Airlander 10 has successfully completed its first test flight, having undertaken a brief journey around Cardington Airfield in Bedfordshire on Wednesday August 17.
Hybrid Air Vehicles’ 92m long airship is the world’s longest aircraft, and the maiden flight marks a key milestone in its Flight Test Programme. Airlander was originally scheduled to make its debut on Sunday, but a technical issue meant it was unable to fly during daylight hours, which is a prerequisite during flight trials.
The four giant engines, which have been undergoing testing since since February 2015, were started up on Wednesday shortly after 19.00. Airlander 10 then took off at approximately 19.45, landing back at Cardington around 20.00. Chief test pilot David Burns and test pilot Simon Davies kept the airship within a six-mile area around the airfield, flying up to 500 feet and reaching speeds of around 35 knots. According to Burns, everything went as planned once in the sky.
“It was a privilege to fly the Airlander for the first time and it flew wonderfully,” he said. “I’m really excited about getting it airborne. It flew like a dream.”
Along with a series of gentle turns at increasing speeds, some technical tests on the hull pressure were also carried out during the flight. Though the maiden voyage was less than 20 minutes, Airlander 10 is expected to be able to remain airborne for up to five days at a time, giving it capabilities that other aircraft can’t match. The airship was originally developed for the US government for surveillance purposes, but was relaunched as a private commercial endeavour when that project was discontinued.
If trials are successful, Hybrid Air Vehicles says the Airlander project could support up to 400 new aerospace jobs, with 80 per cent of the aircraft’s supply chain based in the UK. The company is now seeking additional investment to fund the continuation of the test programme.
Watching it take off I was expecting the trees to either side to flip down and the Thunderbirds theme to start playing. Paint it British Racing Green and you have Thunderbird 2. I wonder if International Rescue have dibs on it for the next big earthquake?
Count me in for a Project Manager Enginering Post !
Best wishes to the Team ……Hugh Brazier C.Eng MIET AFSERT
If I could spell engineering !
You were enduring an endearing erroneousness !!
Ummmmm-what’s it going to be used for/as?
Heavy load carrying, without the need for road or airport at the destination, brilliant.
Once again, great technology, well applied. A tribute to those responsible.
PS When they were giving out the spelin ‘genes’ I must have been absent that day, like Hugh B: [several years ago a fellow blogger did suggest that as one of my comments did indeed have a mistuk in it, I would probably write a CV whot would be thrown onto the ‘discard’ heap immediately by some petty clerk, werll above their station in life: ie in Personnel! Presumbly the Engineers who created Airlander had and have more important things to worry about that the positioning of letters! Getting the equations correctly solved and understanding and minipulating nature’s laws much more important to Engineers. let the clerks continue to demonstate what they believe is povital, whilst Engineers start to redress the economic life of our nation.
Presumbly ? maybe you should create your text in a Word Doc. or similar , do a spell check (Ensure its English not American) then copy and paste into the comments window. It has the benefit of you not losing your text if the web page times out when you are creating a long comment. I should follow my own advice too !
Dear APJ: you are absolutely correct: and I do sometimes (if I remember) start a comment in a worddoc: I actually have one called : EngineerBlog recent: which when and if I can find such in my register, I try to use. Sometimes my enthusiasm to make a comment is stronger than my ability to act efficiently. Though I do always remind myself that when I speak to friends, colleagues and neighbours, they do not know how badly i am spelling the words I am speaking!
It’s useful for communications purpose such as temporary internet relays to remote locations, and research/surveys such as radar and lidar etc.
But I think the big money will be in cargo transport and heavy lifting. It can be used for large construction projects in locations that simply wouldn’t have been possible previously. For example you could carry large loads to areas with poor road access, or help with construction in areas where heavy-lift helicopters and cranes aren’t practical.
but surely only useful if there is not a strong blowing .
The -10 was originally designed for surveillance and I have read suggestions that they are going to try to promote it in this role again. They also want to use this prototype to demonstrate all sorts of operations which might in real life be done by the big brother of this design, the -50 (for 50 tonnes).
Some of the possibilities include transport for wind turbines to remote areas – to save on having to build roads and various types of transport in places like Canada where iced up roads make things difficult. As usual everyone likes to sell a product based on it’s usefulness to disaster relief but I’m not sure there’s a lot of money in that. Some other ideas include tourism and overnight connections (with a comfortable bed) as an alternative to getting up early for a conventional flight.
It is a project in which I could be interested to invest given the right incentives/market potential; where does one acquire a prospectus.
What is its top speed? What payload can it carry.
Looks too unstable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju-UXiW8G-I
for precision lifting (sky hook), but may have uses in dropping large (robust) equipment in remote places due to its ~5 day duration & 10 ton payload.
OR
How about a flying hotel, what a great way to see a country – from an aerial restaurant; …..book me a flight.
