Our radio control club took up flying a blimp for the local college basketball team last year. While we were able to fly adequately, we know that "there must be a better way". The blimp was purchased by a local restaurant and when they couldn't fly it they contacted us. We're all gas airplane pilots and know very little about esc's and such. The port and starboard thrusters on our blimp rotate about a 180 degrees from full forward to full back (we can add about 10 degrees to that in each direction using the trim control on the transmitter). To come down we have to aim the thruster straight up and reverse the motor. This sorta works but because the prop is not as efficient running backwards, sometimes coming down takes longer than we'd like. My question is: Is there typically an adjustment on the esc to allow more throw in each direction? Do we have the thrusters set correctly?

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Tim

Is your Blimp at neutral boincey with thrusters off (just hangs in the air no rise or sink) If soo the you should be able to "fly " it down to where you need with just some (10-15degree) of forward down angle. it sorta sounds like you may be over boyant in your helium

We're set up with "negative" bouyancy in that that blimp will sink slowly with no power. We did that for safety as much as anything so that in case of a battery failure it would come down instead of winding up in the rafters. Tonight when we flew we changed the thrusters so that neutral elevator gave us full forward thrust. That worked a lot better than the way we were flying originally. In fact the entire evening was a success until one of the bouy lines got caught on the backboard during the final media break. Oh well, we got the sponsors a little extra "air" time.

Do you have any pictures of your blimp?

Jesse

Do you know who made the bilmp??

KevinM

Nope, we just fly it. A local restaurant bought it. Check out the links it in action.
http:\\home.comcast.net\~tburgess50\HotLap.mpg
http:\\home.comcast.net\~tburgess50\Landing.mpg

aggie84

The blimp in your videos looks like the 13 ft model made by Blimpguys. The link to their websight is below. Just got involved with the Toronto Raptors blimp and the thrusters are set like yours (max forward thrust with the right stick neutral). One or two clicks of up trim and it will cruise gently as you pulse the throttle. My first solo was Halloween night and on final approach the main battery died. To my horror, the blimp floated way up to the nose bleed section and had to be retrieved with a helium balloon, 80 ft of kite string, and a paper clip. Almost delayed the game...15,000 people cheered when I finally got my hands on the sucker.

Bent
[link]http://www.blimpguys.com/indoor-lg.htm[/link]

[X(]OMG!! That would be a nightmare!! I'm amazed that you were able to get it down that fast. We have three guys flying our blimp and each one has his own ideas about what the best bouyancy point is. We hate to weight the thing down very much if we're dropping t-shirts on the crowd but also we don't want to lose it if the batteries die. We have several large pieces of lead that we put in the gondola and then we use 1/2 oz fishing weights to fine-tune. Its really amazing what a difference a weight as small as 1/2 oz can make.

I'm attaching another MPG file. We asked the announcers to put in a small ad for our RC Club and so now we get a little advertisement in each half.

http://home.comcast.net/~tburgess50/GoodCRCCAd.mpg

I'm still on the learning curve too but we'll all be experts soon. The challenge for me is smooth, slow cruising without porpoising and rock steady hovering. I find it's a much nicer flier if you reduce the extra weight in the ballast bags as much as possible. I don't fill the blimp completely with helium. While filling, once it's lifting all the attachments and payload, I top it up with blown air from a vacuum outlet. This keeps the ballast weight to a minimum. Haven't tried dropping anything yet. I understand one t-shirt at a time is the limit for this size blimp. You might want to try putting a helium filled balloon inside the t-shirt to reduce the load...maybe it would allow multiple drops per mission.

I like the idea of "topping" the balloon off with regular air! Somebody, I assume the arena personnel filled ours so full of helium that we're using full ballast bags and extra weights to keep it balanced. I'm sure they just did it to get out the wrinkles but for some reason it does seem to make the balloon harder to fly. I guess maybe that the mass was increased and therefore so was the kinetic energy and the momentum. I which I'd studied that stuff more in college, ha ha. I've found that the key to me having a successful flight is not over flying the thing; using the thrusters only to get it moving the direction I want and then going to neutral. My biggest problem is being able to feel the neutral point on the throttle stick.

hi aggie

u can make the feel for you thrusters by operating it the conventional way (throttle off at down position) like flying an airplane! you see we dont really need the reversible ESC since we can make it fly the other way around by changing the vector of your props (only if you have a full 180 degrees change in vector!) i'm a professional blimp pilot flying blimps commercially for advertising my college course seems to help me much since im an aeronautical student hope to hear from you guys more often! do you do some aerobatics in your blimp?