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The new age of the airship: Could blimps be the future of air travel?

Sleek, green and coming to the skies above you.

What if you could fly with a fraction of the carbon emissions of a conventional aeroplane? What if you could cruise through the clouds with almost zero noise? And, what if you could board your aircraft without first having to navigate a sprawling airport and all its associated infrastructure?

That’s the elevator pitch for a new generation of airships, the retro-futuristic, blimp-style vehicles that might just revolutionise air travel in the coming decade. Dotted around the world, companies from small start-ups to aerospace giant Lockheed Martin are building lighter-than-air, modern-day Zeppelins with a broad range of applications in mind.

One British company, Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), recently laid out plans for a series of short-haul flights that would enable city-hopping trips aboard its Airlander 10 craft. Proposed routes include Liverpool to Belfast, Oslo to Stockholm and Barcelona to Palma. And per passenger, HAV claims the carbon footprint of such a flight would be less than a tenth of the same journey in a conventional jet plane, because helium is used as a lifting gas to get the craft airborne.

"Three quarters of the carbon reduction almost comes for free," says Mike Durham, HAV’s chief technical officer. "It’s helium keeping us up so we only need fuel [from four combustion engines] to push us along. Conventional aeroplanes need to burn fuel to stay up as well."

Of course, without a jet engine, airships are considerably slower than modern planes. HAV says its proposed Liverpool-to-Belfast route would take 5 hours and 20 minutes (although a similar journey by ferry would take more than nine hours).

As the world slows down in response to COVID-19 and as we grapple with how to reduce carbon emissions from air travel and freight, airships may offer viable alternatives – and not just in passenger flights.Hybrid airships are touted for aid drops, search and rescue, eye-in-the-sky command centres and tourism. Imagine a bird's eye tour of the North Pole or Great Barrier Reef. Some believe luxury airships could even become playthings of the super-rich, decadent floating mansions that offer the same status as a luxury yacht.

The most practical application, however, lies in freight.

"I’ve long believed that hybrid airships would be best placed to disrupt global shipping given their volumetric capacity, the increasing desire for rapid delivery of goods from overseas, and the fact that their speed and operating cost would enable faster delivery than by ship with a proportionally lower increase in transportation cost," says John-Paul Clarke , professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

International shipping doesn't have to be fast, so transporting food or chemicals by airship could save significant carbon emissions compared to large freight vessels at sea. Yet for all their green credentials, some argue that helium-powered airships are not the future of green transport .

"The main source of helium production is oil and gas extraction," says Julian Hunt , a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. "If the main driver for a future airship industry is to reduce aviation CO 2 emissions, a helium-based airship industry will have to rely on a functioning oil and gas industry. It does not make sense."

Hunt has proposed using the jet stream to propel airships at far greater altitudes than something like the Airlander plans to fly.

But if helium – which is also a non-renewable resource – isn’t the answer, then it raises two alternative H-words, both with rather negative connotations: hydrogen and Hindenburg. In 1937, the most infamous airship that ever flew exploded midair and crashed in front of photographers and filmmakers, killing 36 people. Powered by (flammable) hydrogen, the crash was a PR disaster that contributed to the demise of airships as a popular mode of transport.

That was over 80 years ago, however. Most in the industry believe hydrogen's comeback is inevitable.

"Hydrogen is the obvious alternative to helium," says Clarke. "It can be produced greenly and more and more cheaply with each passing day. It has an unfortunate reputation due to past accidents [but] we have learned a lot over the years about how to handle hydrogen, especially in transportation settings, and it is now being used to propel cars, trucks, and aircraft."

So what's it like to fly in an airship? According to Durham, a trip on HAV's Airlander would be a lot smoother than modern flight.

"It’s a low-noise, low-vibration, low-turbulence cabin space where in many operations you may even be able to open a window. It’s also got floor to ceiling windows, so the ambient light is different as well. The cabin has a lot more volume per passenger."

Clarke and Hunt both doubt that airships offer a viable alternative to short-haul flights, citing issues like wind variability and logistical issues, but Durham remains optimistic.

"There will be sweet spots that work for our product and there will be spaces that won’t work. It’s probably not going to work for long-haul flights," he says.

"I think they have a place to play in society moving forward. The human race is going to have to come to terms with the fact that we cannot spend our time rushing and tearing about the place, ignoring the planet. Lighter-than-air travel has a part to play to support that drive to become greener."

Airship designs ready for takeoff

Lockheed martin.

Skunk Works is an arm of the aerospace giant whose purpose is to develop new kinds of aircraft. The department has developed a demonstrator airship that it believes is ready for commercial deployment delivering aid in disaster zones or minerals from remote mining sites. It has also developed a robot that crawls across the exterior of the blimp seeking and repairing tiny holes.

Flying Whales

This French manufacturer is developing an airship designed for freight that picks up and drops off its payload without actually landing. Using helium to hover above the ground, it will have winches that lift or lower its payload, saving energy. The vehicle is designed to carry up to 66 tons.

This Israeli start-up is hoping to join a growing airship market with three different designs. Primarily built for transporting freight, the ships have cargo bays built into the airship and, unlike a lot of current designs, would be powered by hydrogen fuel cells, supplemented by diesel.

Read more about the future of flight:

• Airbus reveals zero-carbon hydrogen plane concepts
• Concept planes that could one day take to the sky
• The world's first airport for flying taxis

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What if your aircraft could be

Lighter than air.

The Electric Airship Revolution Is Almost Here. Are We Ready?

Companies around the world, including one backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, are hoping to resurrect the airship as a green energy, cargo-hauling alternative, but a few obstacles still remain.

The first age of airships ended in flames—the next one begins with an entire world on fire.

