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First Dinner Meeting of 2023!

The Vertical Flight Society Southwest Chapter presents

An Introduction to the Zeppelin NT 07 – Passenger Rated Tiltrotor Airship

a presentation by Francis Govers, Associate Technical Fellow for Autonomy at Bell Helicopter

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

This presentation provides an introduction to airships in general and the Zeppelin NT 07 in particular. The Zeppelin NT is a 13-passenger airship with vectored thrust motors and a unique tail rotor that allows function as a VTOL aircraft, and was selected in 2011 by Goodyear to replace the iconic “Goodyear Blimp”. Normal blimps and airships can’t hover and require a large 20 person groundcrew for takeoff and landing but the NT has infinite hover time and needs only 3 ground crew. Airships have by far the best safety record of any flying vehicle with only two fatalities in the last 60 years. We will discuss how airships work, how to live with helium, how they fly with a balance of static lift (buoyancy), dynamic lift and vectored thrust. We will see how an airship is controlled, balanced, and trimmed, and even go through some pilot training.

Francis Govers has contributed to the design of over 30 manned and unmanned land, sea, air and space vehicles. He currently is the Associate Technical Fellow for Autonomy at Bell Textron, and is the founder of the Bell Autonomy Department. He is an Air Force veteran, was head of command and control for the International Space Station, Deputy Chief Engineer for Unmanned Systems at the US Army Future Combat Systems, Chief Engineer of Elbit Systems of America, CTO of Gamma 2 Robotics, participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge, managed a Zeppelin airship, and is a factory-trained Zeppelin ground school instructor. He was responsible for maintaining the “Yellow Line” for NFL football and designed the onboard telemetry systems for NASCAR and IndyCar. He has published 48 articles and papers and authored the book “Artificial Intelligence for Robotics”. He received five outstanding achievement awards from NASA, and recognition from Scientific American for “World Changing Ideas”. Francis earned his Master of Science degree from Brandeis University.

 

CHECK OUT OUR EVENTS PAGE FOR TICKETING OPTIONS

Paypal, payroll deduct (Bell employees) available!

 

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First meeting of 2022! WEDNESDAY MARCH 2 ft. Erasmo Pinero

Welcome back to the 2022 dinner meeting season! Our goal this year is to host 3-4 hybrid dinner meetings throughout the year to engage with our membership. All dinner meetings will be available to join via a webinar platform as well as in person.

We are also introducing student presentations! Every meeting we will invite a student from the Southwest Region to give us a brief presentation on the research they are doing in the world of VTOL.

And with all that, we are excited to announce our first dinner meeting of the year! Please mark your calendars for WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2. We will be hearing a talk by Erasmo Pinero on the X-22. Erasmo’s presentation will cover the overall design of the Bell Aerosystems X-22A tilt-duct V/STOL research aircraft, its importance to V/STOL research, lessons learned, and contributions to the science of V/STOL flight. The presentation will include the road leading up to the X-22A from concept to contractual hurdles, to flying test bed; and how the program overcame unforeseen technical challenges to become one of the most successful X-planes in the history of V/STOL flight research. The pioneering contributions of the X-22A to more recent powered lift aircraft and vehicles of the future will be explored.

We would love to see you in person, but welcome all our virtual attendees as well! See the attached flyer for more information

 

For virtual tickets, student tickets, or to use Bell Payroll Deduct, please fill out THIS FORM.

 

March 2022 Dinner Meeting – PayPal Option Now Available!

 

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