 Now, what happened is that when we were talking about airships to people, when we were trying to pitch airships to people, a thought suddenly came to our mind that all our knowledge is second hand, we have no personal experience. So, the credibility of a person is always at question when you make statements without having any personal experience. Now, as an academician in IIT Bombay, I really cannot think of making man carrying air ships 1500 kg payload or even 100 kg payload. What we can do here is to do design fabrication and flying of remotely controlled airships. So, that is what we started with and I will show you a small trailer of some of our airship flights. This was the first airship which was demonstrated in Texas in 2002. This year, January, this month, January of 2002, we flew it in Gimphana ground and we can see the kind of control we were able to achieve. Next year, we were invited by the Indian government to the Indian Science Congress which took place again this year in January, first week of January and we flew this airship in Bangalore. But what you are seeing are the full stained dress rehearsals in Pune. Then, we were contracted by a DRDO laboratory called as Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment of Saathi which wanted us to show airships can be used for avalanche monitoring, snow cover studies. So, for that, this airship was designed and it was demonstrated as part of an international seminar on snow and avalanche in April 2009. This airship is the one which is flying in our VNCC fire designed by a dual degree student as part of this VDT couple of years ago and this is an autonomous airship about which I will talk in much more detail very soon. Then, we also made these small airships for demonstration purposes. We go to many institutes and we showcase this technology to excited students so that they can also think of making these systems and so far I have a very clean record that wherever I have gone and given a presentation like this, immediately the students say we want to make something and they start a project, they try to get funding from here and there and many of them have succeeded also as I will focus to use you up there. So, this is field deployment of the wing and this particular device was tested couple of years ago in the Jinfana ground. In case there is an aerostat and in case there is a loss of tether, loss of tension, we have a free flying balloon and we are near the airport. So, this system automatically brings it down to recover the payload safely and this area is that of an aerostat that was installed at NIT Dhameerpur last year in the month of April as a device which can be used by the college as you can see for aerial surveillance of their campus. So, these are some of the projects that we have been doing and in this presentation we will look at some of these projects very closely. So, here is the first one the remotely controlled airship designed by the students of the 2002 passing Janta. This was part of the aircraft design laboratory course, a course which is also going on right now AE417. That year in AE417 since I was completely occupied with airship and airship research, I requested the students why do not they work with me in developing airship. So, there were two teams and then one team finally was able to give a very detailed and a correctly sized design. So, that team along with some project engineers they made this airship and as I said it was flown in Jumkhana ground. We had basically flights on four days. On all the days of TechFest we have flown this airship into 2002. Plus we have done several other trial flights subsequently. So, this airship can lift just 1 kilogram of payload but the dimension is just under 5 meters in length. So, just understand that 5 meters of dimension is needed to lift 1 kilogram of weight and the envelope was actually fabricated by an agency in WAPI because at that point of time we did not have any facility in the department to fabricate or join these envelopes. So, it was sent to a company, our students went to a company in WAPI over 3 or 4 weekends and taking help from them they fabricated this particular envelope. Similarly, I invited a friend of mine to come and fly this airship for us because none of us at that time knew how to fly an airship. And this person is a very experienced flyer. So, therefore we requested him to join our activities and he obliged. And since then he has been working with us on all our airship projects. Most of the projects that we have done we have had the participation of this gentleman. So, I have already shown you the video but do you want to see it again? Okay, I will show you. This is a slightly noisy video. I am putting the noise off. Actually, it is very noisy. The sound that you hear is because of the engine. Can you just connect this downstairs? There is one electrical point there just below. Now, it is so noisy because we had to remove the radiator of the engine for weight control. We were very critical on weight and also we were not sure whether it will be cooled properly. So, we wanted to have air cooling by the propeller. Here you can see a horizontal turn. Now, you will notice that the nose of the airship has got some reddish kind of a bag which is hanging. So, can someone guess what this reddish bag is for? What does it contain? Yes, this is for central gravity control. This particular term is called as ballasting. So, we are using stones for ballasting. We picked up some small pebbles in Jumkhana ground and put them in this red colored bag and used it for balancing our airship because we need a very fine control on the center of gravity. Now, there is a maneuver called as a touch and go maneuver. It demonstrates the amount of control you have on a flying system in which you bring it to land as if it is going to land and then you take off. So, in