Some changes are obvious. Replace internal combustion engines with EVs . Duh. Retire CO2-spewing power plants and invest in wind, solar, and nuclear . No brainer. But there’s a big elephant in the room—one that comes with two turboprop engines, not enough legroom, and an insatiable hunger for jet fuel.

Jet airliners are notorious for spewing carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides, and nitrogen oxides—basically all the bad oxides. Although valiant efforts to develop sustainable jet fuels or even fully electrified alternatives have produced some promising results , airplanes simply require too much energy to sustainably keep 100,000 pounds of metal aloft.

But what if your aircraft could be lighter than air?

“The First World War is what gave planes their first boost, and the Second World War pushed them to jet engines… but the new war is the war against carbon emissions,” Barry Prentice, director of the Transport Institute at the University of Manitoba and co-founder of Buoyant Aircraft Systems International (BASI), tells Popular Mechanics . “Climate change… is changing how we look at technology and also the airship itself.”

Resurrected from the graveyard of aviation, airships have become the engineering obsession of companies around the world. In California, LTA Research , backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, is preparing for test flights of its Pathfinder 1 rigid airship. The France- and Canada-based company Flying Whales, which received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding (including some from the French government), is currently testing its 650-foot-long LCA60T dirigible . And after a decade of development, Hybrid Air Vehicle in the U.K. is readying production of its Airlander 10 blimp .

Lots of people (with lots of money) say there’s a future in airships, but what does that look like exactly?

Old Name, New Tech

Airships are some of the oldest aircraft in human history. In the 18th century, they carried the Montgolfier brothers over the palace of Versailles, and nearly a century later, the U.S. military established its first ever aviation unit during the Civil War called the balloon corps .

Because of this long lineage, airships sometimes feel like technology frozen in the past. But comparing today’s electric airships to the grand Zeppelins of the interwar years is kind of like saying a Douglas DC-3 is just like an Airbus A320. Sure, they’re both planes, but that’s basically where the similarities end.

“The big old airships had cow intestines pasted on linen sheets to create the gas bags,” Prentice says. “Today no one is going to fly in an airship that hasn’t flown in a computer first. The tools have gotten a lot better and so have the materials—you’re not going to use cow intestines anymore.” Instead, you’re going to use advanced materials to maximize every ounce of lift generated by an airship’s helium (or hydrogen) gas bags.

Arguably the Rolls-Royce of this new generation of airships is LTA Research’s Pathfinder 1. Founded in 2015 and backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the company has been tight-lipped about its airship efforts, but in May 2023, Bloomberg finally got a peek under the hood . Dotting the Pathfinder 1’s spec sheet are words like “Kevlar,” “carbon fiber,” “ripstop nylon,” and “hydrogen fuel cells”—all technologies completely unimaginable to airship engineers a century ago.

In other words, this ain’t your granddaddy’s airship.

➥ Anatomy of a Modern Airship

“Just one example of the novel engineering found in Pathfinder 1 is a tool using lidar , which measures helium volume in gas cells in real time. It’s an airship tool that never existed before and an LTA invention that increases the safety of our next-generation airships,” LTA Research CEO Alan Weston told Popular Mechanics in an email. “LTA intends to increase the capabilities of Pathfinder airships, with the possibility of solar or hydrogen fuel cells to power our electric propulsion system.”

LTA Research sees the role of its airship as more of a cargo hauler and less of a people mover. While airships can deliver tonnage more sustainably than air cargo (which is often performed by the oldest, and therefore least efficient, planes), airships will likely never beat airplanes in terms of pure speed.

“The jet engine is a fabulous invention and I certainly don’t want to give them up,” Prentice says, “But there’s not justification for a cargo jet because freight doesn’t complain… I think people will look back and, if anything, they’re going to pick out and say ‘what the hell were they thinking,’ it’s going to be cargo jets.”

But even in a supporting cargo role, airships can take a huge bite out of global carbon emissions while also reaching parts of the world that airplanes and helicopters simply can’t reach or supply efficiently.

With the urgency of climate change adding fuel to the fire, Prentice thinks the single largest market for airships is to ferry goods across oceans . But one question remains: can they even make the journey?

Picturing the Solar-Powered Dream

Christoph Pflaum is not an airship engineer. Instead, he lives in a world of simulations. An expert in leveraging numerical computations to answer complex problems, Pflaum is a mathematician at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg who figures out the nitty-gritty realities of how things work, including optical simulations of thin-film solar cells.

“I became interested in how we use solar cells… but there was one area where we have difficulty using only renewable energy and that’s transport of goods over the Atlantic,” Pflaum told Popular Mechanics .“Then I saw the airship from Zeppelin NT… and I thought ‘okay, this is the place where we need to put thin-film solar cells.’”

Using his expertise in simulation analysis, Pflaum and his team calculated all the nuances of weather, solar availability, and materials to figure out the optimal route solar airships should take across the Atlantic and if they can hang tough with their gas-guzzling competition. The results of his work were published in the International Journal of Sustainable Energy this past March.

And the answer? Hell yeah they can.

“To find the optimal route is really a hard problem from a computer science point of view because there are so many directions you can go,” Pflaum says. So his team designed digital “towns” and “streets” across the Atlantic by creating a grid system for their theoretical solar airship to travel through between London and New York . The team then created “highways” across the ocean using wind data and solar availability to further influence the airship’s journey.

Pflaum’s simulations created routes that snaked into the North Atlantic in the summer and plummeted toward the equator in the winter—all in search of the optimum amount of solar energy during transit. The final results showed that solar airships, designed with a rigid construction to withstand winds, could drastically reduce the emissions of cargo transport to as little as one percent compared to a conventional airliner.

