finished at a given location, the airship returned to pick up and relocate the raft.


title: Airship

text: In June 1987, the U.S. Navy awarded a US$168.9 million contract to Westinghouse Electric and Airship Industries of the UK to find out whether an airship could be used as an airborne platform to detect the threat of sea-skimming missiles, such as the Exocet. At 2.5 million cubic feet, the Westinghouse/Airship Industries Sentinel 5000 (Redesignated YEZ-2A by the U. S. Navy) prototype design was to have been the largest blimp ever constructed. Additional funding for the Naval Airship Program was killed in 1995 and development was discontinued.


title: Airship

text: The SVAM CA-80 airship, which was produced in 2000 by Shanghai Vantage Airship Manufacture Co., Ltd., had a successful trial flight in September 2001. This was designed for advertisement and propagation, air-photo, scientific test, tour and surveillance duties. It was certified as a grade-A Hi-Tech introduction program (No. 20000186) in Shanghai. The CAAC authority granted a type design approval and certificate of airworthiness for the airship.


title: Airship

text: In the 1990s the Zeppelin company returned to the airship business. Their new model, designated the Zeppelin NT, made its maiden flight on 18 September 1997. there were four NT aircraft flying, a fifth was completed in March 2009 and an expanded NT-14 (14,000 cubic meters of helium, capable of carrying 19 passengers) was under construction. One was sold to a Japanese company, and was planned to be flown to Japan in the summer of 2004. Due to delays getting permission from the Russian government, the company decided to transport the airship to Japan by sea. One of the four NT craft is in South Africa carrying diamond detection equipment from De Beers, an application at which the very stable low vibration NT platform excels. The project included design adaptations for high temperature operation and desert climate, as well as a separate mooring mast and a very heavy mooring truck. NT-4 belonged to Airship Ventures of Moffett Field, Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay Area, and provided sight-seeing tours.


title: Airship

text: Blimps are used for advertising and as TV camera platforms at major sporting events. The most iconic of these are the Goodyear Blimps. Goodyear operates three blimps in the United States, and The Lightship Group, now The AirSign Airship Group, operates up to 19 advertising blimps around the world. Airship Management Services owns and operates three Skyship 600 blimps. Two operate as advertising and security ships in North America and the Caribbean. Airship Ventures operated a Zeppelin NT for advertising, passenger service and special mission projects. They were the only airship operator in the U.S. authorized to fly commercial passengers, until closing their doors in 2012.


title: Airship

text: Skycruise Switzerland AG owns and operates two Skyship 600 blimps. One operates regularly over Switzerland used on sightseeing tours.


title: Airship

text: The Switzerland-based Skyship 600 has also played other roles over the years. For example, it was flown over Athens during the 2004 Summer Olympics as a security measure. In November 2006, it carried advertising calling it "The Spirit of Dubai" as it began a publicity tour from London to Dubai, UAE on behalf of The Palm Islands, the world's largest man-made islands created as a residential complex.


title: Airship

text: In May 2006, the U.S. Navy began to fly airships again after a hiatus of nearly 44 years. The program uses a single American Blimp Company A-170 nonrigid airship, with designation MZ-3A. Operations focus on crew training and research, and the platform integrator is Northrop Grumman. The program is directed by the Naval Air Systems Command and is being carried out at NAES Lakehurst, the original centre of U.S. Navy lighter-than-air operations in previous decades.


title: Airship

text: In November 2006 the U.S. Army bought an A380+ airship from American Blimp Corporation through a Systems level contract with Northrop Grumman and Booz Allen Hamilton. The airship started flight tests in late 2007, with a primary goal of carrying of payload to an altitude of under remote control and autonomous waypoint navigation. The program will also demonstrate carrying of payload to The platform could be used for Multi-Intelligence collections. In 2008, the "CA-150" airship was launched by Vantage Airship. This is an improved modification of model "CA-120" and completed manufacturing in 2008. With larger volume and increased passenger capacity, it is the largest manned nonrigid airship in China at present.


