Airships

The world's largest aircraft made its first public outing this week when Hybrid Air Vehicles​' helium-buoyant Airlander 10 airship was guided out of its hangar at RAF Cardington, Bedfordshire, UK,​ ahead of a short series of ground tests in anticipation of its first flight in Britain.

Lockheed Martin's Hybrid Airship is one beast of a heavy hauler. Naturally, maintaining a vehicle almost as long as a football field takes a lot of man hours, but the technology company has a new little helper on deck.

NASA has submitted a request for information in order to gauge the interest regarding a potential airship design challenge. The agency hopes that the “20-20-20 Airship Challenge” would incentivize the development of innovative airships for scientific and commercial purposes.

The Air HES concept claims to yield both clean water and electricity by using a high-flying airship to harvest and condense water vapor which it then uses to spin up an electric turbine generator to create power.

Last July, we first heard about Goodyear’s plans to replace its current fleet of blimps with newer, more advanced models. The first of those airships, which was unnamed at the time, made its maiden flight this March. Now called Wingfoot One, it officially began active service last Friday.

Satellites may be very useful for communications, navigation and other applications, but they're expensive to build and launch. That's why Thales Alenia Space is developing the StratoBus, an airship that can be launched like a regular blimp, but that will be able to hover in the stratosphere.

On Friday, Goodyear unveiled its new state-of-the-art blimp at its Wingfoot Lake hangar in Suffield, Ohio. Built in partnership with the Zeppelin company, the new craft that replaces the 45-year old GZ-20 blimp fleet is not only larger and faster, it isn’t even a blimp, but a semi-rigid airship.

California-based Aeros Corporation has received FAA Airworthiness certification to begin flight testing of a new type of rigid airship called an Aeroscraft. New photographs show the giant airship outside flying under its own power, but connected by tethers to the ground.

The iconic Goodyear blimps that are a common sight in the skies over stadiums at sporting events in the US are set to become iconic Goodyear zeppelins. The company says its new airships will be longer, faster and more maneuverable than the current fleet, while being less expensive to operate.

A company in Nevada has announced a new series of unmanned airships that propose to provide persistent surveillance for days at a time

Nanoblimp, billed as “the world’s smallest RC blimp,” uses a plain ol’ party-variety helium balloon as its gas envelope.

The US Army has canceled the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) program.