“Solar airships are undeniably environmentally friendly since they are outfitted with exceptionally light and immensely efficient thin-film solar cells that recharge continuously throughout the flight,” Plaum said in a press release back in March . “Consequently, no combustion-related discharges are produced during the airship’s operation.”

Pflaum’s vision of this solar-powered airship future is still a ways off. Both LTA Research and Hybrid Air Vehicles, for example, are initially using diesel to power their electric engines but plan to transition to renewables as the technology develops.

But for that future to ever reach fruition, airships need to first overcome their absolute biggest challenge: public perception.

A Bad Case of “Hindenburg Syndrome”

The word “airship” likely conjures up grainy black-and-white footage of military blimps soaring in the air—or perilously crashing into the ground. The fiery destruction of the German-made Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg on May 6, 1937 essentially closed the curtain on the first generation of airships, and it’s a bad bit of PR that’s been particularly difficult to shake.

“We call it ‘Hindenburg Syndrome,’” Gennadiy Verba, president of the Israel-based Atlas LTA airship company, told Popular Mechanics . Verba previously worked on Google’s Project Loon , which sought to bring internet to remote areas using stratospheric balloons. “Nobody can overcome this psychological problem to use hydrogen again, but we have several methods to make hydrogen much safer.”

Airships like Pathfinder 1 and LCA60T use helium as a lifting gas, but helium is extremely hard to come by and is essential for various scientific experiments and medical equipment like MRI machines . Not only is hydrogen much easier to source , it’s lighter and also a more efficient lifting gas. But the U.S. Congress banned the use of hydrogen in military aircraft in 1922 , and that law remains on the books. Experts like Prentice think the century-old ban needs a rethink.

“In 1930, there was no way to detect [hydrogen]—it was a tasteless, odorless, invisible gas,” Prentice says, noting that today you can buy handheld detectors on Amazon that are capable of sensing hydrogen in parts per million. “Hydrogen will not burn at anything less than four parts per hundred, so long before you get to any risk of a fire with hydrogen, you can ventilate the area… Hydrogen is much harder to burn than people think.”

There are signs that things are changing. In 2022, the European Aviation Safety Agency updated regulations allowing for any lifting gas, stipulating that “adequate measures must be taken in design and operation to ensure the safety of the occupants and people on the ground in all envisaged ground and flight conditions including emergency conditions.”

If the FAA follows suit, then a new age of airships could really take off.

➥ Meet the New Generation of Airships

Pathfinder 1

LTA Research — Backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Pathfinder 1 stretches some 400 feet and features a suite of next-gen technologies including lidar, Tedlar (an advanced polymer material), carbon fiber, and electric propulsion. The home of this gargantuan airship is Moffett Field in California, originally built for the U.S. Navy’s LTA (lighter-than-air) program in the 1930s. The company’s next airship, Pathfinder 3, will scale up to 600 feet long and will be built in Akron, Ohio, where Goodyear constructed U.S. Navy rigid airships a century ago.

Zeppelin NT

Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik — Zeppelin NT—which stands for “new technology” in German—is a 246-foot-long airship with a semi-rigid structure, meaning it contains a skeleton but also relies on internal pressure to maintain its shape. Goodyear blimps, for example, are actually Zeppelin NT airships in disguise. Unlike the other airships in this list, Zeppelin NTs have been dotting the skies for decades, and by leveraging new tech like aluminum and carbon-fiber construction, the Zeppelin NT has kept the airship flame alive in recent years.

Flying Whales — The largest airship on this list belongs to the French and Canadian aeronautics startup Flying Whales. At over 650 feet long, the LCA60T uses 1-megawatt Honeywell generators—the most powerful generators the company makes—to power its hybrid electric airship with sustainable aviation fuel. Some 14 gas cells filled with helium provide the airship’s lift, and the company plans for its first test flights in 2025.

Airlander 10

Hybrid Air Vehicles — Until the arrival of Pathfinder 1 in recent years, Hybrid Air Vehicles’ Airlander 10 has been the vanguard for this new era of airships. The only true non-rigid airship on this list, the Airlander 10 first took flight in 2012 and earned the nickname “the flying bum” due to its overall shape. The airship currently uses four diesel combustion engines, but still delivers a 75 percent reduction in carbon emissions compared to a typical airliner; the company also plans to create zero-emission ships in the future. In February 2023, the company announced that the Airlander 10 was finally ready for commercial production.

H2 Clipper Inc. — A relative newcomer to the airship game, the H2 Clipper is the only airship on this list that plans to use hydrogen, instead of the more scarce helium, as a lifting gas. That’s because the H2 Clipper will be a green hydrogen delivery service when its first prototype is built in 2025. The company, H2 Clipper Inc., is designing its airship to run exclusively on clean energy and will have a cargo area equivalent to 35 shipping containers.

Flying High or Run Aground?

Although using hydrogen would help, today’s airships need something to become the iPhone of the industry—a shining example of success that shows the world the technology’s promise. While there are a few lighter-than-air contenders, all eyes are on LTA Research’s Pathfinder 1, which will begin test flights this year.

“We’re wishing big success to anyone who will be the first,” Verba says. “Not if they succeed, but when they succeed, it’ll be a very good day for all of us.”

A few obstacles still stand in the way of that “very good day” becoming a reality—both technological and political. Proving hydrogen’s reliability and continuing to develop green technology such as thin-film solar cells as well as lithium-ion , battery-powered propulsion are big ones, but also perfecting the art of handling these massive airships on the ground is another herculean engineering effort. Where a heavy airplane simply sits idle at an airport terminal, airships are subject to changes in wind speed, direction, and pressure, and require more sophisticated ground-handling techniques—and that’s not even considering the fact that their hulking bodies require lots of space for building and maintaining them.