title: Airship

text: In late June 2014 the Electronic Frontier Foundation flew the GEFA-FLUG AS 105 GD/4 blimp AE Bates (owned by, and in conjunction with, Greenpeace) over the NSA's Bluffdale Utah Data Center in protest.


title: Airship

text: Hybrid designs such as the Heli-Stat airship/helicopter, the Aereon aerostatic/aerodynamic craft, and the CycloCrane (a hybrid aerostatic/rotorcraft), struggled to take flight. The Cyclocrane was also interesting in that the airship's envelope rotated along its longitudinal axis.


title: Airship

text: In 2005, a short-lived project of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was Walrus HULA, which explored the potential for using airships as long-distance, heavy lift craft. The primary goal of the research program was to determine the feasibility of building an airship capable of carrying of payload a distance of and land on an unimproved location without the use of external ballast or ground equipment (such as masts). In 2005, two contractors, Lockheed Martin and US Aeros Airships were each awarded approximately $3 million to do feasibility studies of designs for WALRUS. Congress removed funding for Walrus HULA in 2006.


title: Airship

text: In 2010, the U.S. Army awarded a $517 million (£350.6 million) contract to Northrop Grumman and partner Hybrid Air Vehicles to develop a Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) system, in the form of three HAV 304s. The project was cancelled in February 2012 due to it being behind schedule and over budget; also the forthcoming U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan where it was intended to be deployed. Following this the Hybrid Air Vehicles HAV 304 Airlander 10 was repurchased by Hybrid Air Vehicles then modified and reassembled in Bedford, UK, and renamed the Airlander 10. As of 2018, it was being tested in readiness for its UK flight test programme.


title: Airship

text: , a French company, manufactures and operates airships and aerostats. For 2 years, A-NSE has been testing its airships for the French Army. Airships and aerostats are operated to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) support. Their airships include many innovative features such as water ballast take-off and landing systems, variable geometry envelopes and thrust–vectoring systems.


title: Airship

text: The U.S. government has funded two major projects in the high altitude arena. The Composite Hull High Altitude Powered Platform (CHHAPP) is sponsored by U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command. This aircraft is also sometimes called "HiSentinel High-Altitude Airship". This prototype ship made a five-hour test flight in September 2005. The second project, the high-altitude airship (HAA), is sponsored by DARPA. In 2005, DARPA awarded a contract for nearly $150 million to Lockheed Martin for prototype development. First flight of the HAA was planned for 2008 but suffered programmatic and funding delays. The HAA project evolved into the High Altitude Long Endurance-Demonstrator (HALE-D). The U.S. Army and Lockheed Martin launched the first-of-its kind HALE-D on July 27, 2011. After attaining an altitude of , due to an anomaly, the company decided to abort the mission. The airship made a controlled descent in an unpopulated area of southwest Pennsylvania.


title: Airship

text: On 31 January 2006 Lockheed Martin made the first flight of their secretly built hybrid airship designated the P-791. The design is very similar to the SkyCat, unsuccessfully promoted for many years by the British company Advanced Technologies Group (ATG).


title: Airship

text: Dirigibles have been used in the War in Afghanistan for reconnaissance purposes, as they allow for constant monitoring of a specific area through cameras mounted on the airships.


title: Airship

text: In the 1990s, the successor of the original Zeppelin company in Friedrichshafen, the "Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH", reengaged in airship construction. The first experimental craft (later christened "Friedrichshafen") of the type "Zeppelin NT" flew in September 1997. Though larger than common blimps, the "Neue Technologie" (New Technology) zeppelins are much smaller than their giant ancestors and not actually Zeppelin-types in the classical sense. They are sophisticated semirigids. Apart from the greater payload, their main advantages compared to blimps are higher speed and excellent maneuverability. Meanwhile, several "Zeppelin NT" have been produced and operated profitably in joyrides, research flights and similar applications.


