Silicon Valley’s Airship Revival: Pathfinder 1 Unveiled for Potential Humanitarian Aid

This week, LTA Research revealed Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship, to the public. According to TechCrunch, the company founded by Sergey Brin will spend the next year putting its airship through airworthiness testing at Moffett Field, home of NASA’s Ames Research Center, and out over the seas of the southern San Francisco Bay. If all goes well, airships could one day be used for climate-friendlier air travel, cargo transport, and humanitarian aid missions.

Pathfinder 1, LTA Research’s first prototype, is 400 feet long and 66 feet wide. That’s more than 150 feet longer than an Airbus A380, and is apparently the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the ill-fated Hindenburg in the 1930s.

Instead of explosive hydrogen, Pathfinder 1 uses helium as its lighter-than-air lift gas. The airship has 13 rip-stop nylon gas bags inside its rigid carbon-fiber and titanium frame that are continuously monitored using LIDAR to ensure the airship is properly balanced, buoyant, and performing well. LTA is obviously angling for nothing to go wrong, but just in case, the surface of the airship is coated with Tedlar, a laminated, strong, lightweight, and, crucially, non-flammable material.

While the helium gets Pathfinder 1 in the air, it moves around thanks to 12 electric motors that are powered by diesel generators and batteries. The motors can drive the airship at up to 75 mph and can rotate from +180º to -180º to allow it to maneuver carefully. The pilots steer using a joystick and fly-by-wire system that automatically integrates with sensor feedback data to control all the motors.

Despite its massive size, Pathfinder 1 will only be able to carry a relatively small amount of cargo. Depending on how tests go and the specific requirements of the situation, LTA expects the airship to have a payload of between 4,400 and 11,000 pounds. By contrast, a C-17 Globemaster can carry almost 180,000 pounds. The advantage of an airship, then, isn’t so much in what it can do, but in what other aircraft can’t.