Airship pioneers follow Wright path

Resembling a vanilla éclair on roller blades, Ohio's newest airship squats in a cloth-covered hangar waiting for the skies to clear, the wind to ebb and the ground to harden.

When those conditions are in alignment, a lone pilot in a completely open seat will begin by taxiing the 120-foot Dynalifter down a grass runway north of Alliance.

The first time Ohio, a grass field and a new aircraft with an open seat found their way into a newspaper, it involved a pair of Dayton bicycle mechanics who thought that powered flight was worth a look.

This time, an equally improbable pair of pioneers wants to tempt providence and defy gravity, though a bit more modestly than the Wright Brothers.

Robert Rist and Brian Martin have crafted what they call a hybrid of winged airplane and helium airship. Stubby wings and a pair of waspy little gasoline engines will be able to lift it because of Mylar gas bags from stem to stern.

Don't call the Dynalifter a blimp. It is more like a dirigible because of its rigid metal framework and backbone, and it aspires to avoid the vices of earlier airships, such as the need for big ground crews, high operating costs or the tendency to blow up or come apart in storms.

But where the Wrights created modern aviation from the ground up, Rist and Martin want only to get cargo off the ground, sending it faster than surface ships, farther and more cheaply than trucks or modern cargo aircraft.

In their way, the boys from Alliance are a modern paraphrase of the brothers from Dayton.

The Wrights represented the last gasp of a time when inventors could toil away in private, without benefactors, corporate patrons or major research grants. They ran a bicycle shop, taught themselves to be aeronautical engineers and then went flying - albeit after thousands of attempts and years of experimentation.

Rist and Martin worked at Mount Union College in Alliance, where one set up technical systems and the other was a computer programmer. They've used computer technology to research the project and design it. But they have called in the expertise of various aerospace experts to refine it.

They conceived the idea in 1991, left the college in late 2003, began building in February 2004 and finished most of the work this past autumn. Martin and Rist also want investors, while the Wrights shunned them.

The Wrights reveled in the remote, wind-formed dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks because there was no one there to bother them except feral ponies and the hapless descendants of pirates and shipwreck victims. When they made test flights on Huffman Prairie near Dayton, they would time them to make sure no interurban rail traffic was going down the nearby rails while they were in the air.

Rist and Martin welcome visitors whenever they are at the airfield, and answer questions with the patience of pediatricians and kindergarten teachers.

But anyone with ill intent should know that the white hangar can be seen from the home of Forrest Barber, the probable pilot on the Dynalifter's first flight. The retired police captain is as protective of the airship as the father of the bride the night before the wedding.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

jewinger@plaind.com, 216-999-3905