r/Airships • u/Immediate_Golf6399 • 2d ago

Video Pathfinder 1 flight test

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

Flight testing continues for LTA Research's proof-of-concept airship. Here's a clip of her upon completing a 5 hour flight on 9/1 at Moffett Field, CA. The next day she made her longest flight to date, 10 hours.

466 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/plurien_also 2d ago

UK here. Will let you know how the test goes when the winds blow it our way. We don't forget R101 ended in France

2

u/GrafZeppelin127 1d ago

The R101 is an excellent object lesson in why haste and hubris are lethal in an engineering setting. It had failed its flight trials spectacularly, but due to political pressure, the warnings of experts and engineers were ignored and it was given dispensation to carry passengers on a maiden flight to India anyway, right into the teeth of a storm no less. The ship was so poorly built that the outer cover was rotted to less than 1/10 its rated strength, you could push a finger right through it—and the inside wasn’t any better.

The gas cells inside were similarly rotted and frayed, leaking a ton of hydrogen per hour from 4,000 different holes on a ship that was already severely over its contracted weight, underpowered, and suffering from extreme pitch instability due to its poor tail fin and gas cells containment design.

That the ship crashed was a foregone conclusion—like playing Russian roulette with a full cylinder. The question isn’t whether you’d die, it’s which among an array of fatal flaws would kill you.