About five years ago, I caught wind
that Sergey Brin
was funding the construction
of a secret airship right here
at NASA Ames in Mountain View.
I saw some pictures of this early airship.
Got kind of obsessed with it.
Sergey didn't want to talk about his airship,
but over the last couple of years,
I managed to ingratiate myself
with the guy who's bringing Sergey Brin’s
airship to life.
And today, I'm going to take you guys in
to see this thing being made.
I'm Alan Weston,
and I'm the CEO of LTA,
and I'm the first person
to work on this project.
We've got this beauty behind us
Give us the basics.
This is Pathfinder One.
This is 122 meters long.
Has about 28 tons of total lift.
It's designed to cruise
at maximum speed of 60 knots.
It could probably go over 2000 nautical miles in one leg.
Our mission is to expand and complement
existing humanitarian relief
using lighter than air technology.
And at the same time,
reduce the carbon footprint of aviation.
Rather amazingly,
some of the first airships ever made,
lived right here in this hangar.
Almost 100 years ago, the Navy began
building airships in Ohio
so they could be flown to California.
The Navy saw these craft
as key to gathering intelligence
and performing reconnaissance.
It was the glory days of airships.
You’ve shown me some of these slides
just here in Silicon Valley.
There were times when the sky was, like,
filled with airships,
and they were doing amazing things.
I mean, there's one that was almost
like an aircraft carrier.
This was actually in 1932 and 33.
There was a hook on the airship and
biplanes were carried inside the airship.
They were refueled.
Then, of course, airships
had some very bad PR
and planes came along
and people lost interest in these majestic beasts.
Large airships disappeared in 1939.
So, like everything people might think of,
those are all blimps.
And the difference being a blimp
just has no rigid structure.
Right. This is a rigid airship with a skeleton.
And so the skeleton defines the shape.
And Al thinks he can bring these sexy,
hard bodied airships back,
this time filled with nice,
non-flammable helium.
So you've got this wonderful history,
and you're, like, making it all happen again.
Right, Right.
Back to the future.
Can we do the horn?
Sure.
I don't think anyone...
I've ever heard anyone use it before.
This is Carl Taussig.
He's a mechanical engineer
I've known for years
who really gets around Silicon Valley.
I asked him to give me the grand tour.
That's a lot of scaffolding.
Yeah, it's incredible.
At first glance, it appears almost
nothing has changed in a hundred years.
But really, this thing is
a mix of the super old and the super new.
So this is 1 of 12 of the electric motors
that propel the ship.
Okay.
And it's... you can see its motors
mounted on a pylon which can rotate.
So think of this airship as a giant quadcopter.
All these are thrust vectored.
They can be pointed in order to lift
the ship straight up or move laterally.
And then here, this outer material is
it's kind of leveraged from racing sailboats.
This is how it's laced on.
And this is kind of an anachronism from
the way airships were built 100 years ago.
There's 40,000 of these lacing...
each one is laced by hand.
Geeze.
The Pathfinder One skeleton is made of carbon fiber,
making it lighter and stronger
than past airships.
The ship will run on diesel to start,
but LTA hopes to switch to either solar
or some form of hydrogen power
in the future.
Overall, the airship will be much slower than a plane,
but at least the passengers will feel virtuous
about their carbon footprint.
I've never been in a gondola.
Designed to seat about ten people,
it's used commercially
for sightseeing by the Zeppelin company
on their NT airships.
And so if you're doing like a
two or three day journey
from London to New York,
you're just... you're hanging out in here.
In this space.
Admittedly, for a futuristic airship,
this is an underwhelming interior.
But this ship is just an experimental vehicle,
the first of its kind
and not for the public.
And the company has bigger things in mind
than just leisurely sky cruises.
I think you guys are most interested
in kind of disaster scenarios,
I mean, that's the heart of why
you're making this thing?
Right.
When you arrive at a disaster site,
you often show up
and the place is wrecked.
And so the port may not be working.
You then have to
get your supplies to where the disaster is.
And typically, you know, the roads are gone.
Helicopters are really expensive to operate,
they have limited range and limited capacity to lift things.
So that's where an airship can also help.
And it's the cargo, right?
I mean, they can carry
a significant amount of stuff.
Right.
We've studied airships
that can carry up to 200 tons of cargo.
Our approach is scalable
to build larger airships
that can carry even more.
At the time of writing, Lighter Than Air
is on the cusp of revealing this beauty to the world.
But many potential kinks remain.
The market for slow, weather dependent
airship travel may not be enormous
and the cargo applications
Al favors are a bit further out.
But if the sight of this white whale doesn't move you,
frankly, I'm not sure why you're watching my show.
Al promised my two kids one of the first rides.
It'll be a great ride.
Your kids, the flight test engineers.
Just keep them safe.