Google's Sergey Brin is building the world's biggest airship

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Flyaway

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin is building a hi-tech airship in Silicon Valley destined to be the largest aircraft in the world, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the project.

“It’s going to be massive on a grand scale,” said one, adding that the airship is likely to be nearly 200 meters long. This would make it by far the world’s largest aircraft today, albeit smaller than the epic Hindenburg Zeppelins of the 1930s, or the American navy airship USS Macon that was once based in the very same hangars where Brin’s aircraft is now taking shape.

The sources revealed details of the airship on the condition of anonymity, citing confidentiality agreements. Brin has revealed nothing of his airship ambitions and is building the airship in a giant hangar on a Nasa airfield far from the eyes of the public.

Brin wants the gargantuan airship, funded personally by the billionaire, to be able to deliver supplies and food on humanitarian missions to remote locations. However, it will also serve as a luxurious intercontinental “air yacht” for Brin’s friends and family. One source put the project’s price tag at $100m to $150m.
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/26/google-sergey-brin-building-largest-aircraft
 
Love the way the author conflates the details to make it sound more impressive than it is. ::)
 
sferrin said:
Love the way the author conflates the details to make it sound more impressive than it is. ::)
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Not quite sure what point to make other than needless cynicism.
 
Flyaway said:
sferrin said:
Love the way the author conflates the details to make it sound more impressive than it is. ::)
Click to expand...

Not quite sure what point to make other than needless cynicism.
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Just that it'd be nice if the media went back to hiring professionals. But I might as well be wishing to win the lottery. Anymore you always have to read the fine print for the disclaimers. "World's largest aircraft!!!!" Except it's not even close to the largest airship. As bad as China continually bragging about their "largest seaplane in the world" while the much larger Martin Mars can be seen flying on YouTube.
 
sferrin said:
Flyaway said:
sferrin said:
Love the way the author conflates the details to make it sound more impressive than it is. ::)
Click to expand...

Not quite sure what point to make other than needless cynicism.
Click to expand...

Just that it'd be nice if the media went back to hiring professionals. But I might as well be wishing to win the lottery. Anymore you always have to read the fine print for the disclaimers. "World's largest aircraft!!!!" Except it's not even close to the largest airship. As bad as China continually bragging about their "largest seaplane in the world" while the much larger Martin Mars can be seen flying on YouTube.
Click to expand...

Well if I wanted to be pedantic you could say we officially don't know how big it is, so it might be the biggest and then again it might not be. ;)
 
Flyaway said:
sferrin said:
Flyaway said:
sferrin said:
Love the way the author conflates the details to make it sound more impressive than it is. ::)
Click to expand...

Not quite sure what point to make other than needless cynicism.
Click to expand...

Just that it'd be nice if the media went back to hiring professionals. But I might as well be wishing to win the lottery. Anymore you always have to read the fine print for the disclaimers. "World's largest aircraft!!!!" Except it's not even close to the largest airship. As bad as China continually bragging about their "largest seaplane in the world" while the much larger Martin Mars can be seen flying on YouTube.
Click to expand...

Well if I wanted to be pedantic you could say we officially don't know how big it is, so it might be the biggest and then again it might not be. ;)
Click to expand...

"nearly 200 meters long"
 
"World's biggest airship" could well mean "biggest airship in the world today". Doesn't necessarily mean "biggest airship ever".
 
sferrin said:
Flyaway said:
sferrin said:
Flyaway said:
sferrin said:
Love the way the author conflates the details to make it sound more impressive than it is. ::)
Click to expand...

Not quite sure what point to make other than needless cynicism.
Click to expand...

Just that it'd be nice if the media went back to hiring professionals. But I might as well be wishing to win the lottery. Anymore you always have to read the fine print for the disclaimers. "World's largest aircraft!!!!" Except it's not even close to the largest airship. As bad as China continually bragging about their "largest seaplane in the world" while the much larger Martin Mars can be seen flying on YouTube.
Click to expand...

Well if I wanted to be pedantic you could say we officially don't know how big it is, so it might be the biggest and then again it might not be. ;)
Click to expand...

"nearly 200 meters long"
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Well we will see I suppose at some point how accurate or not this article was.
 
From back in June of this year:
https://robbreport.com/motors/aviation/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-building-airship-1234682672/

Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s airship start-up grows rapidly (ft.com, subscription or registration may be required)

1668007404608.png
ORIGINAL CAPTION: LTA crew members manoeuvre Pathfinder 1 inside the hangar at Moffett Field in California © LTA Research
Tim Bradshaw in London JUNE 3 2022


Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s secretive project to build huge electric airships is scaling up rapidly, as Lighter Than Air (LTA) Research prepares its first major test flights later this year.

The tech billionaire is hiring hundreds of aerospace engineers in Silicon Valley and Akron, Ohio, at a site made famous by the Goodyear blimp, to build airships intended to run humanitarian missions to remote areas or disaster zones.

LTA was incorporated in 2014, before Brin stepped down from executive duties at Google’s parent company Alphabet in 2019. The start-up’s headquarters are at Moffett airfield in the San Francisco Bay Area, a Nasa-owned facility a short drive from Google’s headquarters that the US space agency began leasing to the tech company in 2015.

LTA’s payments to Google for the use of Moffett have risen more than tenfold in the past three years, according to parent company’s Alphabet’s most recent annual proxy filing, which has disclosed the “arm’s length” transactions with Brin’s company since 2017.

After starting at just $131,000 five years ago, those payments rose from $1.1mn in the year to March 2019 to $10.9mn in the most recent period ending in March 2022, suggesting that LTA is accelerating its development.

