Lockheed Just Solved one of the Biggest Issues Facing Airships Today

Lockheed is very serious about kick-starting the Second Golden Age of Airships. Lockheed just announced that they have developed an new drone for repairing Airship Envelopes:

As you can see, this little drone will greatly decrease the time needed to fix Airship hauls by scanning the outside and inside to find little pinholes that need to be repaired, and then automatically repairs them.

You don't really think about little holes on airships that much (honestly I didn't think about it until after watching this video), but one of the big advantages of these new airships over the old ones, is their ability to only lose a fraction of the helium in their envelope every year.


In the past Airships would need to top off the Helium every year as they would lose about 20% to the sky gods. These new airships only lose about 0.03% a year, meaning there is no need to top off at any point during the airships life circle...  in theory.

However tiny pin holes put a hole in that theory, requiring huge amounts of maintenance in order to solve a seemingly tiny problem.

With these new drones Lockheed has solved this problem, showing that they are committed to bringing Airships back and that with a little pioneering innovative thinking you can solve seemingly impossible problems!

There is no doubt in my mind now that Airships are coming back, little things like this everyday remind me, we really have solved the issues with Airships:

The Hybrid Design, Thrust vectoring, fly by wire controls, buoyancy control, all of these things seemed impossible to the engineers of the 1920s, yet we have made the little steps bit by bit in the long process of solving these seemingly impossible problems.

I long for the day, that Airships become ordinary, I was born in an era when computers were just becoming a thing, and throughout my teenage years I could just take the technology for granted. I can't wait for the day when Airships are taken for granted, where getting on an Airship is no different then getting on a bus or walking into a casino. I just hope that day comes before I'm 60 years old.

It's sad to think that people like Count Von Zepplin, and so many others, envisioned that world where Airships ruled the skies and knew it was possible when everyone else said is wasn't. Yet those men and woman never got to see that world in it's full incarnation.

We are lucky enough to live in a time when we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It's important to remember the people that got us here, rebels in their own time. They helped get us here, and they should be remembered for that.

Their can be no denying it now, the Second Golden Age of Airships is coming, are you ready?

Lockheed's New Cargo Order

Lockeed has unveiled plans to bring the popular C-130 Super Hercules to the commercial market as part of it's plan of dominating the ever growing global Air Cargo Business. It's part of a two pronged effort to dominate the high end and low end of the Air Cargo business.

The C-130s will cover air cargo deliveries that need to be made quickly or over very long distances. If the range of the destination is more then 800 nautical miles, Airships become less attractive, as the amount of fuel the airship would need to take to move the fuel it would need, makes it's efficiency only slightly better then the C-130 at these ranges with a whole lot lost in time.

However the C-130 is too expensive to operate in the sub 800nm ranges routinely. In that zone the Hybrid Airship is the king of efficiency, while also remaining timely. On top of that each platform can get into landing locations the other might not be able to reach. The Hybrid Airships might not be able to find an open area large enough to land, that might only be serviceable by a small airstrip not large enough to fit the airship but will fit the C-130. On the same token areas with vast open expenses but terrain too rough for the C-130 to land on will be easily accessed by a Hybrid Airship.


Any air cargo business can see why having both of these platforms makes a lot of sense. When you are not in a hurry you have the Hybrid Airships do the bulk of the cargo operations in your area, with the C-130s only flying long range cargo missions where the premiums are not too expensive. Allowing for a maximum of savings without any lose of coverage. However when you need to move cargo quickly you can send out the C-130s for shorter trips and they can still land at almost the same number of locations as the Hybrid Airship.

This allows for any air cargo carriers to have all their bases covered. When business is slow you scale down the usage of C-130s and double up the Airship cargo routs. When Business is booming you fill in the gaps left by the airships with the C-130.

It's a very smart plan that will have wide ranging impacts on the Air cargo industry. Not only is Lockheed increasing the capabilities of Air Carriers to land anywhere, not only are we seeing increased fuel efficiency because of the use of Hybrid Airships, but we will see increased efficiency for the C-130 as well because it will not be delegated to missions that it's incredibly inefficient for.

That is something that will benefit everyone on the planet in the near future and beyond.

Major Set Back for Professor's Hydorgen Airships

Maybe you remember Prof. Barry Prentice, the Professor that had a plan to build Hydrogen Airships for cargo hauling in Canada's North. Well, unfortunately his business venture had a major set back, the Hanger they were keeping the Airships has been destroyed due to a Sand Storm (Full Story.) Estimated damages are between a half million to a million dollars.

Airship hangers have been notoriously finicky throughout history. The Aeroscraft was destroyed by the hanger collapsing just a few years ago, and in the past major Airship endeavors have ended in ruin because of fires and other major malfunctions in airship hangers all through the First Golden Age of Airships.

The conspiracy theorist in me has always found it a little odd that Airship Hangers seem to be so fraught with failure, when all they are functionally is a massive room. However the more logical explanation is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we construct airship hangers. In this case, I'm sure there is a solution to building much more reliable Hangers for airships then what we are doing now, Moffett Field has had no know problems from collapses I do believe, maybe it's a more structurally sound design?

HAV update July 12th

"The biggest disappointment of this Farnborough show must surely be the non-appearance of the Airlander 10. The huge hybrid airship remains confined inside the hangar at Cardington from which it was due to emerge and fly last April. Its maker, Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV, Hall 4 Stand 36) told AIN that no single problem had caused the delay. “We’ve erred on the side of caution, as we’re the first of a new type,” said a spokesman." Full Story