The good ship Alberto takes flight above Amherst

By Bob Dunn
Staff Writer

Published on December 22, 2006

If you're in South Amherst on a clear morning around dawn and look up, you may see Alberto.

You couldn't miss him. He'd be the 100-foot-long, 70-feet-around, black-and-yellow contraption weighing in at just over a ton and cruising through the morning sky.

Alberto is the creation of Skyacht Aircraft Inc. and its president and principal designer, Dan Nachbar, of Amherst.

Alberto is a new kind of aircraft: a hot-air blimp, or airship, with a rigid but collapsible frame.

"We're building a better blimp," Nachbar said.

When most people hear the word blimp, they picture a lumbering, torpedo-shaped billboard that provides overhead shots at sports events and costs upwards of $2 million.

Nachbar, 48, and his co-builder, Michael Kuehlmuss, 42, of Whately, have designed a craft that uses hot air, rather than helium, can be stored under a tent, rather than in a hangar, and will cost about one-tenth of what a conventional blimp costs, or about the price of a small, conventional aircraft.

Alberto is Skyacht's one and only project right now. "This is our life," said Nachbar.

Nachbar and the rest of the team anticipate another year of research and development. Eventually, they hope to commercially produce the airships. The project got a publicity boost this month when it was included in a survey of innovations by the New York Times Magazine.

Nachbar declined to discuss his financial investment in the project, saying that the real investment has been his time.

"This has been my full-time job for the last five years," he said. "It's hard to build a new kind of aircraft."

Final FAA approval is in the works, Nachbar said, but could take from a couple of months to over a year. Part of the reason for that, is that Alberto is a completely new type of aircraft with no existing FAA category, either for the craft itself or for licensing requirements for potential pilots.

Pilots themselves are hard to come by, Nachbar said, noting that there are fewer airship pilots than there are astronauts.

"You know you've got something new and different when they don't have a category for it," Nachbar said.

It was five years ago when Nachbar was on a long flight to Texas in a small private plane that the inspiration for designing a new type of aircraft struck.

"Somewhere over Tennessee I decided that the view was great, but the noise was terrible," Nachbar said.

Nachbar used to run an Internet-based company. But when his "dot-com" turned into a "dot-bomb," as he put it, he decided it was time to look into another line of work. He decided to pursue aviation, which he said was another passion.

Nachbar moved to Amherst from New York, living in a co-housing community. He said he had been trying to get co-housing communities started in New York, with no success, and learned that there were six running in the Amherst-Northampton area.

"We figured that the area must be fertile ground," Nachbar said.

In Amherst, he began looking to design an aircraft capable of quiet, precise and affordable flight. Nachbar took advantage of some mechanical engineering courses at the University of Massachusetts to develop some of the technical savvy to help design and construct the aircraft.

Kuehlmuss, who has several years of aerodynamic engineering experience, said most pilots who fly private aircraft don't fly their planes for long distances. Rather, they take them up for a couple of hours, look around and come back home.

"All we want to do is look down," Kuehlmuss said, calling this kind of recreational flying "air therapy."

"The Valley is very big on therapy," Nachbar said.

There's a lot of effort that goes into getting a plane in the air, even for short "air therapy" trips, the pair said, even before taking into account the amount of fuel burned up during flight.

Until the creation of Alberto, Nachbar and Kuehlmuss said there was no way to fly "low, slow and smooth."

Hot-air balloons are imprecise and can't be steered. Helicopters produce an incredible amount of noise and wind and conventional airships are impractical and far too large for personal use.

"It takes between $2 million and $5 million dollars to run and maintain a helium blimp," Nachbar said.

In addition to the therapeutic aspects of Nachbar's creation, he sees practical ones in Alberto's future. For starters, it can travel above forests and provide access to their canopies in ways other aircraft cannot. The airship can wander above wetlands too boggy for vehicles and may be of use, the inventors say, to diamond prospectors, whose gravimetric equipment is sensitive to vibration and is less effective when mounted onto conventional aircraft.

Alberto took off for his first flight on Oct. 27. Nachbar said the launch was "delightfully dull," which is exactly how he would prefer it to be, rather than the dramatic moment of liftoff during an airplane's initial test flight.

Moving along aloft aboard Alberto, Nachbar said, makes him feel like Mary Poppins, floating along slowly at treetop level. "It's fabulous!" he said.

Nachbar said that there's usually a handful of people around to watch the flights, but there haven't been any huge crowds yet. "We want to make our mistakes in private," Nachbar said.

The airship is constructed from a mile of fabric held together using 2.5 million stitches and constructed during the course of more than 539 hours of work.

"Not that I was counting," Nachbar joked, noting that Federal Aviation Administration regulations require that detailed logs be kept when constructing an experimental aircraft.

Most of the sewing was done in a workshop near Nachbar's home, but he did rig a sewing machine on a cart that can be transported to the airship and powered with a generator for on-the-spot repairs and modifications.

The frame of the airship was designed from a concept by John Fabel, one of the project's technical advisers. It resembles a pair of umbrellas connected by their handle, allowing the airship to be deflated and stored in a tent or under a tarp between flights.

Alberto has a projected cruising speed of 12 mph, though Nachbar said future models will be faster.

The cabin has two seats and is about as roomy as a full size minivan, said Kuehlmuss.