LTA hopes to reinvent the blimp for the 21st century with “zero-emissions” flights. The company’s first full-sized airship, the 120-metre-long Pathfinder 1, is scheduled to begin test flights over Silicon Valley this year.

An even bigger dirigible, Pathfinder 3, is in development at the air dock in Akron, which became the world’s largest building when it was completed in 1929 and remains one of the world’s largest aerospace facilities today. A recruitment drive in Akron will double LTA’s total headcount to more than 400 people over the coming months.

Alan Weston, a former Nasa programme director who has led LTA since 2016, told local news reporters in Ohio in May that the company was building “the largest air vehicle on earth” in Akron. The 185 metre-long Pathfinder 3 will eventually be capable of carrying up to 96 tons across a range of up to 10,000 miles, or 16,000km, when it is completed next year, Weston said.

Pathfinder 3 is 60 metres shorter than the ill-fated Hindenburg-class airships that promised to revolutionise passenger flight in the 1930s until a disastrous accident in New Jersey killed 36 people and shattered the industry’s ambitions.

Brin’s day-to-day involvement at LTA is unclear but he is one of 13 inventors named on a key US patent granted to the company in April last year. The patent covers “methods and apparatus for constructing airships”, using 3D printing and carbon-fibre tubing to reduce costs and speed up production.

Weston said: “We believe lighter than air technology has the capacity to speed up humanitarian aid by reaching remote locations with little infrastructure, and to lower carbon emissions for air and cargo transportation.” Among the many open positions for which LTA is hiring is a “flight test engineer” in Silicon Valley with “experience with first flight efforts of experimental aircraft”. Advertised perks include free lunches, “swag and the occasional airship ride”.
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It was intended as a reconstruction of Noah's Ark.
- No connection to ecological concerns of builder Johan Huibers, as can be read on the Dutch wiki page:
Huibers richtte de ark, die bedoeld was als bezienswaardigheid en evangelisatiemiddel, in met polyester replica's van wilde dieren zoals giraffen, olifanten en leeuwen, en met exposities over de Bijbelse zondvloed en het creationisme.
[translation]
Huibers furnished the ark, which was intended as a tourist attraction and a means of evangelism, with polyester replicas of wild animals such as giraffes, elephants and lions, and with exhibits on the Biblical Flood and creationism.
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- No connection to Sergey Brin.
- No connection to airships - unless anyone is suggesting the Ark got stuck on Ararat because an airship put it there :)
 
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At last, the general public can empathize with the feelings, shocks and fascination people of the early 20th century might have experienced seeing those majestic giant objects graciously floating in the skies above Europe, first, and then United States. We often, for example, discard their importance as strategic bomber over England and continental Europe in WWI or the sensation of futurism felt with the transoceanic Zeppelins*.

I don´t know if there will really be an economic model for such rigid airships on earth in the future, but this direct connection with our past is a delicacy. (kudos also for this amazing footage!).

*That all together makes some great story and fascinating books.
 
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Playing in Google found this BBC article from February this year.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250214-pathfinder-1-the-airship-that-could-usher-in-a-new-age
Eighty-six years later in November 2023, Pathfinder 1 emerged for the first time from the historic Hangar Two at Moffett Field to begin its outdoor flight-testing programme. But the largest aircraft in the world stayed stubbornly tethered to the ground to the frustration of many aviation enthusiasts. Its expected first flight just didn't happen.

But thanks to the Google co-founder's deep pockets, LTA Research appears to have the freedom to wait-to-get-it-right that others have not always had.

They have used this freedom to, for example, find better materials than lightweight aluminum alloys like duralumin to construct the giant frame of a rigid airship from, and cotton-composite materials and even cow guts to make the envelope out of, and gain a much better understanding of aerodynamics involved in flying very large airships. And it seems like they have been able to cautiously flight test their creation, without the over confidence and pressure from investors that have been a problem in the past.

"People said that they could not do it and that it was impossible," says Janne Hietala, CEO of Kelluu Airships, whose 10 autonomous drones, each of which can be transported in a 12m (40ft) sea container, are currently "the world's largest" fleet of airships. "This is a brilliant, very bold attempt to do the hard work, the engineering that is required, to mass-manufacture big airships. I don't think they will build hundreds of those because of the difficulties in mass-manufacturing airships of that size, but it's still possible."

Pathfinder 1 is not a historical replica. It is a proof-of-concept airship designed to see if a rigid design can be updated with new materials.

In particular, LTA Research wants to solve the thorny problem of how to mass produce aircraft of this size. It wants to build production models in Goodyear Airdock in Akron, Ohio, where the great US rigid airships of the 1930s were built.
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Has LTA Research released any dimensions of Pathfinder 1? Only thing I found was length, 124.5 metres. While substantially bigger than Zeppelin NT (75 metres/8200 cubic metres), among historical Zeppelins it would rank among the smallest (LZ 120 was 120.8 metres/20 000 cubic metres).

Of course it's a proof-of-concept ship, so it would be unnecessarily risky to build it any bigger.
 
Being a building engineering channel, The B1M focusses on the hangars, but this matches well with Sergey Brin's LTA Research. As well as the history of the giant aircraft hangars, it looks at the restoration of Hangar 1 at Moffett Field - who funded it, and why. Things are very secret but it looks like LTA Pathfinder 1 is indeed just that - a pathfinder - and there's a much bigger airship being incubated in Hangar 1.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmte0qRKF1A
 

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