fixed aircraft the touch and go maneuver is an indication of the amount of control a pilot has on the system. And then there is one problem which always we face engine cut. So, basically intentionally the engine was cut during the flight and as I told you in the first lecture we fly airships actually heavier than air. So, because it is really heavier than air it comes down because of gravity and that is taken care by the power plant. This one is slightly enlarged version. So, there is a long nice documentary film which was made. So, I will put that on little self-explanatory. I do not have to speak. So, we rechristened LTA as let us think airships. And this documentary film was made by a person who just passed out from IDC in IIT Bombay. So, this is why his first film you will see me in a very young state. PADD or PADD that you see on the envelope behind me is an acronym for program for airship design and development. A program that we have launched in IIT Bombay Aerospace Engineering Department about a year and a half ago. Airship is a lighter than air vehicle that means or more or less as light as air. Because the envelope of the huge body which it has is filled with lighter than air gas which is helium in most of the cases. Right now this is my ex-colleague professor Gokte who is no more he passed away in 2010. He was the consultant whom we had hired as part of our team. And he worked with us for nearly a year. And a large part of technical work in this project was actually done by professor Gokte. And thereby it is so light that if there is a slight force upward force it will go up. And if the weight is slightly more it will come down. And because of this there are a lot of advantages. We got together and we conceived a small remotely controlled airship which we finally referred to as our micro airship. This particular airship is about 15 feet or just under 5 meters length. The diameter is 1.65 meters for the envelope. And it can lift a payload of approximately around 1 kilogram. What you see behind me is a modified version of the micro airship which we call now as a mini airship. And this mini airship today we have just checked out. It can lift something about 3 kilograms of payload. An airship does not require a large runway. It consumes much lower fuel compared to airplane but at lower speeds. Mandate for this vehicle is to be able to carry a video downlink so that we can demonstrate to people the capability of airship as medium for surveillance and aerial observation duties. Along with having a huge size of the envelope which we can use to promote or advertise a product. For commercialization where you can use in the air purpose or for surveillance purpose or for military purpose or for carrying different loads. Just to save time we can go ahead. Now airships require a lot of support systems. One of them is a mooring mast so that when you are not flying the airship but working on it or doing some attachments we need to attach it to the masts and keep it. So you can see there was a student who came from a college in Nagpur who did his BTEC project on the design of a mooring mast for the airship. And you will see a CAD model of the design as well as some kind of engineering drawing. But when we actually asked the student to fabricate because he joined as a project engineer after he did his BTEC project he realized that all these fancy designs don't work in practice and it was too complicated. You can see it's such a complicated system. So ultimately what he made was just a single member in the center and that is what you can see in the picture below. So he did make a mast but it was much simpler than his own complicated design as part of. That's why in theory we can do many things but when you actually bring it to real life you have to simplify things and simple things work much better. This was a very useful mast. This picture that you see on the bottom has been shot in Park College of Engineering in Coimbatore which started an aerospace engineering department and they had one technical festival like Texas called Park Vamanik Darshan. So we were invited to go and fly our airship there. So our entire team went from here to Park College for this flight. I also mentioned to you about the airship that was designed for snow and avalanche study establishment. Now this was also a BTEC project. Interestingly the student working on this project was actually looking at an aerostat to start with. But then we got a request from the director of this laboratory saying that there is an international science congress. There is an international symposium on snow and avalanches and can you modify this design? So overnight the student converted from aero-strat to airship very happily because aero-strat are little bit boring, they are stationary. Technically they are very great challenge but they are not very exciting. Airships are very exciting because they move around, they fly, they come down, they go up. So you are very happy and ultimately on YouTube he has put a video saying my BTEC project. So have a look, just search for these words my BTEC project and you will find this particular video there put up by one of your seniors. So the challenge here was to design a system within a month including transportation of the system to Manali and then putting it together and flying it. So on 2nd of March we got the final approval and on 4th of April we had to do the demonstration. But on 4th April we did not get to fly because the hangar was occupied by helicopters or VVIPs. We flew on 7th of April. So from 2nd March to 7th April is just one month or one month and 5 days. During this time we designed fabricated, transported it to Manali. We all went to Manali, put it together, tested it there. It has become a case study and at many places I have been invited to give an inspirational talk on, you know, from