Airship transportation system cargolifter

The British manufacturer has already indicated its desire to produce ten Airlander-10s per year from 2021 on.ДЄlongside the 92-meter-long Airlander-10, the company is also developing the larger Airlander-50. An example given is that of transport of the large propellers for wind turbines to remote areas of northern Scandinavia. It is particularly useful in regions and countries with limited infrastructure, where the Airlander can be deployed as an enhanced crane, as it were, for transport of outsized cargo over great distances. There is apparently also great interest from countries such as the US, Brazil and the Middle Eastern states, but also from Sweden. The company itself claims that there is вЂgreat demandвЂ™ for their smaller cargo zeppelin, which can transport cargo at a maximum speed of 140 kilometres per hour, for large infrastructure construction projects in China, among other countries. It is therefore still unclear when the first Airlander-10 will be put on the market.

Only then will the airship take to the skies again. According to insiders, the builders hope to restart the test flights this spring, though all will depend on a number of вЂrigourous checksвЂ™ of, for example, the engines which enable vertical takeoff and landing. The crash resulted in a considerable delay in the airship testing programme, requiring complete replacement of the cockpit, for example. While no one was hurt, there was considerable damage to the bottom of the 25 million pound airship, including the cockpit. The first successful test flight of the Airlander-10 was completed mid-2016, but a second flight in Great Britain in August was less successful, after two hours of being airbourne. This makes the colossus eight metres longer than the worldвЂ™s largest cargo plane, the Ukrainian Antonov 225. The British continued to develop a civil aviation variant, whose prototype had a cargo capacity of ten tonnes and a length of 92 metres. The US withdrew from the military project in 2013, as a result of cost-cutting measures. HAV, which is a follow-on from the Skењњat company, began developing the airship together with the US aviation constructor Northrop Grumman in 2007, for surveillance tasks for the US military. An alternative to such a takeover could be a merger, in order to provide the company with sufficient capital for a ten-year period. HAV has apparently already been approached by parties, but is not naming names at this point. Hybrid Air also receives a subsidy from the EU development fund, Horizon 2020.Д«esides the share issue, Hybrid Aviation is not ruling out the possibility of a takeover by one of the large aviation industry players such as Boeing or Airbus, in the somewhat longer term. Other investors in the British project include aviation enthusiast Bruce Dickinson of the Iron Maiden band. Last year, the zeppelin builder also amassed two million pounds via crowd funding, leading analysts to currently estimate the value of the airship manufacturer to be around 55 million pounds. The company is also undertaking debt refinancing, which must bring in a further thirty million pounds. HAV plans to issue shares on the London Alternative Investment Market. The financing is necessary in order to establish a production line for the Airlander-10, whose length of 92 metres still earns it the title of the largest airship to have actually flown since the demise of the colossal zeppelins of the 1930s. The airship pioneer aims to collect fifty million pounds (58 million euros) by the end of this year or early 2018.

Despite the dent to its reputation when the prototype crashed upon landing in front of BBC cameras in August last year, the British owner of the Airlander, Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) is not discouraged and this month announced a share issue. The British Airlander-10, lovingly nicknamed вЂthe giant bumвЂ™ is the closest thing so far to a commercially deployable cargo zeppelin.

There have been many designs, promises and developments in the field of airships for heavyweight transport jobs, yet companies such as Hybrid Air, Lockheed-Martin/Aviation Capital, CargoLifter and Aeroscraft have yet to deliver the goods.

Airship transportation system cargolifter