Pathfinder 1, bankrolled by a Google billionaire, is an attempt to revive the airship. A century after terrifying disasters, is it a safe-enough bet?

On 24 October 2024, a brief post was shared on the social media network LinkedIn. In it Google co-founder Sergey Brin's airship company LTA Research finally announced Pathfinder 1's first if brief untethered flight at Nasa's Moffett Field in California, part of the space agency's Ames Research Center. "This morning, Pathfinder 1 reached another milestone: untethered outdoor flight. This successful test marks another important step in our journey, and we are excited to build on this achievement through our rigorous testing program."

Airships are hard to hide. Despite the secrecy, one YouTuber filmed it from the road and uploaded it to the video-sharing site.

"Pathfinder 1 is a pretty amazing vehicle," says Alan Shrimpton, editor of the Airship Journal. "It is the first fully rigid airship, certainly of that size, for a very long time, and there was a great expectation that it would fly shortly after it began its outdoor testing programme.

"But Alan Weston [founder and former CEO of LTA Research] always said the biggest fault with rigid airships was that people in the past rushed their development and they were not going to make that same mistake. They were going to check it and check it again – and they did."

The understated tone in LTA's post belies the historic achievements of Brin's company so far. This was the first flight of the first airship built by the Google cofounder's company, the first time a classic rigid airship of this size had flown since the 1930s, and the first of a new generation of airships. The last giant rigid airship Graf Zeppelin II flew for the final time on 20 August 1939, 12 days before World War Two started, and was scrapped the following year. Rigid airships have a complex metal framework that supports a huge envelope filled with enough hydrogen or helium to lift a sizeable number of passengers, or cargo such as disaster relief, for days at a time.

Hydrogen-filled airships are also symbols of the Golden Age of the airship. The era between the world wars when the promoters of the technology beguiled the public with promises of scheduled commercial passenger services between destinations like Europe and North America, and North America and the Pacific, and in some cases delivered on these promises. The Graf Zeppelin flew "the first regularly scheduled, nonstop, intercontinental airline service in the history of the world" between Germany and South America, and was far faster than ocean liners that plied the route.

But the crash of the airship Hindenburg in 1937 – which killed 36 people including one person on the ground – showed the drawbacks of the flammable gas used as buoyancy. The airship faded into obscurity; just as conventional aircraft design surged ahead.

Eighty-six years later in November 2023, Pathfinder 1 emerged for the first time from the historic Hangar Two at Moffett Field to begin its outdoor flight-testing programme. But the largest aircraft in the world stayed stubbornly tethered to the ground to the frustration of many aviation enthusiasts. Its expected first flight just didn't happen.

But thanks to the Google co-founder's deep pockets, LTA Research appears to have the freedom to wait-to-get-it-right

© BBC