Hybrid Airship - Background

Background

Traditional airships have low operating costs, but are limited in several ways, including low payload/volume ratios and low speeds. Additionally, ground handling of airships has historically presented great difficulty. When a purely LTA ship lands, being nearly neutrally buoyant, it is susceptible to wind buffeting. In even a slight breeze, a truck or many ground crew members are required to secure the ship to a mooring mast.

Heavier-than-air aircraft, while addressing these difficulties, require the use of power to generate lift, and airplanes also require runways, while helicopters need even more power to hover. Hybrid airship designs are intended to fill the middle ground between the low operating cost and low speeds of traditional airships and higher speed, but more expensive heavier-than-air aircraft. In addition, by combining dynamic and buoyant lift, hybrids may be able to provide otherwise unattainable air-cargo payload capacity and/or a hovering capability. Such a design is intended to be the "best of both worlds" combination: the high speed of aerodynamic craft and the lifting capacity of aerostatic aircraft. However, critics of the hybrid approach have labeled it as being the "worst of both worlds" declaring that such craft require a runway for take-off and landing, are difficult to control and protect on the ground, and have relatively poor aerodynamic performance.

Most modern airships, for instance the Zeppelin NT or Skyship 600, use some combination of vectored thrust and buoyancy. However, for these designs, almost all of the load is carried via buoyancy, and vectored thrust is used primarily for maneuvering. To date, there is no formal distinction between hybrid airships and airships with vectored thrust.