title: Airship

text: In June 2004, a Zeppelin NT was sold for the first time to a Japanese company, Nippon Airship Corporation, for tourism and advertising mainly around Tokyo. It was also given a role at the 2005 Expo in Aichi. The aircraft began a flight from Friedrichshafen to Japan, stopping at Geneva, Paris, Rotterdam, Munich, Berlin, Stockholm and other European cities to carry passengers on short legs of the flight. Russian authorities denied overflight permission, so the airship had to be dismantled and shipped to Japan rather than following the historic "Graf Zeppelin" flight from Germany to Japan.


title: Airship

text: In 2008, Airship Ventures Inc. began operations from Moffett Federal Airfield near Mountain View, California and until November 2012 offered tours of the San Francisco Bay Area for up to 12 passengers.


title: Airship

text: In November 2005, De Beers, a diamond mining company, launched an airship exploration program over the remote Kalahari desert. A Zeppelin NT, equipped with a Bell Geospace gravity gradiometer, was used to find potential diamond mines by scanning the local geography for low-density rock formations, known as kimberlite pipes. On 21 September 2007, the airship was severely damaged by a whirlwind while in Botswana. One crew member, who was on watch aboard the moored craft, was slightly injured but released after overnight observation in hospital.


title: Airship

text: Several companies, such as Cameron Balloons in Bristol, United Kingdom, build hot-air airships. These combine the structures of both hot-air balloons and small airships. The envelope is the normal cigar shape, complete with tail fins, but is inflated with hot air instead of helium to provide the lifting force. A small gondola, carrying the pilot and passengers, a small engine, and the burners to provide the hot air are suspended below the envelope, beneath an opening through which the burners protrude.


title: Airship

text: Hot-air airships typically cost less to buy and maintain than modern helium-based blimps, and can be quickly deflated after flights. This makes them easy to carry in trailers or trucks and inexpensive to store. They are usually very slow moving, with a typical top speed of 25–30 km/h (15–20 mph, 6.7–8.9 m/s). They are mainly used for advertising, but at least one has been used in rainforests for wildlife observation, as they can be easily transported to remote areas.


title: Airship

text: Remote-controlled (RC) airships, a type of unmanned aerial system (UAS), are sometimes used for commercial purposes such as advertising and aerial video and photography as well as recreational purposes. They are particularly common as an advertising mechanism at indoor stadiums. While RC airships are sometimes flown outdoors, doing so for commercial purposes is illegal in the US. Commercial use of an unmanned airship must be certified under part 121.


title: Airship

text: In 2008, French adventurer attempted to cross the English Channel with a muscular pedal powered airship.


title: Airship

text: Today, with large, fast, and more cost-efficient fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, it is unknown whether huge airships can operate profitably in regular passenger transport though, as energy costs rise, attention is once again returning to these lighter-than-air vessels as a possible alternative. At the very least, the idea of comparatively slow, "majestic" cruising at relatively low altitudes and in comfortable atmosphere certainly has retained some appeal. There have been some niches for airships in and after World War II, such as long-duration observations, antisubmarine patrol, platforms for TV camera crews, and advertising; these generally require only small and flexible craft, and have thus generally been better fitted for cheaper (non-passenger) blimps.


title: Airship

text: It has periodically been suggested that airships could be employed for cargo transport, especially delivering extremely heavy loads to areas with poor infrastructure over great distances. This has also been called roadless trucking. Also, airships could be used for heavy lifting over short distances (e.g. on construction sites); this is described as heavy-lift, short-haul. In both cases, the airships are heavy haulers. One recent enterprise of this sort was the "Cargolifter" project, in which a hybrid (thus not entirely Zeppelin-type) airship even larger than "Hindenburg" was projected. Around 2000, CargoLifter AG built the world's largest self-supporting hall, measuring long, wide and high about south of Berlin. In May 2002, the project was stopped for financial reasons; the company had to file bankruptcy. The enormous CargoLifter hangar was later converted to house the Tropical Islands Resort. Although no rigid airships are currently used for heavy lifting, hybrid airships are being developed for such purposes. AEREON 26, tested in 1971, was described in John McPhee's "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed".