To address these issues, Prentice’s company, Buoyant Aircraft Systems International, has developed a turntable-style landing system that allows airships to move with the wind and also land in areas with little infrastructure—a perfect application for ferrying supplies to remote regions or disaster zones. Similarly, Pflaum’s research has designed a hexagonal parking construction to anchor a large number of airships in a relatively small area.

For decades, the age of airships has been just around the corner, but things are finally changing. Billionaire investors are getting behind the technology, and with the arrival of President Joe Biden’s climate bill, the government appears ready to put some serious money behind world-changing, green energy solutions. Whether airships are what the U.S. government has in mind remains to be seen.

“It’s the lack of public investment that’s really hurt the industry, but I think that is now changing,” Prentice says, “Because as Churchill * once said of [America] during the Second World War, the U.S. will eventually do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted all other options.”

And when it comes to decarbonizing aviation, there aren’t many options left.

* Editor’s note: This quote is frequently attributed to Churchill , though there is no evidence of him saying it.

Images and video courtesy of LTA Research.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough. 

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Inside of world's largest airship revealed in stunning images

New details about one of the world's largest aircraft, Airlander 10, reveal a spacious cabin with floor-to-ceiling windows (and plenty of legroom) inside the blimp-like exterior. And the futuristic aircraft will be loads better for the environment.

British company Hybrid Air Vehicles recently released concept images of its forthcoming airship, which is 299 feet (91 meters) long and 112 feet (34 m) wide, with the capacity to hold about 100 people. But rather than being crammed in like sardines, passengers will be treated to floor-to-ceiling windows and the kind of space and legroom commercial airlines currently reserve for business-class customers.

The firm thinks the vehicle, which is expected to enter service by 2025, will soon challenge conventional jets on a number of popular short-haul routes, thanks to its improved comfort and 90% lower emissions.

Related: Photos: Building the world's largest airship (Airlander 10)

"The number-one benefit is reducing your carbon footprint on a journey by a factor of 10," Mike Durham, Hybrid Air Vehicles' chief technical officer, told Live Science. "But also, while you're going to be in the air a little bit longer than you would if you were on an airplane, the quality of the journey will be so much better."

The Airlander is so much greener than a passenger plane, Durham said, primarily because it relies on a giant balloon of helium to get it into the air. In contrast, airplanes need to generate considerable forward thrust with their engines before their wings can provide the lift to get them airborne.

Once it's in the air, the airship relies on four propellers on each corner of the aircraft to push it along. In the first generation, two of these propellers will be powered by kerosene-burning engines, but the other two will be driven by electric motors, further reducing the vehicle's carbon emissions . By 2030, the company expects to provide a fully electric version of the Airlander.

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Rather than conventional batteries, liquid hydrogen fuel cells will power the Airlander's electric motors. Liquid hydrogen can store much more energy for a given weight than batteries, Durham said. The hydrogen will be kept in cryogenically cooled tanks in the hull and pumped to the fuel cells, where it will react with oxygen to generate electricity.

The airship design does come with some trade-offs, though. For one, its top speed will be about 80 mph (130 km/h), and it will generally average closer to 60 mph (100 km/h). That's closer to a car or train than a short-haul jet, which cruises at more than 450 mph (720 km/h).

For some intercity journeys of around 100 to 250 miles (160 to 400 kilometers), Durham said traveling from one city center to another is only slightly slower, thanks to the airship's ability to land in much smaller spaces or even on bodies of water.

For example, the company estimates that traveling between Seattle and Vancouver would take just over 4 hours by Airlander compared with slightly more than 3 hours by plane. Crucially, it would produce only 10 lbs. (4.6 kilograms) of carbon dioxide per passenger over that journey, compared with 117 lbs. (53 kg) for a conventional plane.

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But considering the journey only takes 2.5 hours by car, passengers are more likely to be wooed by the aircraft's creature comforts than it's speed. On that front, Durham is confident the Airlander will be a much more pleasant experience than the alternatives. The cabin is such a small part of the vehicle's overall cross section that it has little effect on drag, which means the company has been able to make the airship much more spacious than a streamlined jet ever could be.

The floor-to-ceiling windows, combined with a cruising altitude below 10,000 feet (3,040 meters), means passengers will get spectacular views. And because the gigantic, helium-filled hull separates the engines from the cabin, there's little vibration and almost no noise. The aircraft is also largely unaffected by turbulence.

"Once you're up into the climb, you're pretty much running in a near-silent flight environment," Durham said.

Original article on Live Science.

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Why the Airship May Be the Future of Air Travel

Just one short-haul flight a year produces 10% of our individual carbon emissions. 1 We could go back to trains for our traveling, which produce about half the CO2 of a plane, 2 but you don’t always have the time. What if we could get the speed of air travel with the lower emissions of ground-travel? Enter the airship.

When it comes to our individual carbon footprint, air travel is the emission-spewing Dumbo in the room. Flying less is the most impactful action you can take to bring down your CO2 quota. 3 Although aviation currently accounts for only 2% of the global carbon footprint, its impact is taking off pretty fast. 4 With the GHG emissions of the hydrocarbons-guzzling aircraft engines expected to increase more than 4 times by 2045, flying could reach 25% of the global carbon budget by 2050. 5 , 6 So, what do we do? A UK company, Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) 7 , is launching a short-range airship service that will water down the carbon emissions of flight by 90%. 8 By 2025, you may be able to hop onboard their Airlander 10 and get dropped off a couple of hundred miles away. Because of its shape, the Airlander 10 has been nicknamed “the flying buttocks” 9 … thankfully the only gas inside this bad boy is helium … but airships could do more than just make us feel less guilty about a return flight on the weekend. One big benefit is that airships don’t require special infrastructure since flying boats don’t need a runaway for taking off and landing. This could translate into smaller sites located closer to cities, saving people from long commutes to airports, but the airship flexibility would be extremely beneficial for delivering food and humanitarian aid to isolated areas. Sounds uplifting … but before delving into the tech feasibility, let’s jump onboard our DeLorean balloon to fly back in time to where airships came from.

