Breaking free

After her helium filling yesterday, the ship spent the night still suspended from the ceiling of the hangar. This morning, the mast truck arrived to take her on board so that she could be released. The engineering teams were still working on final tests when quite a crowd assembled inside the hangar to watch. Slowly the mast truck inched towards the ship until they were almost nose to mast head. Then the mast was lowered until it was in line with the nose. A ground crew man climbed the mast to check that there were no obstructions and the nose line was pulled taught by the winch line until the nose settled into the clutch in the cup.

Overhead, two maintenance technicians on a large cherry picker started the process of removing the straps securing the ship to the hangar ceiling, and she was set free to sit on her landing gear. Cool.

Fill 'er up

The Linde Helium trucks arrived early on the 15th. As we walked into the hangar we were greeted with this unearthly wooshing noise, the sound of helium under very high pressure going through the nozzle and expanding into the hull. The expansion is so rapid that a sonic effect is set up and it's quite loud!

The filling took most of the day and then overnight the airship was on the helium purifier, getting rid of moisture, particulates and heavier atoms and molecules to leave the helium about 98% pure.

She is now an airship that could fly and yesterday she went from having assembly insurance to proper hull insurance. The first of a number of big events done!

Road Trip part 1

As previously mentioned, our intrepid Chief Pilot, Scott and Zeppelins Ground Crew Chief, Chris, are on the road this week investigating the port(s) where we are hoping to bring the ship in with the Airship on board. Then they are checking out each airport and field that we might use on the way to San Francisco. Logistics also have to be figured out - where is the nearest Avgas, helium, hotel, etc.

One of the biggest issues is determining whether there is enough clear space for the Zeppelin. Scott has visited many of these airfields before with blimps, but they are all smaller than the Zeppelin so it is essential that a very careful measurement of the potential space and all obstructions is done. As you can see, the team are employing what Scott terms 'the wheel of fortune'. If it gets to the right marker point, then we have a potential landing site!

Making a mark

One of the benefits of buying an airship is that you get to name it (more on that later) and you get to decide what is on that huge hull for the maiden flight. We want to make sure people know that she's on her way to California so we hope you'll enjoy the branding when you see the final pictures.

Most of it has yet to be put on (she's not called AI), but this is a cool picture from Josef Hueber at Airbornegrafix showing the process. Thanks Josef!

Waiting for gas.

Thursday is a big day for #4. The helium arrives. Not quite as big a day as it is for a blimp which would be flat until being inflated. But once the helium is in, then the Zeppelin can be released from the chains holding her airframe up and she'll be moored to a mast in the Hangar. This is the first step in getting her ready to fly.
At more than 8000 cubic meters, we're expecting several large tankers to arrive and the helium fill will probably take 24 hours or so.
For those who prefer non metric measurements, that's about 290,000 cubic feet or, if you assume a party balloon has a volume of about half a cubic foot, close to 600,000 party balloons.
Anyway, I thought you'd enjoy this picture....

Coming up....

Please bookmark our blog and stay in touch via our mailing list. The next six months are going to be CRAZY! Coming up on the blog...

• #4 in all her glory. She's almost ready to fly.
• Our Zeppelin Pilots-in-training will let you know about their adventures
• Our Chief Pilot, Scott, is on a long Road Trip with Zeppelin's Ground Crew Chief, Chris. Together they are scoping out the airports and sites that the airship will travel through on her way to California. Expect some pictures and posts from them as they cross many States.
• News of The Route that the airship will take once in the USA
• At least one post about all the onerous regulations to do with 'selling travel'.
• Lots of stories we wrote in the past but couldn't post for confidentiality reasons will finally get posted.
  

We hope you enjoy the ride with us!

Pinch me, it's really happening...

This past year has been quite a journey for us, from my first blog post about how we wanted a Zeppelin badly enough to figure out how to get one, to all the numerous trips, discoveries and ups and downs. Some people have asked us why we don't have slick videos or lots of artists impressions, after all, surely you need all that to sell your ideas? Well, to be honest, we've just not had the time. Every waking hour that we've spent building this company has been on removing the risks and barriers to making it happen.

You see, if you don't remove all the barriers, then when you go to ask people for investment, the first thing they say is "do you have X?" or "Have you planned for Y?". And in most cases, they aren't going to invest until the risk reaches a level that they are comfortable with. So you end up in a sort of catch-22, needing to spend money to get the issues dealt with so that you can find investors, but needing investors to provide you the money to spend!!