title: Airship

text: An impediment to the large-scale development of airships as heavy haulers has been figuring out how they can be used in a cost-efficient way. In order to have a significant economic advantage over ocean transport, cargo airships must be able to deliver their payload faster than ocean carriers but more cheaply than airplanes. William Crowder, a fellow at the Logistics Management Institute, has calculated that cargo airships are only economical when they can transport 500 to 1,000 tons, approximately the same as a super-jumbo aircraft. The large initial investment required to build such a large airship has been a hindrance to production, especially given the risk inherent in a new technology. The chief commercial officer of the company hoping to sell the LMH-1, a cargo airship currently being developed by Lockheed Martin, believes that airships can be economical in hard-to-reach locations such as mining operations in northern Canada that currently require ice roads.


title: Airship

text: A metal-clad airship has a very thin metal envelope, rather than the usual fabric. The shell may be either internally braced or monocoque as in the ZMC-2, which flew many times in the 1920s, the only example ever to do so. The shell may be gas-tight as in a non-rigid blimp, or the design may employ internal gas bags as in a rigid airship. Compared to a fabric envelope the metal cladding is expected to be more durable.


title: Airship

text: A hybrid airship is a general term for an aircraft that combines characteristics of heavier-than-air (aeroplane or helicopter) and lighter-than-air technology. Examples include helicopter/airship hybrids intended for heavy lift applications and dynamic lift airships intended for long-range cruising. Most airships, when fully loaded with cargo and fuel, are usually ballasted to be heavier than air, and thus must use their propulsion system and shape to create aerodynamic lift, necessary to stay aloft. All airships can be operated to be slightly heavier than air at periods during flight (descent). Accordingly, the term "hybrid airship" refers to craft that obtain a significant portion of their lift from aerodynamic lift or other kinetic means.


title: Airship

text: For example, the Aeroscraft is a buoyancy assisted air vehicle that generates lift through a combination of aerodynamics, thrust vectoring and gas buoyancy generation and management, and for much of the time will fly heavier than air. Aeroscraft is Worldwide Aeros Corporation's continuation of DARPA's now cancelled Walrus HULA (Hybrid Ultra Large Aircraft) project.


title: Airship

text: The Patroller P3 hybrid airship developed by Advanced Hybrid Aircraft Ltd, BC, Canada, is a relatively small (85,000 feet3 = 2,400 m3) buoyant craft, manned by the crew of 5 and with the endurance of up to 72 hours. The flight-tests with the 40% RC scale model proved that such a craft can be launched and landed without a large team of strong ground-handlers. Design features a special “winglet” for aerodynamic lift control.


title: Airship

text: Airships have been proposed as a potential cheap alternative to surface rocket launches for achieving Earth orbit. JP Aerospace have proposed the Airship to Orbit project, which intends to float a multi-stage airship up to mesospheric altitudes of 55 km (180,000 ft) and then use ion propulsion to accelerate to orbital speed. At these heights, air resistance would not be a significant problem for achieving such speeds. The company has not yet built any of the three stages.


title: Airship

text: NASA has proposed the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, which comprises a series of five missions including manned missions to the atmosphere of Venus in airships. Pressures on the surface of the planet are too high for human habitation, but at a specific altitude the pressure is equal to that found on Earth and this makes Venus a potential target for human colonization.


title: Airship

text: Hypothetically, there could be an airship lifted by a vacuum—that is, by material that can contain nothing at all inside but withstand the atmospheric pressure from the outside. It is, at this point, science fiction, although NASA has posited that some kind of vacuum airship could eventually be used to explore the surface of Mars.


