On the outskirts of Kirzhach, in Vladimir Oblast, businessman Gennady Verba maintains a dirigible and a field of dandelions. Said field is surrounded by a fence, and immediately on the other side of it is a forest that locals say stretches all the way to Arkhangelsk.
As Verba’s Mercedes rolls smoothly and slowly through Kirzhach, passersby cast unkind looks in its direction. He drives through a gate inscribed with the words “Private Property.” On the far side of the dandelion field is a massive hangar. It is eight stories high, and just as wide. Inside is the largest dirigible in Russia.
Verba is met by the man in charge, a former head of the Kirzhach Department of Criminal Investigations. He has battled the local organized crime group and knows every criminal in the area by sight. He speaks rapidly, mixing bureaucratese with muffled obscenities, as if he is bleeping out his own bad language. He reports that all is quiet. Except that this year the beavers have become bolder and are for some reason chewing down trees dangerously close to the fence.
The dirigible must be regularly re-inflated and serviced. A cubic meter of helium leaks out of the 6000-cubic-meter dirigible every 24 hours, but Verba insists that, among analogous ships, there is none with a slower leak rate.
Furthermore, the oil has to be changed, the engine has to be started, and all the instruments have to be tested. There are technicians in the hangar who do all this, and all of them are retirees. Just 10 employees work here, four per shift. They all used to work at the local aerodrome.
“When the fascists took Czechoslovakia,” one technician jokes, “they set up a factory there and built an engine. And it sits right here in our dirigible.”
The Czech engine is a Lom Praha and, of course, it was not made by fascists. But the dirigible has already flown 1000 hours on it, or about three hundred take-offs and landings.
The technicians sleep in a building attached to the hangar, on the third floor. It’s cold at night, so they turn on portable heaters, but that does not entirely beat back the cold. The technicians also patrol the territory around the hangar. There has not been a single theft in the 10 years the hangar has been standing; needless to say, Kirzhachians have not shown any interest in stealing a dirigible the size of a house.
For their labors, the men receive 10,000R ($170) a month. Not much, but there are no other jobs in the area.
Verba was born in Lviv, Ukraine. When he was a boy, he and his friend Igor Pasternak approached their physics teacher and said, “let’s build a dirigible.” They studied, made drawings and designs, and read all they could, even traveling to Moscow libraries to get the necessary books.
Verba and Pasternak then entered the Lviv Polytechnical Institute. Their first dirigible was named Challenger, in honor of the American space shuttle that exploded on launch in 1986.
When perestroika arrived, Verba and Pasternak created a cooperative enterprise and built aerostats* for advertisers. Business was good. Then, after the USSR fell apart, the pair left for the States to create a joint venture to produce aerostats. Yet their ultimate goal was unchanged: they wanted to build a dirigible.
In 1996, the joint venture’s partners had a falling out and Verba returned to Russia. But before returning Verba took his first ride in a dirigible: a British Skyship 600 floating above New England.
At the time, his friends would say: “Genya, you’ve got such a good head on your shoulders! Do something else, build up some capital!”
This would upset Verba. Today he says that if everyone had chased after capital in the nineties, then there would have been no progress.
Today, Verba is just the other side of 50, and his two young daughters are afraid of flying in his dirigible. They prefer dancing.
The dirigible’s 55-meter body occupies just half of the hangar’s space. And it is only one of the company’s three dirigibles – the other two are in storage. “RosAeroSystems” – the name of Verba’s company, which he founded upon his return from America, appears on the dirigible’s side.
When Verba first returned, Russia was rife with criminal takeovers of everything from factories and graveyards to banks and markets. But the criminals had no interest in dirigibles.
Over the past 20 years, Verba has produced several hundred aerostats, including for the Ministry of Defense (with which he continues to work), and he created a series of small dirigibles: the one-passenger AU-11, and the two-passenger AU-12. Then he created the dirigible that currently occupies the hangar: the ten-passenger AU-30. It took two years to design and build, and cost over three million dollars. An Mi-8 helicopter, by comparison, costs about five million, but then using it is about 10 times as costly, because of the higher cost of fuel.
Verba has sold his aerostats to 14 countries, but dirigibles to just five, including France and Singapore. Back in the early 2000s, Verba built half of all the dirigibles sold in the world. At the time, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov was very interested in dirigibles and even bought a few for the Center for Road Transport Security. As Verba recalls it, a dirigible flew over the city for about a year and a half before it all ended: the mayor and the FSB security service could not agree whether the skies over Moscow should be open to such flights.
The main compartment of the AU-30 contains several seats for passengers, a small table, and a seat for a flight engineer. As to equipment, there are simply some headphones, above which hangs an icon of the Prophet Ilya. On the other side of the compartment’s wall is the two-seat pilot’s cabin. Some of its instruments are made for airplanes, others are specially made for dirigibles, for example sensors that display the air and helium pressure.
A dirigible flies thanks to a combination of forces: the helium lifts the ship into the air, and the gas engine helps with steering. It can reach speeds of 60-100 kilometers per hour, depending on the force and direction of the wind.
