views of the environment. The idea is to create a premier
experience for the passengers, and the Airlander does it.
The level of luxury doesn’t rival a Gulfstream, but rather
an Upper West Side apartment, though with more variety
in the selection of an outside view.
Technologically, the company calls the thing a hybrid
airship, in that it gets its lift from little wing things and
the shape of the vehicle itself, and it’s steered somewhat
aerodynamically and somewhat by pointing its big engines
in varying directions, which they call vectored thrust, just
like an F22. We’ll let them have that one. The company
says the ship gets as much as 40 percent of its lift from its
structure, and close to the ground the engines can be used
to provide some lift as well.
The company has reached an agreement with Collins
Aerospace, which will develop electric motors for the craft.
With electric propulsion, the $32 million Airlander 10 will
not only be huge, but it will be quiet and relatively economi-
cal to operate. With a max capacity of 19 passengers, it
won’t be for moving large numbers of people from point to
point but small numbers of people over interesting places.
Many questions remain to be answered. Will such a
market for luxury loitering materialize? Will the great
size and difficulty in staging the craft prevent it from
getting from one spectacular location to the next reliably
and economically? How many airships will the company
need to sell to stay profitable, and where will those sales
come from? It’s always a risk to develop a product for a
market that doesn’t yet exist, and Hybrid Air Vehicles is
taking just such a risk with its airship. We’re curious to
see how it goes. The company hopes to have its design
certificated by EASA—we are purposely not thinking
about Brexit right now—within the next few years. We’ll
keep you apprised.
PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE?
Another airship, the Phoenix, is, again, a fascinating
ship but with the added benefit of not looking like a butt.
A team of Scottish scientists is developing the craft
as a proof of concept, and it’s working. They flew the
thing in March, and all systems functioned exactly as
they’d hoped. The name “Phoenix” comes from the
mythical bird that rises from its own ashes. In this case,
the airship would do that over and over again. While
not a true perpetual motion machine, it’s not far from
that. The concept that allows it to fly nearly forever, the
change from lighter than air to heavier than air, isn’t
really new, but it hasn’t been used in a full-scale airship
to our knowledge. As the ship goes between sinking and
floating, it milks that change of state for propulsion.
While this emerging technology has the promise of
being able to stay aloft for really long periods of time,
which might come in handy for surveillance as a sky-high
observation platform, or in telecom, say as a floating
wifi hotspot, there currently doesn’t seem to be much
demand for such mobile hot spots. Moreover, the idea has
been tried several times—Scaled Composites, founded
by Burt Rutan and now owned by Northrop Grumman,
focused for years on developing aircraft that could loiter
for long periods while serving as aerial hot spots. The
idea hasn’t gone anywhere, and with the advent of 5G a
few years away, it’s hard to imagine that it will, but then
again, a craft like the Phoenix that can fly for extended
periods of time while burning no fuel might change the
value proposition fundamentally.
That is, after all, how paradigm change happens, by
new ideas upending old ones. In this case, it would be a
very old idea making good on a promise that has been
on pause for the better part of a century. PPplaneandpilotmag.com 39The Hindenburg
is the largest and
most notorious of
a class of rigid-
structure airships
made in Germany.
Its infamous
explosion in New
Jersey in 1937 was
just one of dozens
of horrific airship
disasters in the
early years
of flight.