Demob happy: The LEMV, or Airlander, took its first civilian flight in 2012
The lead singer of heavy-metal band Iron Maiden looks every inch the genteel private investor rather than a veteran of decades of rock ’n’ roll wars. With his corporate windcheater, silk scarf, athletic build and neatly trimmed hair, Bruce Dickinson has the assembled throng’s attention as he articulates the case for pumping up the airship in the hangar next door in Cardington, Bedfordshire, with £250,000 of his hard-earned cash. The aircraft – a behemoth, for sure – has yet to take off more than once.
The original flight of the airship took place in August 2012, and the hope is that it will fly again this year. Since the first flight, the prototype has been extracted for a cost of just over £300,000 from the US, where it was developed by the military from an original concept dreamt up by Jeffrey Roger Munk, a naval architect by training who developed numerous airship designs from the early 1970s until his sudden death at the age of 62, four years ago.
One of these designs was the AT-10, a five-seater airship that was eventually exported to Asia. This design evolved into a hybrid air vehicle with an innovative landing system. It formed the platform for the US Army’s long endurance multi-intelligence vehicle (LEMV), a hybrid military airship developed by Northrop Grumman and Munk’s firm Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) and was intended to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support for ground troops.
After the US Army cancelled the project just over a year ago, the LEMV, also known as the Airlander, was bought back by HAV for a thousandth of the total original cost – $300 million – of the project.
“We aim to get it flying again by the end of the year,” says Dickinson, who has invested his money under the government’s Enterprise Investment Scheme, which provides tax breaks to individual investors who back entrepreneurs at smaller firms. It is hoped the airship, relaunched and touted as a transporter of the future in various sectors, will form the basis for a range of Airlander commercial products, from which Dickinson will eventually profit.
He is not the only famous person on hand to help spur the airship skyward. Nadine Dorries, Conservative MP for mid-Bedfordshire, is perhaps most well-known for her appearance on the ITV reality show I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! But she is also backing the airship project in the belief that it could create numerous jobs in the local area – perhaps as many as 1,800 directly, and 2,200 more in the supply chain.
Airship designer Munk, who is commonly known by his middle name, originally came to Dorries with his idea, seeking government backing. “I have lots of brownfield sites in my constituency. I see a lot of men who put plans on the table and tell you what they want to do; you develop a nose for these things,” she says.
Dorries was impressed by Munk’s proposal. “What I loved about Roger was that he came in with his idea and you could instantly see it would work. It wasn’t just his enthusiasm and knowledge: you could see that this could put the UK at the edge of a leading technology. I was blown away. That day I wrote a letter to the government of the time asking them to back it,” she says. The result of Dorries’ efforts was that the Technology Strategy Board eventually awarded the project £2.5 million.
The second flight of the military prototype is scheduled to take place at the end of 2014, with a new-build of a second HAV-designed aircraft due to take place next year. Then June 2016 would see the start of a three-year programme to build and fly a third airship with an envelope volume of more than 103,000m3, capable of carrying a payload of 60,000kg.
Waiting for take-off: A second flight is planned for the prototype, kept in a Cardington hangar
The hull of this high-payload model, called Airlander 50, would be filled with helium and built from laminated fabric. Its aerodynamic design, with an elliptical cross-section allied to a cambered longitudinal shape, provides up to 40% of the vehicle’s lift. Overall, its dimensions would be 119m long, 60m wide and 35m high. The airship would have a range of 2,000 nautical miles, and a top cruising speed of 104 knots (195km/h).
HAV is not the only company to be developing this type of technology. Similar projects, which the British engineers claim are not as advanced, are going on in other countries, including Russia, Brazil, Australia and the US. Companies involved include EADS and Lockheed Martin.
But what is attractive about the idea? It is a matter of length of range, and of a large capacity for carrying cargo. The firm says it is in talks with several parties that are interested in the Airlander, including charity Oxfam, which could potentially deliver aid to inaccessible regions using an airship, as well as luxury travel firms, mining services providers – and even some academics interested in filming marine wildlife in Antarctica.
In addition, there are applications in defence and security, says Dickinson. “The military kickstarted this because it saw the idea as a game-changer in terms of persistent surveillance,” he says. It is understood that similar designs could carry out some of the missions that drones are used for.
Perhaps the most potentially rewarding sector in commercial terms is mining. In theory, the airship could be used to transport metals or minerals from regions where there are bountiful resources but inadequate transport links. Canada and Africa provide the most promising regions, and rare earth metals are a primary target because of their high value.
Stephen McGlennan, now HAV chief executive but formerly Munk’s corporate lawyer, says: “The range of the aircraft is measured in thousands of miles, but when you do the economics, the journeys that are important are those of 200 or 300 miles. In virtually all of the modelling we do in Canada and Africa, we find those are where the sweet spots are. You are looking at places with mountain ranges, swamps or rivers, where there are impassable pieces of terrain.” Metals such as cobalt could be mined in increasing volume from inaccessible regions of the Congo, for example, were there economical and effective transport.