title: Airship

text: EU FP7 MAAT Project has studied an innovative cruiser/feeder airship system, for the stratosphere with a cruiser remaining airborne for a long time and feeders connecting it to the ground and flying as piloted balloons.


title: Airship

text: The advantage of airships over aeroplanes is that static lift sufficient for flight is generated by the lifting gas and requires no engine power. This was an immense advantage before the middle of World War I and remained an advantage for long-distance or long-duration operations until World War II. Modern concepts for high-altitude airships include photovoltaic cells to reduce the need to land to refuel, thus they can remain in the air until consumables expire. This similarly reduces or eliminates the need to consider variable fuel weight in buoyancy calculations.


title: Airship

text: The disadvantages are that an airship has a very large reference area and comparatively large drag coefficient, thus a larger drag force compared to that of aeroplanes and even helicopters. Given the large frontal area and wetted surface of an airship, a practical limit is reached around . Thus airships are used where speed is not critical.


title: Airship

text: The lift capability of an airship is equal to the buoyant force minus the weight of the airship. This assumes standard air-temperature and pressure conditions. Corrections are usually made for water vapor and impurity of lifting gas, as well as percentage of inflation of the gas cells at liftoff. Based on specific lift (lifting force per unit volume of gas), the greatest static lift is provided by hydrogen (11.15 N/m or 71 lb/1000 cu ft) with helium (10.37 N/m or 66 lb/1000 cu ft) a close second.


title: Airship

text: In addition to static lift, an airship can obtain a certain amount of dynamic lift from its engines. Dynamic lift in past airships has been about 10% of the static lift. Dynamic lift allows an airship to "take off heavy" from a runway similar to fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft. This requires additional weight in engines, fuel, and landing gear, negating some of the static lift capacity.


title: Airship

text: The altitude at which an airship can fly largely depends on how much lifting gas it can lose due to expansion before stasis is reached. The ultimate altitude record for a rigid airship was set in 1917 by the L-55 under the command of Hans-Kurt Flemming when he forced the airship to attempting to cross France after the "Silent Raid" on London. The L-55 lost lift during the descent to lower altitudes over Germany and crashed due to loss of lift. While such waste of gas was necessary for the survival of airships in the later years of World War I, it was impractical for commercial operations, or operations of helium-filled military airships. The highest flight made by a hydrogen-filled passenger airship was on the "Graf Zeppelin's" around-the-world flight.


title: Airship

text: The greatest disadvantage of the airship is size, which is essential to increasing performance. As size increases, the problems of ground handling increase geometrically. As the German Navy changed from the P class of 1915 with a volume of over to the larger Q class of 1916, the R class of 1917, and finally the W class of 1918, at almost ground handling problems reduced the number of days the Zeppelins were able to make patrol flights. This availability declined from 34% in 1915, to 24.3% in 1916 and finally 17.5% in 1918.


title: Airship

text: So long as the power-to-weight ratios of aircraft engines remained low and specific fuel consumption high, the airship had an edge for long-range or -duration operations. As those figures changed, the balance shifted rapidly in the aeroplane's favour. By mid-1917, the airship could no longer survive in a combat situation where the threat was aeroplanes. By the late 1930s, the airship barely had an advantage over the aeroplane on intercontinental over-water flights, and that advantage had vanished by the end of World War II.


title: Airship

text: This is in face-to-face tactical situations. Currently, a high-altitude airship project is planned to survey hundreds of kilometres as their operation radius, often much farther than the normal engagement range of a military aeroplane. For example, a radar mounted on a vessel platform high has radio horizon at range, while a radar at altitude has radio horizon at range. This is significantly important for detecting low-flying cruise missiles or fighter-bombers.