The airships’ turbulent history

Lighter-than-air (LTA) 10 vehicles fly through the sky like hot-air balloons, using LTA gases such as helium or hydrogen. While something like a hot-air balloon goes with the wind, airships have engines to ensure maneuverability. These vehicles can be rigid, semi-rigid or non-rigid. The last category, which includes blimps, rely on the pressure of the gas filling the balloon to keep their shape, while the other two types of machines are supported by an internal framework. But when did airships take off? Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was the pioneer who led the way to rigid airships as we know it. He designed the first rigid motorized dirigible at the end of the 19th century, giving his name to the ancestor of modern airships.

Zeppelins became very popular for their travel comfort. It was like having a cruise in the sky. Much more relaxing than jolting up and down in a cramped plane. But a storm was brewing on the horizon, like the one Zeppelin LZ 14 flew into in 1913. 11 The dirigible lost control and dove into the North Sea before splitting in two, killing 14 people. As bad as that was, airships fate was sealed in 1937, when the Hindenburg went down like a lead balloon. With its 804-foot length, the German zeppelin was the largest dirigible ever constructed at that time. Because of the US export restrictions imposed on the Nazi regime, German designers used hydrogen instead of helium as the filling gas. But given the flammability of hydrogen, that wasn’t the best choice. At the end of one of its transatlantic cruises, the Hindenburg caught fire while landing in New Jersey and killed 36 people. 12 But safety wasn’t the only reason why airships floated away as a from of travel. In addition to being in the wrong place at the wrong time on the Hindenburg, you would’ve also spent a fortune on the trip. While it would shave 2 days off your Atlantic crossing, the trip would have cost you 5.5 times more than a third class ticket on an ocean liner. In today’s money, that would translate to around $8,200. 13

A Comeback to thrust forward

So, how come airships are rising back into the sky again after that bumpy ride? Some scientists are suggesting hydrogen-filled balloons as a more sustainable alternative for transporting the gas compared to maritime cargo shipping. 14 Researchers said the airships would require less energy and time to deliver the fuel than oceangoing cargo ships. How would that be possible? Their idea is to fly in the less turbulent stratosphere and make the most out of the jet stream, which is an air current that circles the globe from west to east reaching up to 140 mph. 15

You might be asking yourself the same question I did: isn’t this just going to be history repeating itself? The study considered using unmanned airships, which removes any risk for a human crew. Also, they argued some compelling points on the hydrogen controversy. While helium is safer, it’s more difficult to source and its availability is much more limited than hydrogen. Which makes its price higher. 16 Another perk of using hydrogen would be generating power and water through on-board fuel cells. But the fire risk is not the only challenge. At the stratosphere altitudes, the air pressure is lower. This means ultra-flexible materials need to be used for designing the airship gasbag. The trouble is these materials are not quite ready yet. 17

In the meantime, someone is already working on this setup. The Buoyant Aircraft Systems International (BASI) 18 is looking into hydrogen-filled airships to bring produce, construction equipment, and modular housing to the many off-the-grid communities in Canada. Designed to suit the Arctic climate conditions, BASI’s airships will be initially hybrid and then converted to a hydrogen fuel cell-power system.

While using helium rather than hydrogen, Lockheed Martin already offers an airship cargo service. 19 Their LMH-1 hybrid model stays aloft using 80% helium buoyancy topped by an aerodynamic lift. By minimizing the use of fossil fuels-driven direct lift, Lockheed Martin hybrid models consume less than 10% of a helicopter’s fuel. Also, their vehicles can be parked on any type of terrain thanks to an air cushion landing system (ACLS). Put simply, the ACLS is a massive inflatable doughnut underneath the blimp that makes airship touchdown a piece of cake. It also doubles as a really great hemorrhoid pillow. After 20 years of development, their versatile hovercrafts are now accomplishing a number of cargo missions. From delivering heavy equipment to hard-to-access areas hemmed in by icy roads in Alaska, to picking up workers and rare earth metals off isolated mines in Quebec 20 , to serving as a flying clinic for getting aid and tons of supplies into — and injured or refugees out of — accidents and natural disaster locations.

Varialift is working on a different hybrid model, combining solar-powered and conventional engines. 21 , 22 According to the UK company’s CEO, their floating ship would use only 8% of the fuel of a conventional jet over a transatlantic flight between the UK and the US. For the same payload, the firm also claims their machine and operational costs would be up to 90% less than a standard aircraft.

Yet, airships are not just about shipping goods. Since 2001, the German company Zeppelin NT has risen from the Hindenburg ashes. 23 Their gondola bags have a semi-rigid design, relying both on helium pressure and on a solid frame to support itself. Carrying up to 12 passengers, gasoline-powered Zeppelin NT airships have been used both for aerial sight-seeing and traveling purposes.