Mining is lucrative, and “miners think like we think”, says Chris Daniels, head of partnerships and communication at HAV. “They think of investing a lot of money upfront, and then reaping the rewards over a period of time. A miner does the numbers. If the numbers stack up, this airship is the best transport technology, and it is greener.”
The Airlander could also be used to transport offshore oil and gas workers from their rigs as a potentially safer alternative to helicopters. McGlennan says HAV is in talks with firms looking at this option. “Everyone knows the disadvantages of flying to oil rigs in helicopters. Safety is a big concern,” he says. There have been calls for a public enquiry into helicopter safety in the North Sea oil and gas industry, following a series of accidents. The Airlifter 50 could carry up to 50 passengers.
There is also potential interest in transporting fruit via airship to avoid wastage, says Daniels. But other sectors might use it, too. “If it does something useful, somebody is going to buy it. There are obvious sectors, and there are probably things we’ve never thought about.”
The supply chain for the Airlander 50 will be global, but about 80% of the value could be provided by British companies, says McGlennan. Berkshire-based motorsport transmission maker Xtrac will supply gearboxes while Raytheon, which has operations in England, Scotland and Wales, is supplying avionics. “There is an arc of aerospace companies from Cambridge to Cardiff that is full of great firms,” he says.
The airship will feature four 2,350hp (1,753kW) turboshaft gas turbine engines supplied by Germany’s Thielert Aircraft Engines. Two engines will be mounted forward on the hull, and two on the stem of the hull for cruise operation. All four are configured in ducts with blown vanes, to allow vectored thrust for takeoff and landing and ground-handling operation. This configuration effectively means the airship features very short takeoff and landing capability.
The government’s support for the project is welcomed by Tory MP Dorries. She says she does not see eye-to-eye with Vince Cable on most issues, but “I am grateful for the £2.5 million he and the government have given this company”. She adds: “We slumped in terms of innovation in the past decade, but there are now lots of little companies and projects such as this. The government support means that technologies such as this are coming to the forefront, whereas they didn’t before. They didn’t have the back-up.”
The coalition has poured billions into the aerospace industry in the past year through the Aerospace Growth Partnership, and the British sector is still the second biggest in value globally after the US. The feeling among many engineers is that this recognition is long overdue.
McGlennan, a Glaswegian, says he is not a natural supporter of the government. But he adds that the domination of the Aerospace Growth Partnership and the Technology Strategy Board by “industry people” is a good thing. “They have a decent shot at picking the right technology,” he says.
Bruce Dickinson, a qualified pilot, will also be hoping he is backing the right horse. Airships have a chequered history, but he feels the technology is mature – at least compared to the days when the performance of their aerostructure was hard to predict, weather patterns were difficult to forecast, or when more than 50 people had to operate cumbersome flight controls. “Simply controlling the path of the vehicle in the air was difficult. But we have revisited this technology, made it super-efficient and made it work for the modern world. Solve the problems, and you’ve got a valid transport system.”
Meanwhile, McGlennan, residing in Britain, will not be able to vote in September’s referendum on Scottish independence. But he hopes the Airlander 50 will take off in a still-United Kingdom. “The world is increasingly dominated by big players. Scotland would still be a fine country on its own – it would just be better as part of Britain.
Lockheed Marin project gets off the ground One of the other companies developing airship designs is US defence giant Lockheed Martin, which could have a model ready for the market this year.
A spokeswoman for the company’s Skunkworks development unit in California says: “Our hybrid airship effort is active. We flew our proof-of-concept demonstrator, the P-791, in 2006. Our family includes 18-tonne, 45-tonne and 453-tonne variants. Our focus is on commercial transport.” The largest variant represents the maximum in terms of payload capacity, says the company. It adds: “Lockheed Martin is working to bring the first-generation commercial hybrid airship to the market in 2014.”
The airships could bring transport to where it is needed, enabling tactical and strategic airlift, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and long-duration surveillance. They combine large-transport capacity with improved fuel economy and reduced operating costs. “They can operate from existing infrastructure, or service remote points of need with austere infrastructure,” says Lockheed.
Airships potentially allow commercial freighters to pick up products at the point of origin and deliver them directly to distribution centres, bypassing ships, trains and trucks. Similarly, military freighters could pick up supplies at sea and deliver them directly to the target, bypassing ports and ground threats. Hybrid airships will enable special missions “not possible with conventional aircraft”, says the company.
A new generation of airships could have a range of 6,000 nautical miles, and operate faster than trucks, trains or sealifts. They have better durability than trucks and lower operating costs than conventional transport,
says Lockheed.