title: Airship

text: The most commonly used lifting gas, helium, is inert and therefore presents no fire risk. A series of vulnerability tests were done by the UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency DERA on a Skyship 600. Since the internal gas pressure was maintained at only 1–2% above the surrounding air pressure, the vehicle proved highly tolerant to physical damage or to attack by small-arms fire or missiles. Several hundred high-velocity bullets were fired through the hull, and even two hours later the vehicle would have been able to return to base. Ordnance passed through the envelope without causing critical helium loss. The results and related mathematical model have presented in the hypothesis of considering a Zeppelin NT size airship. In all instances of light armament fire evaluated under both test and live conditions, the airship was able to complete its mission and return to base.


title: John Saxon

text: John Saxon (born Carmine Orrico; August 5, 1936 – July 25, 2020) was an American actor who worked on more than 200 film and television projects during a span of 60 years. He was known for his work in Westerns and horror films, often playing police officers and detectives.


title: John Saxon

text: Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Saxon studied acting with Stella Adler before beginning his career as a contract actor for Universal Pictures, appearing in such films as "Rock, Pretty Baby" (1956) and "Portrait in Black" (1961), which earned him a reputation as a teen idol and won him a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor. During the 1970s and 1980s, he established himself as a character actor, frequently portraying law enforcement officials in horror films such as "Black Christmas" (1974) and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984).


title: John Saxon

text: Saxon appeared in numerous Italian films from the early sixties. In a 2002 interview, he said of this period: "At the time Hollywood was going through a crisis, but England and Italy were making a great many films. Besides, I thought the European films were of a much more mature quality than most of what Hollywood was making at the time." Saxon appeared in Italian productions all through the 1970s and 1980s, up until 1994, when he made "Jonathan of the Bears".


title: John Saxon

text: In addition to his roles in horror films, Saxon co-starred with Bruce Lee in the martial arts film "Enter the Dragon" (1973), and he had supporting roles in the westerns "The Appaloosa" (1966; for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture), "Death of a Gunfighter" (1969) and "Joe Kidd" (1972), as well as the made-for-television thriller "Raid on Entebbe" (1977). In the 1990s, Saxon occasionally appeared in films, with small roles in "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" (1994) and "From Dusk till Dawn" (1996).


title: John Saxon

text: Of Italian descent, Saxon was born Carmine Orrico in Brooklyn, New York in 1936. His father, Antonio Orrico, was a New York-born dock worker, and his mother Anna (née Protettore) was an immigrant from Calabria. Italian was the primary language spoken at home, though Saxon also spoke some Spanish. He attended New Utrecht High School and studied acting with famous acting coach Stella Adler. He entered showbusiness as a teenager, when he was spotted by a modeling scout at a movie theatre.


title: John Saxon

text: According to Robert Hofler's 2005 biography "The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson", agent Henry Willson saw Saxon's picture on the cover of a detective magazine, where Saxon posed as “a Puerto Rican guy” who gets shot and falls over a garbage can while his girlfriend looks on. Willson immediately contacted the boy's family in Brooklyn. With his parents' permission, the 17-year-old Orrico contracted with Willson, and he was given the stage name John Saxon. He contracted with Universal Studios in April 1954 at $150 a week.


title: John Saxon

text: Saxon spent 18 months at Universal before the studio first used him in a film. His first significant role was a juvenile delinquent in "Running Wild" (1955), co-starring Mamie Van Doren. According to "Filmink", "young Saxon had a scowling, broody teen quality that was in fashion in mid-‘50s Hollywood."


title: John Saxon

text: He was then given a good role in "The Unguarded Moment" (1956), playing a youth who seemingly stalks Esther Williams. During February 1956 Universal exercised its option on Saxon and he was paid $225 a week.


title: John Saxon

text: Saxon had the lead in a low budget teen film, "Rock, Pretty Baby" (1956) which became an unexpected success and established Saxon as a teen idol. Universal executives were pleased, and Ross Hunter announced he would be in "Teach Me How To Cry". Saxon quickly reprised his "Rock, Pretty Baby" role in a sequel, "Summer Love" (1958). By this time, he was getting about 3,000 fan letters a week. He then made "Teach Me How to Cry" with Sandra Dee, which was retitled "The Restless Years" (1958).


