Background
The AEREON Corporation, established in 1959, at first concentrated on the construction of a prototype three-hull hybrid airship, the AEREON III. Completed in 1965, the prototype was lost during taxiing tests the following year, without having flown.
Following the destruction of the AEREON III, the firm sought "a new and better solution." AEREON's Monroe Drew and John Fitzpatrick employed German physicist Jürgen Bock, formerly of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany, and the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, to develop a list of parameters that would be fed into a computer at the General Electric Space Center, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in order to determine "the optimum configuration for enclosing maximum volume without too much penalty of drag." AEREON 26's deltoid configuration, "a shrewd and practical compromise between an airfoil and a sphere," was the result of these efforts.
Rubber-powered and gasoline-engined models of the configuration were flown and wind tunnel tests conducted before testing of the 26 itself began.
Read more about this topic: AEREON 26
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