At Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., Lighter Than Air (LTA) Research is floating a new approach to a technology that saw its rise and fall a century ago: airships. Although airships have long since been supplanted by planes, LTA, which was founded in 2015 by CEO Alan Weston, believes that through a combination of new materials, better construction techniques, and technological advancements, airships are poised to—not reclaim the skies, certainly—but find a new niche.
Although airships never died off entirely—the
Goodyear blimps, familiar to sports fans, are proof of that—the industry was already in decline by 1937, the year of the Hindenburg disaster. By the end of World War II, airships couldn’t compete with the speed airplanes offered, and they required larger crews. Today, what airships still linger serve primarily for advertising and sightseeing.
This article is part of our special report
Top Tech 2023.
LTA’s Pathfinder 1 carries bigger dreams than hovering over a sports stadium, however. The company sees a natural fit for airships in humanitarian and relief missions. Airships can stay aloft for long periods of time, in case ground conditions aren’t ideal, have a long range, and carry significant payloads, according to
Carl Taussig, LTA’s chief technical officer.
Pathfinder’s cigar-shaped envelope is just over 120 meters in length and 20 meters in diameter. While that dwarfs Goodyear’s current, 75-meter
Wingfoot One, it’s still only half the length of the Hindenburg. LTA expects Pathfinder 1 to carry approximately 4 tonnes of cargo, in addition to its crew, water ballast, and fuel. The airship will have a top speed of 65 knots, or about 120 kilometers per hour—on par with the Hindenburg—with a sustained cruise speed of 35 to 40 knots (65 to 75 km/h).
Some 21st-century Airship Tech
It may not seem much of an advance to be building an airship that flies no faster than the Hindenburg. But Pathfinder 1 carries a lot of new tech that LTA is betting will prove key to an airship resurgence.
For one, airships used to be constructed around riveted aluminum girders, which provided the highest strength-to-weight ratio available at the time. Instead, LTA will be using carbon-fiber tubes attached to titanium hubs. As a result, Pathfinder 1’s primary structure will be both stronger and lighter.
Pathfinder 1’s outer covering is also a step up from past generations. Airships like the 1930s’
Graf Zeppelin had coverings made out of doped cotton canvas. The dope painted on the fabric increased its strength and resiliency. But canvas is still canvas. LTA has instead built its outer coverings out of a three-layer laminate of synthetics. The outermost layer is DuPont’s Tedlar, which is a polyvinyl fluoride. The middle layer is a loose weave of fire-retardant aramid fibers. The inner layer is polyester. “It’s very similar to what’s used in a lot of racing sailboats,” says Taussig. “We needed to modify that material to make it fire resistant and change a little bit about its structural performance.”
LTA Research
But neither the materials science nor the manufacturing advances will take primary credit for LTA’s looked-for success, according to Taussig—instead, it’s the introduction of electronics. “Everything’s electric on Pathfinder,” he says. “All the actuation, all the propulsion, all the actual power is all electrically generated. It’s a fully electric fly-by-wire aircraft, which is not something that was possible 80 years ago.” Pathfinder 1 has 12 electric motors for propulsion, as well as four tail fins with steering rudders controlled by its fly-by-wire system. (During initial test flights, the airship will be powered by two reciprocating aircraft engines).
There’s one other piece of equipment making an appearance on Pathfinder 1 that wasn’t available 80 years ago:
lidar. Installed at the top of each of Pathfinder 1’s helium gas cells is an automotive-grade lidar. “The lidar can give us a point cloud showing the entire internal hull of that gas cell,” says Taussig, which can then be used to determine the gas cell’s volume accurately. In flight, the airship’s pilots can use that information, as well as data about the helium’s purity, pressure, and temperature, to better keep the craft pitched properly and to avoid extra stress on the internal structure during flight.
Although LTA’s initial focus is on humanitarian applications, there are other areas where airships might shine one day. “An airship is kind of a ‘tweener,’ in between sea cargo and air freight,” says Taussig. Being fully electric, Pathfinder 1 is also greener than traditional air- or sea-freight options.
After completing Pathfinder 1’s construction late in 2022, LTA plans to conduct a series of ground tests on each of the airship’s systems in the first part of 2023. Once the team is satisfied with those tests, they’ll move to tethered flight tests and finally untethered flight tests over San Francisco’s South Bay later in the year.
The company will also construct an approximately 180-meter-long airship,
Pathfinder 3 at its Akron Airdock facility in Ohio. Pathfinder 3 won’t be ready to fly in 2023, but its development shows LTA’s aspirations for an airship renaissance is more than just hot air. This article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “The Return of the Airship.”