“The main innovation of this ship is its autopilot mechanism,” says Verba, “which was specially made for the dirigible. No one has ever done that before.”
Aside from the dirigible, the hangar also contains the launch team’s vehicles: two KAMAZ trucks with special boom arms. Their task is to pull the AU-30 out to its asphalt launch pad in the middle of the dandelion field. From there it takes off, and this is also where it lands: the dirigible descends; special hawsers are captured by the boom arm; then the dirigible is docked.
The launch and landing crew is comprised of just six people.
If the dirigible has to land in another location, the KAMAZes follow the AU-30. They are capable of driving off road, and are supplied with everything needed for overnight stays.
In the past, the AU-30 was contracted to do laser scanning of power lines for a division of the state electric monopoly. Unlike airplanes, dirigibles do not vibrate at low speeds and require far less fuel. But the program was shuttered in 2010 when there was a leadership change at the company.
“After that, we decided to strike out on our own,” says Verba. “Monitoring systems are used in dozens of areas. For example exotic tasks like counting moose, creating computer models of historical monuments for restorers, or photographing sections of railroad.”
They also want to use the dirigible for tourist outings.
“Old Mi-8s now fly loudly above St. Petersburg,” Verba says, “and people peer out through tiny windows. But a dirigible has a much broader range of view, it makes no sound, and it floats as smoothly as a ship on water.”
Despite all that, Verba’s dirigible stands in its hangar and has not flown at all this year.
Orpheus Kozlov is 84. He sits on a couch in his sixteenth-floor apartment in Moscow’s Maryino district, dressed in a flannel shirt and a warm sheepskin vest. The room is filled with models of airplanes. Working as an engineer, he devised the control systems for nearly all the Tupolev planes. Then he decided to build a lenticular (circular) dirigible that was two football fields long.
Kozlov was born in February 1934, almost at the end of the dirigible era.
In August 1934, a fire outside Dolgoprudny consumed almost all the Soviet dirigibles (B-4, B-5, B-7) then in existence.
In 1935, a B-7 remake, built that same year, crashed onto the NKVD’s puppy nursery. A hundred dogs died, but Commander Vladimir Ustinovich successfully parachuted out, and went on to become deputy chief of the air force’s aerostat corps. He taught half a million Soviet soldiers how to parachute jump.
In 1937, Germany’s Hindenburg, the world’s largest ever dirigible (245 meters long), met its end, catching fire as it landed in the US (according to one account, the cause was an unextinguished cigarette). Thirty-six people died, and the accident became a symbol of the unreliabillity of dirigibles.
In 1938, the B-6 was dispatched to save Ivan Papanin’s North-Pole-1 expedition, which drifted on a shrinking ice flow for over 200 days (in the end, the B-6 did not reach the expedition; icebreakers and a plane eventually rescued the team). At the time, Kozlov was three years old, and his father, a timber industry bureaucrat, was arrested in Stalin’s purges. The family was forced to move from their home in Perm to tiny Kudymkar.
Also in 1938, a B-6 dirigible crashed into the mountains outside Kandalaksha in Karelia. Six months later, a B-10 crashed. At that point, except for three ships that took part in World War II, dirigible activity came to an end in the USSR. No new ships were built.
The drifting ice floe and the rescue of the Papanin explorers was widely covered in the Soviet press. And many books were written about it. As a young boy, Kozlov loved these books, as well as the airplanes used to help save the Papanin expedition.
His father was freed and then put in charge of timber-producing labor camps, since he understood the industry. Later, the family moved to Novosibirsk and then Moscow. Kozlov’s father became deputy forestry minister, and their family of eight was given a two-room apartment on Pushkin Square.
In 1952, Orpheus entered the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI). He had decided to devote his life to aviation.
At that time, dirigible construction was being determinedly resurrected in the USSR. The flagship enterprise, DirigibleStroy (“dirigible construction”) was transformed into DKBA: the Dolgoprudny Construction Bureau of Automation.
Kozlov graduated from MAI in 1958 and his first job was copying an American rocket that had crash-landed in China. Then he transferred to the Tupolev factory, where he was involved in guidance systems. In the 1990s, when the aviation sector began to be buffeted by the economic crisis, Kozlov was given an opportunity to develop a guidance system for a DKBA project called “Thermostat.” The project failed, but it brought Kozlov in contact with dirigibles.
In May of last year a press conference was held concerning the development of dirigible construction in Russia. Two people with completely different mindsets and approaches to the future of the industry – the realist businessman Verba and the romantic engineer Kozlov – attempted to explain who needs Russian dirigibles and why. There should have been more presenters, yet no one other than Kozlov and Verba showed up to answer questions.
When asked where, or on whom, Russian dirigible builders pin their hopes, Verba seemed to get a bit offended.
“We don’t pin our hopes on anything,” he said. “We are doing business here. And earning money.”
