Personal blimp sails over fields of Amherst

AMHERST -- There was one thing about flying planes that always irritated Dan Nachbar, a pilot with 23 years of experience. "The view is great," he said, "but the noise is awful."

The solutions he would mull all had drawbacks. A hot-air balloon is at the whims of the wind, and an electric plane would never lift off with the weight of batteries needed to power it.

"I started thinking, what can carry more weight and needs less power?" he said. "The answer is a blimp."

Nachbar's solution could be seen soaring high above a field on a cloudless morning last month: a 102-foot blimp designed with co inventor Michael Kuehlmuss to resemble a bee. It's nickname is Alberto.

Blimps may not be new, but even the smallest blimps available today carry sky-high price tags that start at $2 million. Nachbar and Kuehlmuss hope to market Alberto as an agile and nearly silent aircraft that will sell for between $100,000 and $200,000 -- the flight enthusiast's version of a day sailor's yacht.

That would make the "personal blimp" from Amherst-based Skyacht Aircraft, Nachbar and Kuehlmuss's company, cost-competitive with a single-engine airplane.

And they've devised a way to fly the blimp without relying on helium.

When Nachbar, 49, approached Kuehlmuss, 43, an aeronautical mechanic, to bring his expertise to the project, he was initially skeptical about what he called Nachbar's "hare-brained idea." A veteran of experimental aircraft design, Kuehlmuss knew designing something from scratch would be a serious and expensive undertaking.

"There's a saying in aviation," he said with his slight German accent: "How do you make a million dollars? You spend two."

But from conception to testing, the company produced Alberto for much less, a down-to-earth half-million dollars, Nachbar said. A veteran computer scientist at Bell Labs who had a profitable run in the dot-com boom, Nachbar financed the project substantially with his own money, with additional backing from friends. They plan to market it to flight enthusiasts who would like an aircraft, but are not interested in being controlled by the wind that affects balloons.

"There's a certain amount of Buddhist detachment involved in being a good balloon pilot that I just don't have," Nachbar said. "My guess is that our customers will be more like me, fellow control freaks."

Early on a July morning shrouded in thick fog, Kuehlmuss, Nachbar, and three crew members prepare Alberto for flight on a field in Amherst. A large tent shelters the deflated blimp -- there's no need for the hangar a helium blimp would require.

Inside Alberto before takeoff, bathed in the yellow hue of the craft's nylon shell, Nachbar explains the blimp's innards: an array of aluminum tubing and wiring. While hot-air balloons and helium blimps require internal pressure to maintain their form, Alberto is akin to two enormous umbrellas. Internal motorized winches draw the ends of the blimp together, flexing aluminum tubing, and pushing the craft's fabric shell out, expanding the blimp in the process.

This design provides a framework to attach its propellers and bright red fins to the rear while reducing stress on the fabric envelope. Nachbar and the company's technical adviser, John Fabel, were awarded a patent in 2004 for development.

As the gusty blow of the burners begins, Alberto comes to life. With the air heating inside its shell, giving it buoyancy, the craft shows signs of yearning to leave the ground.

Under the blimp's large shadow, Kuehlmuss steps into the open-air cabin, about the size of a small car with borrowed Toyota Camry seats to boot, and blasts the burners again; soon he is a few hundred feet above the ground and moving around at 8 miles per hour.

While technically capable of rising thousands of feet, the craft, the inventors have found, is most enjoyable at lower levels.

"The most fun is actually close to the ground when you're just hovering above the ground because that's the closest you get to come to being released from the earth," Kuehlmuss said.

He's having fun testing the craft. Part way through that day's trial, he flew over to a lone tree and parked the blimp on top of it. Only because of the craft's agile control, he later noted, was he able to do that.

The company is still honing the design, and each launch features numerous tweaks.

Later this year, the inventors expect to construct Alberto's successor, a craft that will be even quieter and zoom to speeds around 20 miles per hour. They are also pursuing Federal Aviation Administration approval that would allow them to bring passengers aboard.

Alberto has already passed the FAA's phase one testing requirements, which include 10 hours of flight time. (They've logged 30 since it s first flight, in October.) But because of its unique design, it fails to fit any previous classification, and the company faces more bureaucratic hurdles before it can sell the blimp or welcome passengers aboard.

"On the one hand, it's frustrating that we're waiting while the FAA is scratching their heads; on the other hand, it's reaffirming that we've come up with something new and different," Nachbar said.