And going back to the eco-friendly Airlander 10 — the ‘flying buttocks’ — that I mentioned earlier, last May, HAV announced a number of routes that will be explored by their green flying machines in 2025. But you might be able to ride on one of HAV’s Airlander 10 even earlier. If you fancy an “experiential journey” to the North Pole, you can book your slot with OceanSky Cruises as soon as 2023. 24 But it will cost you a bit of money. Remember the Hindenburg golden ticket? Peanuts in comparison to this. The price tag for a two-person cabin on the Airlander 10 is $79,000. 25 As for lower-cost travel, HAV is currently trying to strike a deal with some other airlines. HAV’s CEO said the company aims at covering 47% of regional flights with a distance up to 230 miles. HAV touts the airship market will reach a value of $50bn over the next 20 years. However, by 2026, when they’ll start selling their vehicles, the estimated value might be only around $165 million. 26

With a capacity of 100 passengers, the company claims their hybrid-electric dirigibles will take as long as conventional flights yet have a tenth of their carbon footprint. 27 That applies whether traveling from Liverpool to Belfast or from Seattle to Vancouver. At least, based on company calculations. Although flying at a top speed of only 130 mph, the airship doesn’t need a runway and could take off from and land in pretty much any flat open area, including water. This city center-to-city center traveling mode makes these vehicles flexible and independent from airports…or ports… if you like? That means you’d save time on commuting. But how safe are HAV’s airships? Fire risk is extinguished by filling the balloon with helium. Yet, one of their prototype tests crashed while landing in 2016. 28 However, HAV machines will be certified by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which means it will have to conform to the same safety standards as other aircraft.

So, how green is the Airlander 10 technology? Combining the helium buoyant effect, an aerodynamic lift and a helicopter-like thrust, HAV’s hybrid design is more efficient than comparable aircrafts. Leveraging the helium lift, the vehicle reduces the consumption of the fossil fuel-burning engine and could carry a higher payload. Also, the UK Aerospace Research and Technology Programme awarded the company with a £1M grant to develop a prototype fully powered by a 500 kW electric motor. And they aren’t stopping there because the Airlander 10 could feature battery and solar cell technology. 29

What’s puncturing the airship’s balloon?

More cargo, less carbon emissions, no infrastructure required. Sounds like airships are on the rise, right? But is there anything that could hold them down? or on the water? Cost might be one thing. One factor that could inflate the airships operational cost is the gasbag filling. And I’m not talking about myself. Helium is a non-renewable source and we may experience a shortage in the future. 30 While hydrogen could work as an alternative for unmanned cargo missions, it would probably be too risky to use with passengers on board. According to Julian Hunt, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), using a cargo airship would currently cost up to 50 times more than standard ships. He also said we should invest up to $100 billion over the next 20 years in technological improvements to make airshipping compete with conventional shipping. 31 Sir David King, the former UK Chief scientist and climate change specialist is more optimistic than Hunt, saying that the cost of a Varialift airship would be comparable to a jumbo jet. 32 Also, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), airships would be more cost-effective than jetliners for freight transport. 33 That’s because of the lower fuel consumed during take off and landing as well as the higher payload carried by the flying boats. 34 The UK Advanced Technologies Group Ltd. (ATG) estimated the freight cost per ton kilometer for three hybrid cargo airships of different capacity. At the lowest payload, the airship would cost slightly more than a standard aircraft. However, for the medium and top capacities, ATG model simulations predicted airships to compete with trucking and maritime shipping respectively. 35 But airships may not be only competitive for cargo deliveries. A 1980 study suggested that a 420-ton airship would be a cost-effective way of ferrying both passengers and their cars from the U.S. mainland to Hawaii. A more recent and comprehensive study compared the economic feasibility of airships to that of airplanes and helicopters. 36 Researchers found airships to be the most profitable transport solution when considering long distances (up to 5,000 km) and a high carrying capacity.

The flight path to sustainable aviation

Hybrid and fully electric airships may be a greener alternative for fast travel over short distances. Plus, their greater flexibility can play a key role for delivering cargo to hard-to-reach regions and for performing rescue operations. Data on cost effectiveness seems to be lacking and controversial. Also, airships’ technology may need further investments to catch up with competitors. But eco-friendly flying boats could be a key part of a zero-carbon aviation strategy along with electrical aircrafts and more sustainable fuels. It’s also got the cool steampunk, retro-futurist vibe to it.

• “How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of by Mike … – Alibris.” ↩︎
• “Plane, Train or Automobile: Which Has the Biggest Footprint?” ↩︎
• “To fly or not to fly? The environmental cost of air travel | Human … – DW.” 24 Jan. 2020 ↩︎
• “‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace ….” 20 Sept. 2019 ↩︎
• “A40-WP/54 – ICAO.” 7 May. 2019 ↩︎
• “Analysis: Aviation could consume a quarter of 1.5C carbon budget ….” 8 Aug. 2016 ↩︎
• “Hybrid Air Vehicles.” ↩︎
• “Airships for city hops could cut flying’s CO2 emissions by 90% | Air ….” 26 May. 2021 ↩︎
• “Will Airships Have A Place In The Future Of Aviation? – Simple Flying.” 9 Apr. 2021 ↩︎
• “Lighter-Than-Air – Centennial of Flight.” ↩︎
• “Zeppelin Disasters – List of Airship Accidents – Zeppelin History.” ↩︎
• “Hindenburg | German airship | Britannica.” ↩︎
• “Transatlantic transportation costs in 1937 – Outrun Change.” 2 Oct. 2017 ↩︎
• “Using the jet stream for sustainable airship and … – ScienceDirect.com.” ↩︎
• “jet stream | National Geographic Society.” ↩︎
• “Zeppelins stopped flying after the Hindenburg disaster … – NBC News.” 19 Aug. 2019 ↩︎
• “Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. | by ….” ↩︎
• “Buoyant Aircraft Systems International.” ↩︎
• “Hybrid Airship | Lockheed Martin.” ↩︎
• “Canadian rare earths mine to transport ore using airships – MINING ….” 22 Nov. 2016 ↩︎
• “Varialift – unique heavy lift and transport solution – Varialift.” ↩︎
• “A solar-powered airship is being built to transport cargo more greenly.” 2 Oct. 2019 ↩︎
• “Home | Zeppelin-NT am Bodensee.” ↩︎
• “Reservations – OceanSky Cruises.” ↩︎
• “Boarding soon: the five-star airship bound for the … – Financial Times.” 11 Oct. 2019 ↩︎
• “Airship Market 2021 is estimated to clock a modest CAGR of 7.4 ….” 4 Apr. 2021 ↩︎
• “Airlander 10 will provide a new option for regional travel – HAV.” ↩︎
• “World’s biggest aircraft crashes in Bedfordshire | Air … – The Guardian.” 24 Aug. 2016 ↩︎
• “HAV – Hybrid Air Vehicles.” ↩︎
• “How A Helium Shortage Could Put The Brakes On The Tech Boom.” 13 May. 2021 ↩︎
• “Could Airships Rise Again? – IEEE Spectrum.” 23 Sept. 2019 ↩︎
• “Emissions-free air freight? How about a solar-powered helium airship.” 19 Jan. 2016 ↩︎
• “Blimps could replace aircraft in freight transport, say … – The Guardian.” 30 Jun. 2010 ↩︎
• “Cargo Airships – Canadian Transport Research Forum.” ↩︎
• “The Return of the Airship – University of Manitoba.” ↩︎
• “Economic Feasibility of Using Airships in Various … – TEM Journal.” 28 Aug. 2020 ↩︎

