It’s gigantic. It’s part airship, part helicopter, part plane. It has an intriguing form. And it flew for the first time – with success.
Dubbed the The Flying Bum for its odd shape, the Airlander 10 took off from an airfield north of London, England last week and landed safely after a 15 minutes’ flight. The gigantic Airlander “flew like a dream,” Chief Test Pilot Dave Burns said following the flight. It climbed to a height of 500 ft and reached a maximum speed of 35 knots.
It was a first test flight, and many more are to follow before the behemoth gets the regulatory okay from the authorities for commercial use, but the company behind the initiative foresees a bright future for the Airlander.
However the aircraft’s second flight test however did not fare very well. The Airlander 10 suffered cockpit damage after a hard landing on Aug. 24, although Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) rebuffed media reports it had hit a telegraph pole.
“Airlander sustained damage on landing during today’s flight. No damage was sustained mid-air or as a result of a telegraph pole as reported,” HAV said on its Facebook page.
The company did not say why the incident happened, and said: “We’re debriefing following the second test flight this morning. “All crew are safe and well and there are no injuries.”.
The Airlander 10, made by British company Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), is 302 ft (92 m) long, 85 ft (26 m) high and 143 ft (43.5 m) wide. To compare: The A380, the world’s largest passenger airliner made by Airbus, has a length of 72.7 meters, a wingspan of 79.8 meters and a height of 24.1 meters. The Airbus Beluga, which is used to carry aircraft parts and oversized, voluminous cargo, is only 56 meters long and has a wingspan of 45 meters. Airbus is developing a new version of its Super Transporter, the Beluga XL to replace the type around 2019-2020.
The Airlander 10 also might be world’s t longest aircraft for the moment, however the record holder are the German Hindenburg-class airships. These mid-20th century airships were 804 ft (245 m) long, and thus longer than the current Airlander 10.
The “10” after the name refers to the payload of 10 metric tonnes (22,050 lbs) that the air vehicle is able to carry. HAV is already working on a future version of the Airlander, the Airlander 50, that can move up to 50 metric tonnes of cargo. The big brother for the Airlander 10 will be commercially deliverable in the early 2020s, HAV says.
The Airlander is a hybrid aircraft, combining the best characteristics of fixed wing aircraft and helicopters with lighter-than-air technology to bring brand new capabilities to aircraft. An Airlander produces 60% of its lift aerostatically (by being lighter-than-air) and 40% aerodynamically (by being wing-shaped) as well as having the ability to rotate its engines to provide an additional 25% of thrust up or down. It has a maximum speed of 91 miles (80 knots, 148 km) per hour.
It can hover and land on almost any surface, including ice, desert and even water! It does not need long runways like conventional aircraft. Its landing system consists of two profiled pneumatic tubes / skids on the underside of the two outer hulls.
It has four 325 hp, 4 litre V8 direct injection, turbocharged diesel engines. Two engines mounted forward on the hull and two on the stern of the hull for cruise operation. All four are configured with ducts with blown vanes to allow vectored thrust for take-off/landing/ground handling operation
It can stay airborne for up to five days at a time if manned, and for over 2 weeks unmanned, according to HAV and its team of developers.
The Airlander has no internal structure but it maintains its shape due to the pressure stabilization of the helium inside the hull and the carbon composite material it is made of. The skin of the hull is a combination of multilayered Vectran® weave, Tedlar® and Mylar™. This provides strength and endurance that past hybrid aircraft prototypes lacked, according Composite Manufacturing magazine. This composite construction allows it to withstand multiple lightning strikes.
The super-strong hull Vectran material – it is five times stronger than steel and 10 times stronger than aluminum— is designed by Warwick Mills (the U.S. company that developed the airbag fabric for the Mars rover landings), and the mammoth hull’s envelope structure was assembled by ILC Dover, the U.S. company who makes the NASA spacesuits.
As a matter of fact, the Airlander –it was not yet called the Airlander at that time, it was called the HAV 304— was designed and built for the U.S. Army as part of its Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) program, in cooperation with Northrop Grumman. The HAV 304 first flew in the U.S.A. in August 2012, but the project was grounded soon after mainly due to defense spending cuts.
The U.S. Army had projected to introduce the LEMV for the combat deployment in Afghanistan in early 2013, but it dropped the idea on operational, technical and safety concerns of sending the airship abroad.
The ready-to-fly aircraft was left redundant at Joint Services Base in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The U.S. military reportedly had spent up to $517 million on the developing the LEMV. Whilst the LEMV was initially designed to loiter over warzones gathering intelligence for weeks on end, it offers other applications as well. Air Force General William Fraser III, Commander of U.S. Transportation Command, told a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee that hybrid air vehicles have the potential to carry a lot more cargo than a ship and do so faster than the command’s conventional cargo aircraft, such as the C-17. The extreme operational flexibility of the hybrid air vehicles make “factory to foxhole” cargo delivery possible, Fraser said.
Hybrid Air Vehicle bought the airship back, reportedly for $300 million. It revived the project thanks to a €2.5 million grant from the European Union, £5.9 million worth of funding from the of the U.K. government while it also managed to raise over £3.4 million through two crowd funding campaigns.
According to HAV, customer interest for the Airlander is “strong” due to these game-changing capabilities. The hybrid aircraft is ideal for remote access and carry cargo for sectors such as mining, oil & gas, communications and humanitarian relief. It can also undertake search and rescue operations, or do military and commercial survey work.
In addition, HAV is targeting passenger transport although the passenger market is likely to remain small, Chris Daniels, head of partnerships at Hybrid Air Vehicles, told CNBC. “The passenger market again is a very clear market but it’s relatively niche – luxury tourism, experience flights, that kind of experience rather than getting from A to B,” he said.
