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The world's largest airship has been unveiled, as the enormous Pathfinder 1 begins its first round of flight tests. Measuring 400 ft (121.9 metres) in length, this gargantuan blimp is nearly twice the length of a Boeing 747-8 quadjet, the world's longest aircraft. The blimp uses approximately one million cubic feet of helium and 12 electric motors to achieve vertical take-off and speeds of up to 75mph (120km/h). The vast airship has been created by LTA Research, a company backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Its creators say that craft like this could one day reduce the carbon footprint of...

AUSTIN, TX — In a landslide victory during a special statewide referendum this week, Texans overwhelmingly voted to have a giant airship pick up Austin via tow cables and drop the city off in California. As the city is mostly inhabited by Californians who left their state due to the cost of living, high taxes, and crime - and then proceeded to vote for the same policies in Texas - the move is just "setting things right" by sending immigrants from the Golden State "back where they belong," according to the bill's sponsors. The act took effect immediately, and a...

Zeppelins, the rigid airships most famously epitomized by the Hindenburg, now seem kind of retro, rather than the image of futurity they represented in the 1930s. But they could be about to make a comeback in a big way — courtesy of a new aluminum-shelled, solar-powered airship that’s being built by the U.K.-based company Varialift Airships. According to the company’s CEO Alan Handley, the airship will be capable of making a transatlantic flight from the United Kingdom to the United States, consuming just 8% of the fuel of a regular airplane. It will be powered by a pair of solar-powered...

The world's longest aircraft has collapsed to the ground less than 24 hours after a successful test flight. The Airlander 10 - a combination of a plane and an airship - was seen to "break in two" at an airfield in Bedfordshire, an eyewitness said. "it appeared the Airlander broke free from its mooring mast, triggering a safety system which deflates the aircraft." Two people on the ground suffered minor injuries.

Larry Page has his flying cars. Sergey Brin shall have an airship. Brin, the Google co-founder, has secretly been building a massive airship inside of Hangar 2 at the NASA Ames Research Center, according to four people with knowledge of the project. It's unclear whether the craft, which looks like a zeppelin, is a hobby or something Brin hopes to turn into a business. "Sorry, I don't have anything to say about this topic right now," Brin wrote in an email. The people familiar with the project said Brin has long been fascinated by airships. His interest in the crafts...

Lockheed Martin has been given the green light to build its radical hybrid airship that will launch in 2018. The US Federal Aviation Administration has this week approved a certification plan developed by the company, taking it one step closer to starting commercial deliveries. Lockheed says the airships can transport heavy cargo to remote locations, burn significantly less fuel than conventional aircraft and land on any flat surface, including sand, snow and water.

If what follows sounds like a scene from the sci-fi disaster flick Independence Day, imagine what President George W. Bush must have thought on the night of January 8, 2008 as he contemplated his ranch home in Crawford, Texas. At around 8:00 pm, an enormous, hovering craft with ridiculously bright lights, at least 1,000 feet long (though some witnesses said a mile long), was tracked on multiple radars heading straight for the president's ranch at low speed. The craft lacked a required transponder, was totally unidentified, did not respond to any attempts at communication, and was flying through restricted airspace....

Airships aren't just powered balloon-like vehicles that hover above sporting events. Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are floating the idea that airships have potential for important scientific and commercial uses. NASA is considering issuing a challenge for developing stratospheric airships that can break records in terms of duration of flight at high altitudes. The agency has issued a request for information for this contemplated "20-20-20 Airship Challenge." Submissions will be accepted until December 1. "We are seeking to take astronomy and Earth science to new heights by enabling a long-duration, suborbital platform for these kinds of...

....“The technological problems with airships that have stopped them ruling the skies have been gradually ticked off,” says Mr. Durham, technical director of Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), which makes the Airlander.” Advances in materials, avionics and aerodynamic design mean that we have overcome the lion’s share of these obstacles. This craft is part airship, part aircraft and part hovercraft. We have taken the best aspects of each machine and combined them in one hyper-efficient vehicle. Let me tell you, this isn’t the Hindenburg.”... A future design called Airlander 50 will lift 50 tons of cargo, five times more than a...

Once seen as the future of surveillance, the Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle has been terminated, InsideDefense.com reports. Is the military airship revival drawing to a close? UPDATE, 6:30pm Thursday: The Army confirmed that the LEMV airship project has been canceled. Here's the statement an Army spokesman emailed us: "The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), a hybrid air vehicle, is a technology demonstration project administered by the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command. This project was initially designed to support operational needs in Afghanistan in Spring 2012; it will not provide a capability in the timeframe required. Due to technical and...