I would like to know how well it copes with wind. How many days of the year would the wind disrupt operations? The big market will come when it can move houses. Then we can build houses where all other products are made, in a factory.
This is a beautiful airship and I commend the people who conceived and created it. For obvious reasons, Airships, particularly one as big as the Airlander, are very hard to control in any significant wind. Ground handling is a big issue and making headway in a strong headwind uses a lot of energy. This does not make them fundamentally impractical, but puts some severe limitations on when and where they can operate. I wish the Airlander people the best possible result with this innovative aircraft.
“Then we can build houses where all other products are made, in a factory.”
But that would mean doing so in days or at the most weeks: and think of all the non-producers (estate agents, lawyers, clerks of works, insurance brokers, builders merchants etc) who would be out of work almost immediately.
If you ever have an idle moment as an Engineer, just write down as a short exercise just how many so-called professions make their living from ‘your’ residence. You would (as i have been since a dear friend told me) be amazed.
I can heartily recomment several excellent books on the early days of air-ships.
“Airship on a shoe-string” & “Parallel Motion” by John Anderson , “Slide Rule(Nevil Shute’s autobiography) Enjoy Mike B
“As usual everyone likes to sell a product based on it’s usefulness to disaster relief but I’m not sure there’s a lot of money in that.” neither am I: though those who apparently know better than we Engineers are presently completing two white-elephants -sans aircraft (to project our overseas image by carrying hot-rocks to the far corners of the earth) and a fleet of missile carrying submarines (sans missiles?) I am reliably informed that both will be valuable for disaster relief: presumably after they have been a part of creating the ultimate man-made disaster. Cost of this rubbish: £3.5++billions per annum for the next 30 years. Just how many airships might we get for that sum?
I have been a fan of this for a long time (join their club for more involvement) it flies at 80 mph one man can drop it onto any size space -Imagine 500 people going from city to outskirts with no track it’s a no brain er for future mass transport .If it has a hole it will still gently float to ground and not explode ,wait for the big one -do not miss this train of the sky ,it is a trackless future of people transport.
Airships like seaplanes and flying boats require far less infrastructure / support than conventional land based aircraft and at a time when space is at a premium in (smaller) developed countries where they may need to depart from to remote areas where support is minimal then that alone is a serious piece of hardware that like the Harrier could in it’s time can do what no other alternative could undertake.
The team should be really proud of the achievement.
Back in 1983, we received the request from our Director at the Mexican Petroleum Institute, to review and study a concept Lighter-than-Air vehicle proposed by a now deceased designer, that fell in love with the idea of a “modern” airship. That gentleman approached the Mexican Petroleum institute with the idea of replacing the expensive helicopter transportation to offshore oil platforms, as well as many other “possible uses”, like heavy lifting of petroleum drilling equipment to difficult to access places and so on. That designer became enthusiasted with LTAs probably because he suffered a serious accident when learning to fly small airplanes, and the long stay at the hospital allowed him to dream at airships when reading an illustrated book on airships of the past (until Hindenburg). But his concept had very little engineering to support it, and was more like an “artist concept” or conceptual idea that an actual development.
We started to study what was the entire wealth of published knowledge at the time (1984), eventually gathering about 85% of all the papers available at the AIAA library (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics at NYC), and also interviewed people from several companies related to blimps and airships (including “Airship Industries, builders of the Skyship 500 and 600, betterknown as the “Fuji Film” Blimps) and the president of the NASA Comitee on LTAs (just before its disappearance in 1984), Doctor Norman Mayer, who had actual experience on the use of blimps in WW-II, and who told us: “It will be extremely hard to beat the helicopter…”
After a period of many months (almost three years actually) and numerous calculations, we concluded that the possible development of a practical, flying modern airship was beyond our capabilities and at least 10 years away, and that the real possibility of substituting helicopters was really far away, if feasible at all. Even with the intense interest of many government entities with diverse potential applications, all we had was a lot of mostly conceptual designs and a few terribly failed examples (like the Piaseky PA-97 Helistat). So we decided to stop our project in order to see if the concept would be advanced by others.
Our appreciation of the concept revealed that the only advantageous use of these vehicles would be to meet endurance over non mountainous terrain, like naval reconaissance, promotional use, joy-rides and the like, but we foresaw no heavy lifting or passenger transport in the near future at all, and the last 30 years have shown little progress, so we weren’t very far from truth. FWIW.
Quite correct.
In our study back in 1984-86, the performance simulations suggested that the prevailing winds in Campeche Bay (acting as crosswind) would reduce the effective speed of the proposed design to less than 65 Km/h., severelylimiting it projected effectiveness. And don’t forget these aerial vehicles will need a fully enclosed, wind proof hangar, as those are very sensitive when moored.