In reality, Verba is pinning his hopes on his own development of ATLANT, a Russian acronym for “a flying, aerostatic transport apparatus of a new type.” Russian media coverage made ATLANT sound as if it were a new generation of military dirigible, but ATLANT is being developed without Ministry of Defense involvement, though the state-funded Skolkovo Innovation Center is taking part.
In 2014, Verba’s company received R18.7 million (just over $300,000), and he matched that amount with his own funds, to develop “a demonstration system for balancing dirigibles.” It consists of several cylinders made of very durable and light fabric that can be filled with helium if the dirigible needs to be lightened, or with air if it needs to be heavier. As a result, ATLANT will be lighter than air in flight, and when it is on the ground it will not need take-off propulsion.
“We are trying to overcome the perception that this sector is a thing of the past,” Verba said. “We even avoid using the word ‘dirigible,’ and we want to show our partners that our design concept is based on complex principles, that it employs the latest technology.”
For now, ATLANT only exists on paper, and in two forms: ATLANT-30 and ATLANT-100, with carrying capacities of 15 and 60 tons, respectively.
“It has a wide range of applications,” Verba asserts, “transport of huge cargoes to where there are no roads or infrastructure. Oil companies and the military are interested, for example. But so far no one has given the go ahead. We are in negotiations.”
According to the design documentation, the project “combines the advantages of a dirigible with elements of the airplane, the helicopter and a sea vessel floating on a pillow of air.” Verba can talk endlessly about the virtues of his brainchild, and cites the Italian aeronautical architect Umberto Nobile, who was invited to the USSR in the early 1930s to head up DirigibleStroy: “There is at least one country in the world where dirigibles could develop and be put into wide use,” Nobile said at the time. “That is the Soviet Union, with its vast territory, which is for the most part rather flat. Here, particularly in the Siberian North, huge distances separate one populated settlement from the next. This complicates the construction of paved roads and railways. What is more, the meteorological conditions are entirely suitable for dirigible flight.”
Further development of ATLANT requires $50 million. Skolkovo has proposed 300 million rubles ($5 million). Verba has initiated negotiations with foreign investors.
Kozlov and Verba clearly are not fond of one another. Aside from the press conference, they have only been seen together a few times. To Verba, the idea of a lenticular dirigible seems strange and unnecessary. In his opinion, such a shape has no logical basis and would make the ship difficult to control: a “saucer” like that could be suddenly blown away by the wind. And Kozlov doesn’t like the idea of ATLANT.
“I told Genka that this magic trick of theirs will not work,” Kozlov says. “They are relying on old technology, but what is needed here is a fundamentally new approach. And our dirigible will be thermo-ballasted. Two cavities, with lightweight gas or helium, and with oxygen. We will sit on the ground, heat up the oxygen, and the ship will rise. Release oxygen, and the ship will fall.”
In 2002 at MAI, under the leadership of engineer Ryzhkov (who also worked on Thermostat), the institute began developing dirigibles to prospect for precious metals. In Kozlov’s words, the plans were ready, motors and assembly parts were purchased, but then the project was shuttered; no reason was given.
Then the general director of the company Metaprocess, Kirill Lyats, came to MAI and invited Kozlov to take part in a major project: a lenticular dirigible with a carrying capacity of 600 tons, Lokomoskayner. He worked on the project for four years.
“This is the very first craft we made,” Kozlov says, showing a photo of a two-meter flying saucer with four engines. “The guidance system was weak, but look, it flew. And this is the large model that we showed [Prime Minister Dmitry] Medvedev. We’re holding onto the lines, because the guidance system was poorly developed. It was developed at MAI, which has an experimental factory for manned airships.”
Medvedev approved the project, but the history of Lokomoskayner as a company ended a year later.
“He was a swindler, this Lyats,” says Kozlov. “He understood little of the technology, but he did have organizational skills. It’s always that way: as soon as they get the money, it’s all over. The money is siphoned off and the everyone cuts and runs. There is interest, but no one wants to do anything.”
When Lyats went under, Kozlov summoned enthusiastic engineers from the Ulyanovsk Aviakor Factory. In 2010, the government of Ulyanovsk Oblast even put together a five-year plan for construction of lenticular dirigibles. They planned to invest R2.7 million, but seven years on there is still no dirigible. There is just a paper printout of a 3D model that sits on a shelf.
“It has a lenticular shape,” Kozlov says of his grandiose dirigible, speaking in the present tense. “It has eight engines, four each for horizontal and vertical thrust. We will hang a freight platform from the bottom, and it can be changed when the functionality needs to be changed.”
Kozlov prefers not to talk about money, but instead to think in terms of inventions. He talks of the limitless ways they can be used:
“It turns out there is this problem: how to get corpses off the Himalayas. Hundreds have accumulated there. There are people who want to pick them up and bury them. We made a normal kite that can lift 100-200 kilograms. The length of its hawser line is seven kilometers. It descends, they attach a corpse to it, and it carries it down.”
Kozlov has also registered a patent for a muscle-powered plane (a “Muskulolet”), essentially a flying bicycle: leg power moves the wings, and it flies. He is building the Muskulolet himself, at his dacha.
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