title: John Saxon

text: Universal put him in an "A film", "This Happy Feeling" (1958), directed by Blake Edwards, where Saxon romanced Debbie Reynolds in support of Curt Jurgens. MGM borrowed him to appear opposite Sandra Dee in "The Reluctant Debutante" (1958), for director Vincente Minnelli, which was widely seen. Saxon was billed third, beneath Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall. He had a support role in a large budget Biblical drama about Simon Peter, "The Big Fisherman" (1959) for director Frank Borzage, starring Howard Keel. Released by Buena Vista instead of Universal-International, it was a financial disappointment.


title: John Saxon

text: In August 1958, Saxon signed a three-picture deal with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster the first of which was to be the main role in "Cry Tough" (1959), a film about juvenile delinquents. He was meant to follow it with "The Ballad at Cat Ballou" (not made for years later, with Jane Fonda). Instead, for HHL he worked with another major director, John Huston, in the Western "The Unforgiven" (1960), playing an Indian in support of Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn. Back at Universal, he remained in a supporting role for "Portrait in Black" (1960), reunited with Dee, with Lana Turner and Anthony Quinn.


title: John Saxon

text: He appeared in the Western "Posse from Hell" (1961) with Audie Murphy and guest starred in television series like "General Electric Theater" and "The Dick Powell Theatre". "I want to do all sorts of character parts," he said in 1960.


title: John Saxon

text: Saxon played a serial killer soldier in "War Hunt" (1962) and had a small role in the comedy success "Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation" (1962).


title: John Saxon

text: In 1963 Saxon co-starred with Letícia Román in Mario Bava's Italian giallo film "The Girl Who Knew Too Much".


title: John Saxon

text: He returned to Hollywood to perform in Otto Preminger's "The Cardinal" (1963) and an episode of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre" then was back to Europe for "The Cavern" (1964).


title: John Saxon

text: "The Ravagers" (1965) was shot in the Philippines; "Night Caller from Outer Space" (1965) was a science fiction film shot in Britain.


title: John Saxon

text: In 1966, he starred in Curtis Harrington's science fiction/horror classic "Queen of Blood" with Basil Rathbone and Dennis Hopper, then appeared opposite Marlon Brando in "The Appaloosa" (1966), winning a Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor nomination for his portrayal of a Mexican bandit. Saxon recalls, "This was to me a terrific role and something I was ready for, but he [Brando] was despondent. He said he had lent a whole bunch of money to his father, and what he was saying to me was that his father ruined his life by losing all of his money. He was kind of bored in the picture."


title: John Saxon

text: "The Doomsday Flight" (1966) was a made-for-television film. In an interview in 1966 he said "I never felt comfortable being a teenage dreamboat... I regard myself as a craftsman."


title: John Saxon

text: He portrayed Marco Polo in episode 26 of "The Time Tunnel" ("Attack of the Barbarians"), originally broadcast on March 10, 1967, and was a guest actor on "Bonanza" in 1967 ("The Conquistadores"). In episode 19, season 5 of "The Virginian" ("The Modoc Kid") Saxon appeared in the title role alongside Harrison Ford, appearing in one of his first speaking roles. And in 1969 he appeared in Bonanza again ("My Friend, My Enemy").


title: John Saxon

text: Saxon was in a sex comedy for Sam Katzman, "For Singles Only" (1968), and appeared in some Westerns, "One Dollar Too Many" (1968), "Death of a Gunfighter" (1969), "The Men from Shiloh" (rebranded name for "The Virginian", 1971), and "Joe Kidd" (1972) (again playing a Mexican, this time a revolutionary named Luis Chama). "I Kiss the Hand" (1973) was a thriller made in Italy.