Fortunately, not everyone has the same feelings about risk. The earliest investors who take the biggest risk are often called Angels because they believe in you and help you when it's not at all clear when or even if, this will really happen. Aside from founders who often put a great deal of their own investment in, Angels are the first external people that validate what you are doing. They provide much needed emotional support and also a network of people that they can introduce you to. They are your first cheerleaders. Our first Angels joined us at the end of last year after we'd been on the fund raising trail for a couple of months having at least established that most of the issues could be overcome.

Angel funding then allows you to keep moving forward while you remove further risks and eventually you get to the point where you can close the funding deals with the larger investors from a position of reasonable strength.

On Monday (fortunately not Tuesday as that was the Hindenburg anniversary), we completed our funding. This final step involved a few weeks where Brian, myself and our legal teams all saw midnight, from our desks or on the phone, too many times. But that funding, plus some additional financing already secured, allows us now to be as confident as we can be that the Zeppelin is coming to the USA in the fall.

The team here is happy and a little exhausted, and we haven't even had time to issue press releases about all the great people we've been hiring, but when we see our ship leave the hangar for the first time in the not too distant future, I think we're all going to be a little emotional.

What a ride..... so far...... more to come!

What's long and sausage shaped and....

Found this on ebay and couldn't resist it. Dating from 1919, back in the days when toilet paper came in a wrapper. And as you might expect, there are folks who collect these things. I'm still trying to figure out what they were thinking of in terms of the brand match between toilet paper and an airship. Suggestions anyone?

Getting the word out

Scott and Brian became 'booth babes' for the evening at the California Travel and Tourism Commission media event in San Francisco. Here they were promoting our business to members of the travel and tourism press. I think they look rather good!

Zeppelin Pilots Wanted!

I've waited for some time to make a post with that title. It's true. Really. You can go here to find out more. Now we have to think about uniforms etc.

The cool pin picture is from this site.

The First Bay Area Zeppelin

A friend of ours sent us a copy of an artists drawing in a childrens book about bridges. It showed a design for the Golden Gate bridge that had been produced in 1923 but not built. The artist had added a Zeppelin going over the bridge. We of course approve of the sentiment! But it got me wondering about when Zeppelins had entered the consciousness of the American public enough that it would be considered perfectly normal to assume a Zeppelin flying over a landmark bridge.

The first Zeppelin flying in the USA was the US Built Shenandoah. She was commissioned in September 1923, so it was a little prophetic to have one in a 1923 picture! She did actually visit the Bay Area the following year, and this picture is from October 1924 with her flying outside the Golden Gate, sans bridge.

The Navy acquired a German built Zeppelin, renamed the Los Angeles, in 1924 and she occasionally made trips west. But it would be August 25, 1929, when the first commercial passenger airship, Graf Zeppelin entered the Bay through the Golden Gate.

Cute booties

Our Facilities project manager, Dwayne, is in Germany right now absorbing everything he can about Zeppelin operations. Dwayne is responsible for working with NASA and other agencies and entities to set up the leases and agreements for the necessary facilities for us to operate. So he has to be a repository of knowledge about how much space things take up, how often they need to be moved, whether they are hazardous, whether they need special climate conditions, who needs access, how often and so on. This impacts everything from how we manage our operations to minimize risk in a historic massive wooden hangar to the provisioning of portable toilets at remote sites. And all of it involves thick legal documents and lots of red tape!

Dwayne sent us this picture of him inside the hull of #4. Nice booties Dwayne!

Water - then and now

A visible feature on the Moffett Field skyline is the red and white water tower. I've been acquiring old ads and images featuring airships of late, with an eye to decorating our future bar/restaurant space.

One that really caught my eye was an advertisement by the Pittsburgh-Des Moines steel company about their new water tank serving 'Uncle Sams dirigibles'. On May 13, 1932, the Akron, sister ship to the Macon, visited the incomplete Sunnyvale Naval Air Station (to become Moffett Field). The PR folks at Pittsburgh-Des Moines captured an image of the Akron with the water tower for an advertisement.

They explain that a modern airbase demands "trained man power, strong mooring masts, ample stores of gases, oils, food - and water." And that "this well built tank will guarantee a constant and dependable water supply."

