Hello again friends. It's been a long time since I've started having a positive outlook on Airships and Aviation. When Airlander crashed for the second time I felt like that was the end, nobody would invest. But the reality of the Airship industry is that it's just been one disaster after another, and that's still not a good enough reason to quit.
Understand reader, we have never developed a true "Airship" as the meaning of the word embodies. Everything that's ever been built in the Airship space is pretty much a prototype for the idea of a True Airship.
We have yet to achieve the dream of Airships. I didn't explain anything that happened in the last Airlander disaster, but to be clear. Nothing was fundamentally wrong with the design of Airlander that led up to it's second crash. What was wrong was the ground handling crew accidentally let the airship get away from them. There was a fail safe that caused the Airship to deflate and that's was what destroyed Airlander 10... nothing but pure incompetence on Hybrid Air Vehicles part.
As such it's important to understand that the Hybrid Airship Design is still fundamentally sound, at lest in theory.
Hybrid Airship overcome a critical flaw of "old world" airships, in that they do not get all of their buoyancy from a lifting gas. This was a critical problem with older Airships that used helium instead of hydrogen, because in order to load and unload cargo they would need to change the ships buoyancy or the ship would become uncontrollable and shoot up into the air like a balloon!
Hybrids are always heavier then Air and as such can never shoot up and away when loading or unloading cargo. Instead they get the rest of their lift from the shape of their haul, just like an airplane.
This makes them a total dream to fly, they're much easier to fly and land then a regular airplane, I even put my mother down in front of the simulator once and she was able to land the Hybrid Airship no problem. It passes the "Your mom can fly this test". Which frankly, being somewhat of an experienced pilot myself (I mean come on guys, I'm Johnny Thunder) I don't think I know of anything else that can pass the "Ur Mom" test currently flying. Maybe ultralights, but it's still pretty easy to kill yourself in an ultralight.
Hybrid Airship on the other hand I'm convinced a total fool can fly and land no problem. Worst thing that can happen is something like the first Airlander 10 crash. It's like flying a Cessna with training wheels!
Another issue with Airships is that they get blown around in the wind a lot. This was part of the reason the Airlander 10 was destroyed. Hybrids have developed a solution, at lest on the ground, to remedy this by using large hoverpads that not only blow air but can suck air as well. These hoverpads allow Hybrid Airships to grab the ground and hold it during loading and unloading operations, in shifting winds.
With all of these issues solved, it seems like we should see Airships flying now.
Well, something interesting has been happening unrelated to Airships that I have been paying close attention to. And that is pretty much everything Elon Musk is doing.
The Man has already achieved the impossible at lest 3 times so far. He's developed orbital class rocket boosters that can land themselves. He's made electric cars popular, and he's even composing his own music. The man is quit literally the most important person alive right now, and he still plans to do the impossible at lest 3 more times before he dies.
There are two very interesting things that Musk has talked about that really are making me have a double take on what is and is not possible.
Recently, Musk has talked about how our understanding of manufacturing is all wrong, no doubt from his experience with Model 3 production hell. While we tend to believe that building a prototype of something is the hard part, it is actually the production line of any new product that is 1000 times harder then building the initial prototype. When Space X started developing Starlink they started by building the factory that would build satellites first, with no initial prototype developed. Musk said this was the right way to go, as now they can produce Starlink satellites faster then they can launch them and cheaper then the launch costs associated with them.
He is now working on, what I'm sure historian's of the future will see as a critical step in humanity development: a Starship.
In the same sense that an Airship has never been a "True Airship", no Rocketship has been a "True Starship".
This is what Musk is building right now.
Myself and many others are watching the development of Musk new super rocket and the rate of production in absolutely stunning. Musk and Space X are able to solve issues in one week that take NASA 6 to 9 months to fix. How are they able to do this, because Starships are just a byproduct of what Musk is really building, and what he is really building is the factory that builds Starships. Working protypes just become a byproduct of the initial work going into this factory, and when one blows up, another takes its place in a little over a week that fixes the problem. Then the solution gets implemented and the line of Starship continue.
This is what is missing in the Airship industry. It's why Hybrid Air Vehicles spent years trying to get their first prototype back from the US government instead of just building a new one. When the simple reality is all that time spent on Airlander 10 was actually a mistake. Everyone in this industry needs to focus on building a production line not a prototype, the prototype must be molded by the limitations of the factory so that everything is produced at low cost and high speed.
Another point that Musk has made the gives us hope. According to Musk, the parachutes that have been developed for Dragon 2 were actually much harder then Musk anticipated. In fact he made a joke that he thought Rocket Sciences was hard but Parachute Science was a whole new can of worms.
In other words, building an Airship is actually harder then building an orbital Rocket, which Musk himself says in 2020 is actually pretty easy. We think this "old" technology of Airships should be pretty easy too because it was first, but in fact Airships are the hardest of all the flying technologies to master, even harder then Rocket Science.
These facts have really given me pause and reflection. With this new knowledge it seems clear why Airships haven't gotten off the ground yet in terms of popularity. This is actually one of the hardest endeavors humanity has undertaken. But the rewards of achieving that first "True Airship" I can feel in in my bones, and I think when the world switched over to Elon's method of thinking, we will see a lot more prototypes becomes production products faster then we ever have seen before.