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AIR & SPACE MAGAZINE

Airships rise again.

Zero emissions and a million pounds of lift renew the appeal of these century-old giants.

Tom Grundy, the CEO of Hybrid Air Vehicles, started his career working on fighters and drones for BAE Systems, and he was a project engineering manager for Airbus during the development of the A380. But these days his focus is on a type of aircraft that can do things the fixed-wing fliers he has spent his life admiring can’t—even though the basic technology keeping them aloft is substantially older. Welcome to the second age of the airship.

Grundy’s company is promoting its striking, pillow-like AirLander 10, initially designed for military surveillance, as a pleasant, low-emission alternative means of regional air travel. In May the company announced plans to begin service for up to 100 passengers per flight on a handful of short-haul routes (Liverpool to Belfast, Oslo to Stockholm, Seattle to Vancouver, among others) in 2025. A Scandinavian company is in talks about using the AirLander to give tours of the North Pole.

The chief market for the airships of the 21st century, however, will not be passenger service but freight hauling. The new airships can carry heavier loads farther and cheaper than helicopters can, with lower emissions than fixed-wing aircraft—potentially zero emissions, if the ships are powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

Historically, there have been two major types of airship. Rigid airships, as the name implies, are built around a hard skeleton. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin of Germany flew the first rigid airships, and on his account, they are sometimes called Zeppelins. The other type of airship is non-rigid. Non-rigid airships have no skeleton. They consist of an envelope inflated with a lifting gas such as helium, from which is suspended a gondola for crew, passengers, and cargo. The familiar Goodyear blimps have been mostly non-rigid airships.

The engineers at Hybrid Air Vehicles looked at the history of rigid and non-rigid airships and came down solidly on the non-rigid side—with a twist. Rather than the cigar or American football shapes of past airships and blimps, the AirLander looks more like a pillow. A radically different design, it’s a lifting body—and heavier than air. It relies on both aerostatic lift from helium and aerodynamic lift to fly, making it a hybrid airship. “About 40 percent of our lift is aerodynamic,” Grundy says. “When we turn our engines off and we slow down, we’re heavier than air. We come down and land just like airplanes do.”

The appealing energy efficiency of airships comes from their ability to float in the air as boats do on water—so it seems strange to purposefully erode that lighter-than-air quality. But there is another, problematic side to aerostatic buoyancy. “If you are taking 50 tons of cargo to a remote part of the world,” Grundy says, “and you want to put that 50 tons down in [that same spot], you now have 50 tons of buoyancy you have to deal with.” Like a pool float held underwater, it’s going to surge upward once you let off the pressure. Airships of yore would manage by venting lifting gas (not something you want to do with limited and expensive helium), taking on ballast, and elaborate rope and mooring procedures. That’s a nonstarter if you want to make money taking big things to places with little infrastructure, Grundy says, but he believes the AirLander is the answer.

When the AirLander had its first flight in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 2012, it was intended as a U.S. Army surveillance craft. The Army canceled that program the following year, and HAV brought the ship across the Atlantic to Cardington, about 60 miles north of London, for a 2016 series of flights that would test its viability for civilian use. In November 2017, the unoccupied AirLander broke free from its mooring mast and deflated. Grundy says the lessons of this incident resulted in improvements to the production model, which remains on schedule. “Our base business plan sees us delivering 12 aircraft per year” beginning as soon as 2025, he says.

Gentle Giant

The Graf Zeppelin was 776 feet long. Even non-rigid airships could be enormous, according to Wichita State University professor of aerospace engineering Brandon Buerge. He cites the U.S. Navy’s N-Class blimps of the 1950s, tasked with anti-submarine and early-warning missions. They could be as large as 400 feet long and 120 feet tall, “bigger than anything we’ve been flying with any regularity,” Buerge says.

Early on, the German Zeppelins racked up an impressive record for safety and capability. The Graf Zeppe lin flew more than a million miles beginning in 1928, circumnavigated the globe, and lifted more than 43 tons. “How long did it take before fixed-wing aircraft caught up?” Buerge asks. (About 30 years. The C-133 Cargomaster—first heavy lifter in the U.S. Air Force—entered service in 1958 and could carry more than 55 tons, but it had four jet fuel-guzzling turboprops.)