I've also found some great adverts for spark plugs, shock absorbers and the like, all using their connection with patriotic airships to sell their wares!

London Calling...

We've known for some time that there would be a period of time between the completion of NT #4 and us being able to bring her to San Francisco. So Zeppelin set out to find her some work for the summer, locate a sponsor etc. Today's Sunday Times carries a brief article about the Civil Aviation Authority approving her visiting London, something which we very much hope will happen. There are a couple of ticket agents accepting inquiries in the UK right now - LondonZeppelin and ZeppelinTours. But visiting London won't take all summer, so we'll keep you posted on where else #4 will be flying.

It's been a year

Friday marks the blogs first anniversary. It's really interesting for us to go back and read some of the early posts when we were just starting on this road. We have actually got a lot more blog posts to put up in the future - I tended to write a post when something exciting was going on, even if, for confidentiality reasons, I couldn't post it! There will come a time when I can release a bunch of those and make the record even more complete.

These past couple of weeks have been crazy with us trying to hire people, and we look forward to telling you all about our new team members and having them join in blogging.

Contents....

We have an office to decorate, and eventually we'll need to have things to adorn our public spaces. So I've been hanging on ebay picking up airship related stuff. There seem to be a lot of Christmas ornaments around right now, but one that I had to have was a Department 56 piece of 'Kitchmas' with a rotating Goodyear blimp!

Aside from fits of laughter at how really dorky this ornament is, the instructions made us laugh the most. For those of you that can't quite see this, it says

Contents: Goodyear Blimp

Michael from Zeppelin who is with us at the moment looked very carefully at the model and from the ducted fans concluded it was based on a GZ22.

Regardless, it would have been a real steal at $16 plus shipping.

How many lawyers does it take to ...

get an airship off the ground?

Have a think about it for a moment. I'm sure most of you said 'someone to help with the FAA'. Good, that's one. But actually, it takes quite a few more than that. As we are fortunate to have a wonderful group of patient and easy to understand representatives of the legal profession working with us, I thought I'd take a moment to give you a little insight into how many legal plates are spinning!

First, there are indeed experts helping with the FAA and DOT. That's Jennifer, Jonathon and their colleagues in Washington DC at Pillsbury Law. San Francisco Pillsbury also provide us with Bob for copyrights, patents and trademarks and a colleague on federal lease documents, LA Pillsbury houses Deborah and Erin who are experts in gift certificates and other consumer issues, and Daveed is in Sacramento where he's helping us figure out what airline travel sales rules we need to abide by.

Our corporate stuff (incorporation etc) is handled by Rob and Teresa at Morrison and Foerster, and they also handle all our critical work with investors such as term sheets, convertible notes and the like.

There's a pile of tax issues to deal with. We have a great accountancy firm in Berger/Lewis and they, through principal Tom, coordinate with Steven from Reed and Roth to ferret out all the rules and issues related specifically to aviation sales and use tax, and business property tax.

You can imagine that we have quite a number of complex aircraft purchase related contracts to deal with and a veteran of aircraft contracts, Stuart, from Warren Sklar, casts his eyes over the material that comes from Zeppelin.

And finally, we have some visa related work as we expect a couple of the team from Zeppelin to be with us for the first few months of operation which Paul from Fragomen, Del Ray is coordinating.

And as to my question? The answer is at least Eleven. You can do the math on the fees yourself.

Yeah, I know, there's a punchline in there somewhere about hot air, but I'm grateful that it doesn't apply to any of our team.

Cover Up

Following the installation of the last piece of the airframe, the Zeppelin continues to get closer to completion. Here you can see the pressure tested envelope suspended from the hangar roof in preparation for pulling over the airframe - if it doesn't swallow #3 first!

Image courtesy of Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik.

6 inches

.....of resumes have piled into our offices in response to the three job postings we have open right now. So if you're one of those who have applied and you're reading this, we're doing our best to get through everything! (The USPS box is for sending to our CFO who is doing the initial reviews on the Controller position)

New & Improved! "Less Flammable" Helium

On a visit recently to the Pensacola Naval Aviation Museum, I came across yet another attempt to communicate to the public the relevant (to airships) difference between helium and hydrogen. It really cracked me up! While the sign is true, you have to wonder how many other statments could receive this treatment. I guess that makes dirt "less explosive" than dynamite?

All kidding aside, the museum was really fantastic. More photos/blog posts to come soon!