Airlander 10 is world’s largest plane airship embarks on first flight from Cardington,England
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM August 18: The world’s “largest aircraft” embarked on its maiden flight on Wednesday, four days after a previous attempt was abandoned due to technical issues.
The Airlander 10 — part plane, part airship — took to the skies amid cheers and applause from crowds gathered at an airfield in Cardington, central England.
The successful flight comes 85 years after another airship — the ill-fated R101 — took off from the same airfield in October 1930 before crashing in France, killing 48 people and effectively ending the development of airships in Britain.
At 92m long and 43.5m wide, this is the world’s largest aircraft, dwarfing heavyweights such as the Airbus A380 “superjumbo”. It is a bit cheaper, too, with a catalogue price of £25m, compared with $375m (£287m) for an A380.
It can also carry a 10-tonne payload, comparable with military transport helicopters such as the Boeing CH-47 Chinook, the US Air Force’s workhorse of choice.
Originally developed for the US army as a surveillance aircraft, the 92-metre- (302 feet-) long Airlander 10, also has potential uses in the commercial sector, such as carrying cargo, according to makers Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV).
The firm, which describes the Airlander as the “largest aircraft currently flying”, received a British government grant of 2.5 million pounds ($3.7 million, 2.9 million euros to develop the project.
The Airlander can fly at up to 4,880 metres (6,000 feet) and reach speeds of 148 kilometres per hour (92 miles per hour), according to HAV.
Its first flight was delayed on Sunday due to a technical fault, which was resolved in time for the aircraft to take off in clear weather conditions for Wednesday’s 30-minute flight.
HAV CEO Stephen McGlennan said the aircraft was cheaper and greener than helicopter technology.
“It’s a great British innovation. It’s a combination of an aircraft that has parts of normal fixed wing aircraft, it’s got helicopter, it’s got airship,” he said.
A project to develop the aircraft for surveillance use by the US military was shelved due to budget cuts.
Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), the company behind the Airlander’s development, gleefully bought back the lion’s share of the airship, minus the top-secret military hardware. It had been paid nearly $100m to build the craft and retrieved its creation for a mere $300,000.
Since then HAV has raised money through several rounds of crowdfunding, and input from private investors. These include Peter Hambro, the mining magnate and scion of the Hambro banking dynasty, and Bruce Dickinson, the frontman of the heavy metal group Iron Maiden and a keen pilot.
HAV’s chief executive, Stephen McGlennan, has his eye on a stock market listing toward the end of this year to raise up to £30m. He believes there could be 100 of the airships in the skies within five years and says there is latent demand for around 1,000. Potential uses include tourist pleasure cruises, cargo transport and disaster relief.
The Airlander is already attracting interest from military powers willing to spend where the US was not. “At first, 40 to 50% of its use will be military,” McGlennan predicts.
The Airlander can stay airborne for weeks at a time, monitoring activity such as insurgents planting explosives. The craft may not be very subtle, but that’s the point. “You want them to see it,” says McGlennan. “It’s about surveillance and keeping ground troops safe, but also about changing behaviours rather than catching people in the act.”
It can fly out of reach of all but specialised ground-to-air weaponry, so militants taking pot shots shouldn’t pose too many problems. “It doesn’t pop,” says McLennan.
