Homebuilt hot-air airships

john smith wrote:
As with most homebuilt advertising, look to see it the article has
actually flown.

I know it hasn't flown untethered yet. The inventor had taken some effort
to avoid people getting the wrong idea about the pace of progress. He went
to the trouble of using HTML metatags so as to have his web site excluded
from search engine results. I only found his web site rather obliquely. I
only mention his site now because it appears he has finally removed those
metatags and is making a presentation at Oshkosh.

From the photos on the above website, this one hasn't. What does that
tell you?

Nothing I didn't already know. Dan Nachbar has already stated that the pace
of progress is much slower than expected.

The one photo of "tethered" lift is taken at night. Again, one must
ask the question, why?

Eh? The caption to that picture seems to explain things rather clearly:

"October 28, 2005 -- Here's a shot of your intrepid adventurers piled into
the cabin and making a first tethered flight. The winds died very late that
day, so this picture was taken in near darkness. So while the photo quality
isn't very good, the moment it captures was quite momentus. It took nearly
4 years of work to get off the ground this first time."