A radical new kind of airship funded by the US military is about to make its first test flight - and it looks uncannily like the Thunderbird 2 craft from the classic TV show. The Aeroscraft airship will carry three times as much as the biggest military cargo planes over thousands of miles, use a third of the fuel, and it doesn't even need a landing strip. It could also have major implications for cargo haulage, and almost everything now laboriously transported across the planet's surface by boat, train and lorry could within years be carried through the skies, its...

Argus One airship, U.S. military drone Drones and satellites dominate the U.S. military's surveillance arsenal, but fleets of unmanned airships could soon join in keeping an eye on battlefields. One robotic airship contender, the modular Argus One, has upcoming flight demonstrations scheduled at a U.S. Department of Energy Nevada Test Site that hosted nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War. The Argus One's design resembles a segmented sky worm made of connecting modules, and has the flexibility to quickly change its flight path as it slinks through the sky. It can also carry 30 pounds of surveillance sensors or...

The U.S. Army launched its new $150 million High Altitude Long Endurance airship in Akron Wednesday only to watch it come down in some Pennsylvania woods just hours later. According to Akron's Fox 8, the solar powered blimp went down in Greene County, about 50 miles south of Pittsburgh. Intended to provide satellite type communications and surveillance above the Jet Stream, the ship hit 32,000 feet when an "anomaly" forced operators to abort the flight.

Ever since the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, airships have been a largely abandoned technology, their continued existence consigned to being a quick shorthand for alternate universes in science fiction. But now, 75 years later, airships might be ready to return. To be fair to airships, the Hindenburg blew up because its fuel was flammable hydrogen - something its German operators had to use because the US banned the export of helium to the Nazis - and so it's perhaps not the best representative of the technology's abilities. Then again, the Hindenburg was far from the only airship disaster, and the...

The United States Army has ordered a huge hybrid airship longer than a football field to watch over battlefields in Afghanistan by the end of 2011, according to the airship's builder Northrop Grumman Corporation. The company has received a $517 million Army contract to build up to three of the huge military airships, called the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicles (LEMV). Such airships would serve as surveillance stations at 20,000 feet (6,096 meters) above sea level and could stay on watch for as long as three weeks at a time. A LEMV would also have the capability to carry a 2,500-pound...

A huge inflatable vehicle as long as a 23-floor skyscraper is tall has become the world's largest airship in its bid to serve as a stratospheric satellite, or "stratellite," according to its developers. The 235-foot (72 m) long airship, known as the Bullet 580, has a top speed of 80 mph (129 km/h) and can serve as a high-flying sentinel that stays aloft for long periods of time. Getting the new sky behemoth inflated required six hours inside Garrett Coliseum in Montgomery, Ala. "Our airships are radically different designs that move beyond the performance limitations of traditional blimps or zeppelins...

Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the loss of the U.S. Navy airship USS Macon, NOAA today announced that the wreck site on the seafloor within Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. The Macon, a 785-foot dirigible was one of the largest airships in the world – comparable in size to the RMS Titanic. It was intended to serve as a scout ship for the Pacific Fleet and had the ability to launch and recover Sparrowhawk biplanes. In service less than two years, the Macon, based at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, Calif.,...

The zeppelin, Eureka, sits on the tarmac at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif. The airship was dedicated Friday at an event celebrating the 75h anniversary of Moffett Field.(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News) MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--NASA celebrated the 75th anniversary of this iconic airfield and research center on Friday by dedicating a brand-new zeppelin from a private company called Airship Ventures. The zeppelin NT ("new technology"), which is one of just three currently functioning zeppelins that exist in the world, and the biggest, at 246 feet, was named "Eureka," a name that relates to the fact that the ship is based...

The flying hotel Thunderbird 2: The 700ft super-airship that will gently float you around the worldLast updated at 23:32pm on 1st February 2008  With its fins and whale-like shape, it resembles Thunderbird 2. But, unlike the huge International Rescue rocket in the puppet series, this gigantic airship won't be roaring off in a blast of flame and smoke to any international emergencies. Instead, its designers say it will gently lift 40 passengers into the sky for a serene cruise of the world. Scroll down for more...   Uplifting: Manned Cloud's deisgners say it will offer eco-friendly holidays    The...

This is not a Blimp. It's a sort of flying Queen Mary 2 that could change the way you think about air travel. It's the Aeroscraft, and when it's completed, it will ferry pampered passengers across continents and oceans as they stroll leisurely about the one-acre cabin or relax in their well-appointed staterooms. Unlike its dirigible ancestors, the Aeroscraft is not lighter than air. Its 14 million cubic feet of helium hoist only two thirds of the craft's weight. The rigid and surprisingly aerodynamic body—driven by huge rearward propellers—generates enough additional lift to keep the behemoth and its 400-ton payload...