Fig. 9. La Patrie, French War Dirigible
The next year a new and larger balloon equipped with a more powerful motor was used. Many flights were made in tests for the French War Department.
La Patrie. La Patrie was then built for the French government by the Lebaudy Brothers and was of the same design as their earlier airships. In speed it was nearly equal to Zeppelin’s, and its dirigibility was nearly perfect. Fig. 9 shows a view of this airship in flight.
It was 200 feet long, and the 70-horsepower engine drove two propellers. It could carry seven people and one-half ton of ballast. It carried four people at a speed of 30 miles per hour. On its last trip it covered 175 miles in seven hours. A few days afterward, a heavy wind tore it away from its moorings and it was blown out to sea and lost.
La Republique and Le Jaune. Two more airships of the same type, La Republique and Le Jaune, followed this. These were tried by the French government, in 1908, and both proved successful. La Republique is illustrated in Fig. 10. The shape and equipment of the car are shown in Fig. 11. The automobile type of radiator may be seen attached to the side of the car. During a flight in the fall of 1909, a propeller blade broke and was thrown clear through the balloon envelope, causing the balloon to fall from a height of 500 feet. The four officers who formed the crew of the dirigible were killed instantly.
Clement-Bayard II. The numerous factors that must be considered in the design of a successful dirigible balloon as well as the many conflicting conditions that must be reconciled have already been referred to in detail. How these are carried out in practice may best be made clear by a description of what may be considered as an advanced type of dirigible, the Clement-Bayard II, Fig. 12, of French design, and the most successful of the French military air fleet. Its predecessor, the Clement-Bayard I, Fig. 13, made thirty voyages, some of them of considerable distances, without suffering any damage, but a study of its shortcomings led to their elimination in the following model.
Fig. 10. La Republique, French War Dirigible
