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The AS261 breaks new aviation ground in that it is the largest hot air airship to be certificated. With a pilot and four scientists it will be able to hover above the Amazonian rainforest for hours on end enabling scientific research impossible by any other means. Visible in the photo is the huge canopy that will be gently lowered onto the very roof of the forest allowing the scientists to be able to examine a region of the forest normally impossible to access.
Revolutionary Airship to Study Amazon Rainforest
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The world’s largest hot air airship ever built and flown has been rolled out at the Thunder & Colt airship base at Rednal, near Oswestry, UK and is now undergoing flight trials. The AS261 is a 261,000 cubic foot craft, specifically designed to be used in a unique ecological research project in the South American rain forests.
The AS261 breaks all the existing boundaries of airship technology. It is 47. 8m long, 20. 4m high and has a gross lift capacity of 2,100kg. It is the world’s first airship to be built and flown specifically for scientific purposes, the largest airship built in Britain since the ill-fated R100 in 1931 and the first hot air airship to fly with an underslung cargo weighing three quarters of a ton.
The AS261 has been commissioned by a French group, Hear topia, to play a key role in operation Radeau de Cimes (Raft of the Tree Tops). Piloted by Danny Cleyet Marrel, the AS261 will be used to land botanists from the Tropical Laboratory of Montpellier on the very canopy of the Brazilian rain forest.
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The gondola of the airship has been designed to carry the pilot and four scientists. Slung beneath the airship by detachable cables is a giant platform constructed from a web of strong netting, sufficient to take the weight of the scientists and their equipment.
The plan is for the airship to overfly the forests and for the scientists to select a suitable area for experiment, some 25 metres above ground level. The airship will then descend and, gently, lower the netting platform onto the forest canopy. The scientists can climb out of the gondola, onto the netting and the airship then flies off, leaving the environment totally undisturbed.
The scientists can move about on the netting, collecting samples of flora and fauna, observing the behaviour of insects, before the airship returns, settles gently on the tree tops again and then lifts the platform back to base.
If this sounds all a little bit like science fiction, bear in mind that a similar project in 1986 successfully used a hot air balloon which was deflated on the very tops of the trees. With the advantages of an airship to carry a greater load, be more manoeuvrable and select a precise landing site, this expedition is expected to be an even greater success.
The AS261 is a scaled up version of the Thunder & Colt AS80 Mk2 and is heated by triple Colt Mkll burners. The engine is a Continental 100 horsepower aircraft engine, as used in the GA42 airship. The dry weight of the gondola is 530kg and the envelope, constructed from HTN90 material, weighs 375kg. The platform which the airship has to carry and the extra scientific payload clock in at 740kg.
Technical problems which the Thunder & Colt designers had to overcome in constructing the aircraft included making a gondola which can be quickly broken down into four equal sections so that it can be shipped up the Amazon on a raft!
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