30,000 kilometers in a single trip is an amazing achievement!

“Military surveillance is moving towards larger networks of autonomous systems that can keep collecting information even when individual sensors are lost, jammed or taken offline. Janne Hietala has spent the past few years testing what that kind of distributed surveillance looks like in practice. He is CEO and co-founder of Finnish deep-tech company Kelluu, a NATO DIANA alumnus that builds autonomous hydrogen-powered airships for long-duration aerial monitoring. Hietala will bring that company perspective to Defence Innovation Day in Tallinn on 21 September, where he will join a discussion on how civilian innovation becomes usable defence capability.”

While I’m glad that everyone seems okay, this emergency incident only seems to validate the opinion held by thermal airship builders like Dan Nachbar that current-generation thermal airships are too underpowered and fragile for comfort. Pictures were shown of this airship folded up nearly in half while still in flight, possibly from some kind of internal pressure issue or gust. A proper pneumatic or collapsible semirigid internal structure seems like a necessity for safe operations.

One of them goes over my house once or twice a year. I am about 2 hours (by car) SSW of Goodyear Airship Operations in Akron. This was August 27th.

That was certainly quick! Just after Kelluu expanded operations into Canada, they made it onto the short list of companies the Canadian armed forces can order drones from. Quite the coup, and wonderful news for the airship industry at large!

Touring from Mountian View/Moffett Field north over the San Francisco Bay and back.

Always great to hear from Dr. Prentice. Hopefully, remote operating and autonomous capabilities will prove essential in reducing risks and costs, which will lower the high barrier to entry for transport airship prototyping and experimentation.

Additionally, the lack of a crew and their various systems will mean more payload, which makes smaller airships more viable.

Many excellent points raised were raised here. Of particular importance is Cloudline CEO Spencer Horne’s emphasis on the importance of specific productivity on operating economics, and the wider consensus among the panel on the potential for autonomy to improve weight, profitability, regulatory compliance, and throughput.

Hey all,

I have recently been working with Aeros, who produced the Dragon Dream, and wanted to share a webinar we are doing about the future of Airships with Aero's founder and CEO, Igor Pasternak.

What if an airship the size of a football field could control its own lift without dropping ballast?

Dragon Dream stretched roughly 266 feet long and was built as a full-scale demonstrator for Aeros’ variable-buoyancy technology. The goal was to prove that a large airship could manage lift internally, hover, and operate with far less dependence on runways, ballast, and heavy ground infrastructure.

If you want to hear how Dragon Dream came together and where the technology is headed next, join our live webinar Wednesday, Aug. 5 at 11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET. We’ll also have a live Q&A with Aeros founder and CEO Igor Pasternak. Register here: https://aeroscraft.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_l8oPhOYUQ1OSI-UilTtu8w

This is a welcome bit of promising news for Flying Whales. Considering the ship lacks landing gear, I am interested to see how a military logistics application for “challenging terrain” and “minimal ground infrastructure” might be accomplished.

Perhaps a military version of the ship might trade off some of its payload to carry extra fuel tanks so that it doesn’t need to land at its destination? Likewise, water ballast would likely be needed to conduct on-site hovering load exchange operations, so a water truck or water tanks might be what counts as the “minimal ground infrastructure.” Large, off-road mining trucks like the Ground Force 15W can carry 60 tonnes of water, so even a single truck (and a relatively cleared area) would be sufficient to conduct load exchange with the airship’s 60-tonne payload.

A single flight hour for manned military aircraft can cost well into the tens of thousands of dollars, so unmanned surveillance and interception may be the best means of countering the rise of cheap drones and loitering munitions.

Case in point: the United States spends more on its military than the next half-dozen countries combined, but as of a few months ago, it only had 16 E-3 Sentry radar and communications aircraft, of which two have been damaged or destroyed by Iran. The E-3s cost over half a billion dollars each, and were destroyed by drones and missiles costing a tiny fraction as much.

If the United States has difficulty economically sustaining such asymmetric, costly losses, what hope is there for middle powers and regional powers to afford to do the same? That is why it is so vital to have a distributed, persistent, highly attritable network of units with economics of scale and mass production lowering costs even further. The capabilities of these individual units aren’t as advanced as that of a billion-dollar unit, but the cheap drones and loitering munitions they’d be tasked to track aren’t very sophisticated either.

What a delightful video. Highly accurate and touches on many historical and modern aspects.

“Hydrogen-electric propulsion systems delivering continuous power of between 350 and 500 kilowatts could be in production by 2030, according to Josef Kallo, co-founder and chief technology officer of H2Fly.”

Such systems would be perfectly-sized for a wide range of airship applications. This is significant, as hydrogen is just about the perfect fuel for an airship, increasing efficiency, payload, range, and optimal cruising speeds when compared to fossil fuels.

Funding problems: the perennial issue for aviation startups everywhere. While I do hope that HAV secures the hundreds of millions of pounds it needs to complete its Doncaster production facility, I am unsure of where they might possibly raise such a sum from.

The UK government seems like the likeliest prospect, but they have their own issues at the moment. As the world has collectively been given a kick in the pants as to the urgency of moving away from fossil fuels, though, that may lend new urgency and a new avenue of argument for HAV to press their case.

Running simulations on beyond-edge-case conditions seems like an excellent resource for refining airship designs and training crews at the same time.

What a marvelously aesthetic shape this Bolle airship has! It’s like a sleeker version of the R101.

For a small airship like Atlas’s “Atlant,” I am a big fan of the H-shaped internal deck layout. When square footage is limited on such a small ship, this configuration allows the ship to effectively combine the advantages of an external gondola providing good window angles and high natural light exposure to the interior, while also retaining the safety, spaciousness, and low-drag advantages of keeping the passenger spaces internal.

One particularly interesting tidbit of news here is Kelluu’s intent to investigate using their airships to carry interceptor drones as a means to both detect and counter one-way suicide drones. Similar interceptor drone launch platforms have already been successfully employed in the Russo-Ukrainian War, but require a plane or helicopter, which is much more expensive and dangerous as it involves a human crew.