Return of Airships

Always on the edge of tremendous comeback, airships are back in spotlight from advanced, new technologies. The Agency of Defense Advanced Research has recently announced funding for an innovative, ballast-free airship technology created by Aeros Aeronautical system, which compresses and decompresses helium in the 210 ft-long envelope. In addition, each design promises that the launch will be a new era of lighter than the air transportation.

The HAA airship is 450-ft long, unmanned High Altitude airship and will use old-fashioned lifting gas to ascend. This airship can blanket hundreds of miles with high-resolution radar. A top-mounted solar array may enable this huge radar platform to stay as long as up to a month. The designer of this airship is ‘Lockheed Martin’. In addition, the speed of this airship is 28mph along with capability of operational altitude that is up to 60,000ft. The airship’s radar system is still developed and the Lockheed Martin has schedules the fuel-size prototype of the ship and its potential user is ‘Missile Defense Agency’.

SA-60 airship

The SA-60 airship can fly autonomously and it was designed for the purpose of scouting and surveillance. SA-60’s round shape gives it more low-speed maneuverability. In addition, SA-60 is unmanned, which is 62-ft long. The designer of SA-60 is ‘ Techsphere Systems International.’ The speed of this airships is 35mph and the operational altitude is up to 10,000. Techsphere is putting its best blimp forward with higher altitude blimps and scheduled to fly SA-60 and SA-68.

Sky Cat 20 airship

Sky Cat 20 airship is one of the best airships that contains a cargo hauling and it has a feature of retractable hover-cushion engines that allow for vertical takeoffs and landings. More ever, it can be reserved due to which crew members don’t have to be in touched in ground team through communication equipments. Designer of Sky-Cat-20 is ‘World Sky-Cat,’ which is one of the renowned companies for airships. It has operational altitude up to 10,000 ft and its speed is higher than that of SA-60 and HAA which is 97mph (maximum). World Sky-cat planned its first flight for 2002. The updated schedule calls for world tour by the end of this year, using the updated sky cat 20.

Hybrid blimps

Hybrid airships are intended for heavy lifting of machinery or other material from one place to other. If you observe traditional airships, you will see that they have low operating cost but they are limited in different ways. For example, they have low speed low payload/volume ratios. Moreover, they are very difficult to handle while grounding them. Whereas hybrid airships are easy to control and one can easily trained for controlling a hybrid airship. Also, they consume less energy for lifting heavy things from one place to other. New hybrid blimps can float in air with high speed and they used advance technology.