The Guild is needed to redress the UK’s aerospace industry imbalance, which hardly provides support for Buoyant Aircraft (BA), although balloons are popular for pleasure flights, seen occasionally drifting across British skies. Tethered aerostats also are used for military and security duties around the world but not often seen around our country.
However, It’s mainly airships and their derivatives that need better support, where there currently are none to be seen (except occasional models and perhaps prototypes) in UK service.
Yet the Industry sector has huge potential to provide a widespread range of BA for aerial services worldwide in naturally sustainable ways. This stems from using least energy principles of flotation, where power is only for motivation together with control and systems operation purposes.
The situation in other countries is different, where there is an upsurge of interest in BA and active development of new types to serve world needs. The EU perhaps may be said to be leading the show with support from national governments and coordination through EU commission leaders, where:
• France is a major player with Flying Whales taking centre stage but also with several contenders in the background, such as: Aeronde, Airstar, A-NSE, Hylight and Voliris.
• Germany also has active developments by Zeppelin with certified airships in operation and supporting USA interests. In addition, it has numerous small enterprises such as H-Aero, Roboloon and WDL developing new types. CargoLifter
also is underway again and new enterprises such as Wolkenflug have taken up airship development.
• Finland is another leader with Kelluu providing active area coverage with its small drone airships.
Other world leaders include:
• Brazil, where Airships do develops traditional types.
• Canada, where there’s great need for airships to serve its vast northern regions, spawning airship developments such as BASI’s proposal.
• China, which has several BA developments such as its latest AS700D airship.
• India, which also has serious interest for airships led from IIT Bombay, now with new enterprises such as Empyreal Galaxy.
• Israel, where Atlas LTA leads new BA developments and RT LTA Systems provides tethered aerostats.
• South Africa, where Cloudline is well underway with its small airship development.
• USA, with several contenders including: Aeros, AT 2 Aerospace, GUS, LTA Research, Plimp Airships, Sceye, TCOM and others.
This demonstrates the serious drive for airships and other BA, which the UK appears to overlook or simply dismisses because of historical aspects of former types and where its institutions either are too busy with other things or don’t have resources for BA.
Depending on purposeful design and cooperation of people with interest in this sector, British BA could provide door to door duties practically anywhere worldwide across vast isolated regions without local infrastructure, including types automated as drones.
Most airships don’t need long flat concrete runways aligned with main wind directions as aeroplanes do and they can be configured for access into/out of quite small open areas using vertical launch and capture (VLC) methods (pseudo VTOL from remaining airborne at ground level).
Photo by Yaren Kılıç