Top Tech 2023
Top Tech 2023: A Special ReportPreview exciting technical developments for the coming year.Can This Company Dominate Green Hydrogen?Fortescue will need more electricity-generating capacity than France.An Airship ResurgencePathfinder 1 could herald a new era for zeppelinsA New Way to Speed Up ComputingBlue microLEDs bring optical fiber to the processor.The Personal-Use eVTOL Is (Almost) HereOpener’s BlackFly is a pulp-fiction fever dream with wings.Baidu Will Make an Autonomous EVIts partnership with Geely aims at full self-driving mode.China Builds New Breeder ReactorsThe power plants could also make weapons-grade plutonium.Economics Drives a Ray-Gun ResurgenceLasers should be cheap enough to use against drones.A Cryptocurrency for the Masses or a Universal ID?What Worldcoin’s killer app will be is not yet clear.IBM’s Quantum LeapThe company’s Condor chip will boast more than 1,000 qubits.Arthritis Gets a JoltVagus-nerve stimulation promises to help treat autoimmune disorders.Smartphones Become SatphonesNew satellites can connect directly to your phone.Exascale Comes to EuropeThe E.U.’s first exascale supercomputer will be built in Germany.The Short ListA dozen more tech milestones to watch for in 2023.From Your Site ArticlesCould Airships Rise Again? ›Sergey Brin's Revolutionary $19 Airship ›Related Articles Around the WebAirship firm LTA Research scaling up for first flight | Aerospace ... ›Why Google's Sergey Brin Is Building a Secretive Airship Company ›
Magazines love to dabble in prognostication, particularly when it comes to emerging technology. Startups show such futuristic pronouncements to potential investors, who in turn use them as data points to inform their bets. And as readers, we gravitate toward them, if only so we can feel superior when, say, a highly anticipated product launch bombs—chef’s kiss to Mark Zuckerberg for the schadenfreude fest that is the metaverse. Think of IEEESpectrum’s annual technology forecast as prognostication filtered through a skeptical lens and years of ongoing coverage of technological advances from lab to market. Each January, we look at projects across the globe and from a range of engineering disciplines that will have major milestones in the coming year. While some technologies flop and fade away, others produce multiple hype cycles that raise and then dash hopes again and again. Take flying cars. Back in 2007, we predicted that the flying-car startup Terrafugia would fail. The company lurched along for years until finally ceasing U.S. operations in 2021, ironically just after receiving a Special Light-Sport Aircraft airworthiness certificate from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. But as we wrote in 2014, flying cars are an idea that will not die. And even though the road—or the flight path—to commercial success is riddled with regulatory and social obstacles, eVTOLs (a newer and less sullied, acronym-a-licious moniker for flying cars) have attracted billions of dollars in investment in recent years. And now, the sector seems poised to finally take off, as Editorial Director of Content Development Glenn Zorpette reports in his story about Opener’s BlackFly eVTOL. Flying cars illustrate one path that emerging technologies follow, with innovators and investors taking chances and failing early on. True believers learn from those failures, ultimately leading to solutions that are then brought to market. Sometimes, though, externalities like a changing climate fast-track technologies that have been languishing in development for decades. Back in 2001, Senior Editor Michael J. Riezenman wrote about hydrogen fuel cells as a promising answer to long-haul transportation needs. Back then, the hydrogen economy seemed right around the corner. Fast-forward 22 years and Contributing Editor Peter Fairley reports on two Australian companies that aim to use hydrogen to make a big dent in the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions. One company is using renewable energy to produce hydrogen as fuel for huge trucks to haul zinc ore. The other is developing a new generation of electrolyzers to produce hydrogen for export, although exactly how that will work has yet to be determined. Thank the pressures of the climate crisis for this green-hydrogen boom. Cryptocurrencies, which we’ve been covering since they emerged, have imploded over the last several months. This crypto winter has soured many people on that particular application of blockchain technology, but there are many other, perhaps more promising ways to apply a blockchain. One is as a means of providing proof of personhood, as the journalist Edd Gent explores in his critical look at Worldcoin. The company’s founders want Worldcoin to be not only a global currency that will somehow redistribute wealth via universal basic income but also a secure means of biometric identification, with a dose of buzzy, Web3 facilitation thrown in for good measure. And so, while crypto is tanking and the NFT market has fizzled, something useful may yet rise from the ashes of Web3. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that Web3 will be recalled in years to come as a figment of some collective pandemic fever dream. Check back in a few years to see how that prognostication pans out. Meanwhile, have some fun with this issue. And for IEEE members, enjoy your exclusive member benefit: online access to our feature archives going back to 2000. Log in to the Spectrum website to trace how technologies like lidar and microLEDs have developed into components that now enable other technologies—a new generation of blimps and optical interconnects for chiplets, respectively—which are also featured in this issue.From Your Site Articles10 Lessons From the Legacy of Apple’s Steve Jobs ›Top Tech 2022: A Special Report ›January 2023 - IEEE Spectrum ›Related Articles Around the WebThe 7 Fundamentals for Succeeding in Innovation ... ›Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Innovation? | On Point ›The eight essentials of innovation | McKinsey ›Keep Reading ↓Show less
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