Customer Reviews

Airship Design

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This book makes a good companion to the more recent book "Airship Technology" edited by Khoury and Gillett. Despite its age, "Airship Design" is still worth purchasing for anyone interested in airship design. Some knowledge of calculus and basic physics and engineering fundamentals is required to get the most out of the book. Since there isn't any detail provided on Amazon on the book's contents at the time of this review, here's a quick rundown on the chapter titles, which are mostly self-explanatory:

Chapter I The Types of Airships
Chapter II Size and Performance
Chapter III Volumes, Areas, and Linear Dimensions
Chapter IV Load, Shear, and Moments
Chapter V Aerodynamic Forces
Chapter VI Strength of Nonrigid Airships
Chapter VII Longitudinal Strength of Rigid Airships
Chapter VIII Gas-Pressure Forces and Transverse Strength
Chapter IX Design of Girders
Chapter X Steps in Design
Chapter XI Common Airship Fallacies

There is useful material in this book that does not appear in the Khoury book and vice versa. For those interested in rounding out an airship library, the book "Airship Aerodynamics Technical Manual" by the War Department, short as it is, is one I would also recommend - and the price is reasonable and the target audience was airship student pilots, meaning the math involves only algebra and trigonometry - no calculus.

I used this book when I worked for an airship company, this book, Khoury and Pressure Airships are practically the only publically published english language airship books.

There are some excellent German books that deal with more modern materials and methods as well as some older Russian literature that deal specifically with this subject. The concepts are sound but I never fully trusted the equations, they have too many assumptions built in based on 1920's airships. One of the later chapters deals with the non-feasibility of some advanced concepts and they were not feasible in the 1920's, today they are definitely feasible.

Of course most "modern" airships are non-rigid balloons anyways so their is not much change there. Goodyears ships are from the 1950-1960 era, they are just WELL maintained and obviously the electronics are newer.