Airship Company Gets First Civilian Customer

Zothecula writes "Hybrid Air Vehicles has recently achieved two massive commercial wins that seem to indicate that the airship has a very rosy future indeed. The aircraft's versatility plus an ability to stay airborne for 21 days enabled HAV to win a 517million contract (€370million) to supply a Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) to the U.S. Army for deployment in Afghanistan starting in 2012. Whilst the LEMV is a relatively small vehicle designed for surveillance, HAV has now announced a civil customer for their heavy-lift variant."

All in the costs...as always

[TrueSatan]

In the 1980's I worked for a company that supplied the engines (Mercedes Benz motor car engines brought up to aviation standards) used in gondolas run under Airship Industries (maker of them) blimps. The gondolas ran as mobile generator sets and saw significant usage to power the lighting for the LA Olympic games. Other airships flew over the games sites so as to provide a high vantage point for security services to monitor the event. This led all involved into a false feeling of a new dawn for airships...fancy plans were drawn up for them to run tourist trips in and out of the Grand Canyon for instance and over Ayres Rock in Australia. Some even hoped for African wildlife tourism to be involved and for trips up the Amazon...then we came to our senses as the company (AI) went under. The cost of filling a large blimp with helium is immense and the wretched things leak! To make matters worse in order to move a blimp around a country one either has to wait ages while it covers any noteworthy distance under its own steam or deflate the thing (usually by venting all the helium) and transport the remaining items by more conventional means (road, rail, air or ship) then pay out for a new fill of helium. This made the costs look pretty awful pretty fast. High winds and airships aren't a good combination so should the prevailing conditions grow nasty the owners of the blimps were, again, forced into a deflate/re-inflate cycle so as to protect the structures. In short almost all the proposed uses of the blimps were unable to see a reasonable return on investment and those that had any chance of same were too few to keep the company making the blimps running. I very much doubt that an economic case that can be viable long-term really exists for all but a tiny number of large civilian use blimps in anything but an unrealistic pipe-dream. Small military use ones may be a niche product with a future and that's where money might be made off of these things.