concept to reality in less than a month or something like that. So very interesting case study. At some point of time I can give you that case study in a story form. It is a story in pictures but for you what is important is to know some of the interesting features of this airship. So the altitude at which it is flying is actually quite high for airships. So that itself is no mean achievement. Now we are not very sure whether electrical motors will work in this kind of an environment when it is, sometimes it may snow, sometimes it may be raining. So we stuck to IC engines which are much more reliable and they have much better power to weight ratio. But our concern was the ability of an IC engine to develop enough power at this altitude. So some interesting studies were done to calculate the power available at these altitudes. And interestingly this was built in our laboratory. The envelope was built in our laboratory and taken to Manali. Okay so in the interest of time I will just try to show you some of the, yeah this is a very beautiful segment of the pictures. It shows the airship majestically undergoing a 360 degree turn while flying in the valley of Manali. And during demonstration there was on this airship we have fitted a very special camera called as an IP camera. You know that is an IP camera? It is a camera that can talk to an IP address. So my laptop was by IP address. This camera was recording images, still images at a particular frequency, approximately 3 per second. These images were recorded on board, they were encrypted. Then there was a video downlink, they were communicated downstairs. My laptop was receiving them. Then there was a decryption software and then there was a software which will show them in a sequence to show a pseudo video. All this was done because it is DLDO, it is a defense application. There could be a situation when the airship goes into a territory where you do not want it to go. Then you do not want your data to go there. So nothing is stored on board. Everything is recorded in real time, transmitted and then decoded. So let us see what the onboard camera records. Now as you will see on top of the screen probably if you can read, these are a series of JPG images which are numbered sequentially. So we are now seeing 480, 481, 482, 483.jpg. So this whole flight is around 650 JPG images and I can accelerate them like this. As you can see it is fast forward. So it just shows you. This is the campus of Sasse-Manali by air. So using an open source software called IrfanView, we are able to stitch them together into some kind of a pseudo video. My question to you is that there are several good video cameras available with us and we have installed them and tested them before. So why do you think there was a need to go for taking still images? Why couldn't we do video recording? In what way it takes less memory? Yes, for a given flight sequence you are right, it takes less memory. But there is one more reason. What else could be the reason? One is it is easy to decrypt and downlink. But other than that what could be the reason? Yes. That is also one reason. There could be a limit on the data. So each image can be transmitted sequentially. So there could be a limit and there was a limit. There was a limit in this case. But our main reason was please remember this is meant for snow scientists. So what are they interested in? Not the beauty. They are interested in still images of specific areas which they want to process in their softwares. If they want to do snow cover evaluation, they want you to fly today after 3 months and they will compare the 2 videos. So for comparison purposes you have to grab an image from a video and now that reduces the image quality. So each of this is a high quality still image. So what we did is we looked at the customer's requirements and conceived a system suitable to the customer. Rather than telling the customer we have an airship, we have a camera, please use it. We said no, we will give you something. Now this airship also flies in rain. It also flies in mild snow. It has been made completely waterproof. And I will show you some videos. We can also fly during night by using a very interesting system. But about that something else, this is just a picture. Now looking at this airship I want you to tell me 2 things. Whether it is climbing or descending or whether it is moving turning towards the left that is port side or towards the right or the starboard side. You have to look at the picture and then come to a conclusion. And raise your hands. Raise your hands so that I get to choose. There is already one person whose hand is up but I will not give him a chance because he has already taken part in the discussion. Anybody else would like to raise your hand? Is it yes? Climbing or descending? Why do you say it is climbing? Correct. Elevator is at its top. So the air hitting the elevator will move elevator down. Therefore nose will go up. What about turning flight or straight flight? Is it a port turn or a starboard turn? Now you think it is a straight flight but actually the angle of the photograph is such that the deflection of the vertical surface is a bit towards the left. As you see, if you see very carefully you will find there is a slight deflection towards the left. So it is turning actually towards the left. Because when elevators go left, the nose also goes left. So it is in a climb and a very shallow turn. Yes, you are right but if the picture is not, if you have in this particular case we normally approach, see in an aircraft you approach with the angle of attack during the landing because you would like to have high drag. In airships we do not come at an angle of attack. We come at a horizontal, because we are not using dynamic lift at all. So if you see an angle of attack in an airship, chances are it is climbing.