Still the rigid giants eventually proved fragile. The German airships used flammable hydrogen for lift, which led to the Hindenburg disaster. And the U.S. Navy’s rigid airships displayed an alarming tendency to break up in bad weather. The Germans scrapped the Graf Zeppelin at the start of World War II, while the American Navy stuck with non-rigid blimps, using them to escort shipping convoys. The blimps proved much more resilient, with one N-Class blimp, the Snowbir d, crossing the Atlantic twice and beating the Graf Zeppelin ’s record for endurance by flying for more than 264 hours through all kinds of weather.

“Those are the ships they would plow through ice storms,” Buerge says. “It’s hard to kill a non-rigid airship.”

As you approach Moffett Federal Air Field in Sunnyvale, California, Hangars Two and Three are easily visible from U.S. 101, their parabolic apexes and massive door frames hulking over the relatively flat desert landscape. Seeing them from a distance does not prepare you for the feeling of their immensity as you stand between them. The giant hangars channel the early summer breeze like a box canyon. In the 1930s, they housed U.S. Navy airships like the Macon , a behemoth 785 feet long and 150 feet high. More recent tenants include the California Air National Guard and NASA.

The current occupant of Hangar Two, LTA Research, is using it to house airships again. My tour guides on this bright June morning are LTA CEO Alan Weston and LTA chief of operations James McCormick, who acts as a sort of ground wire for Weston’s seemingly boundless energy. Inside the hangar, a chorus of birdsong echoes down from the rafters far overhead.

Before us stands the naked, cigar-shaped skeleton of the airship they have dubbed Pathfinder 1, a 400-foot-long vessel that could easily swallow the fuselage of the Boeing 737 that brought me to California. It’s more organic sculpture than airframe, a latticework of black carbon-fiber tubes rising like the bones of an ancient leviathan awaiting its taxidermied skin—in this case, high-tech sailcloth.

“Isn’t that cool?” Weston asks.

His excitement is catching, but he is in some ways a strange ambassador for the return of a technology that for most of the last 70 years has been more prevalent in science fiction than in the real world, those floating billboards hovering over football stadiums notwithstanding. “Most of my career has been in spacecraft and rockets,” Weston says. He designed kill vehicles for President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program and spent 23 years doing research and development for the U.S. Air Force. Then he served as director of programs at NASA Ames Research Center until his retirement in August 2013.

Retirement did not last long. Late that same year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin asked Weston to create a company to build an airship that could carry cargo on his humanitarian relief missions.

Weston’s enthusiasm for his new project grew as he studied the history of airships. The Hindenburg disaster of 1937 might have been the death of airships in the popular imagination, but there have been fresh design efforts in every decade since. (John McPhee’s book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed documents a push by a strange coalition of former Navy airship men and Presbyterian ministers to develop a hybrid airplane/rigid airship in the 1970s. Their ship flew, but no one wanted it. Their dreams of at once revolutionizing air freight and missionary work went unfulfilled.)

His history lessons complete, Weston concluded that the challenges that plagued the older rigid airships could be overcome. They would use non-flammable helium as a lifting gas, for starters. And the flaws that brought down Navy airships like Akron and Macon —a faulty altimeter and structural damage, respectively—could be corrected with modern avionics and strong, light materials. Each of the 13 rib-like carbon fiber “mainframes” that make up the length of Pathfinder 1 weighs just 600 pounds, but together, they support a vessel with 28 tons of lift. A broken carbon tube can be replaced in-flight.

“The beautiful thing about a rigid airship is you can almost do anything you want,” Weston says. “The problem with all these blimps is you don’t have any hard points.”

Pathfinder 1 will support a gondola, diesel generators, solar panels, batteries, electric motors, and vectored thrust propellers, as well as a small gangway running the length of the envelope for accessing the interior frame. While LTA will not disclose the dimensions of its in-development Pathfinder 3, it will be substantially more capacious than Pathfinder 1, with room enough in the crew gangway for passengers and for hydrogen—for fuel cells, rather than for lift.

Beyond Pathfinder 3, LTA aims to build a massive rigid airship that will dwarf the Zeppelins of the past. All LTA will say on the record about its next-gen giant is that it will be too big to be built in Sunnyvale—LTA is in the process of moving into the former Goodyear Airdock hangar in Akron, Ohio. “The AirDock goes on top of this,” Weston says, gesturing up toward Hangar Two’s distant ceiling. “This is 160 feet tall. The AirDock is 200 feet tall.”

That ship isn’t scheduled to fly until 2023 at the earliest, and Weston and his team have plenty to keep them busy in the meantime, like fully outfitting Pathfinder 1 and flying it to its new home in Akron—following a series of flight tests around the San Francisco Bay area.

Though Weston hopes to begin these short-distance “camping trips” this year, they are currently unscheduled. “History is full of airship projects that crashed or something bad happened because people were in a rush,” Weston says. “We’re going to be careful.”

Igor Pasternak shares Tom Grundy’s view that buoyancy control is key to building a commercially practical airship. The founder of Worldwide Aeros Corporation in Montebello, California, Pasternak built tethered balloons called aerostats as a teenager growing up in Ukraine. Airships, he says, are “what I have been doing all my life.”

He thinks, though, that relying on aerodynamic lift and vectored thrust will limit an airship’s operational capacity. Requiring a runway, even a short one, is another limitation. The vehicle under construction at Worldwide Aeros, the Aeroscraft Dragon Dream, is a non-cylindrical rigid airship. It takes a different approach than Hybrid’s AirLander, using a low-pressure system to compress and release helium to modulate the lift of the airship—compress the helium, shrink its volume, and you reduce aerostatic lift. Prove a heavy-lifting airship can perform true vertical take-offs and landings without ground infrastructure, Pasternak says, and “we are talking about a huge shift, dramatic shift” in the transport business.

That proof is yet to come. The design review for the Dragon Dream operational demonstrator was completed only last summer, and he won’t say when its next test flight will be. As with LTA, he’s pushing the humanitarian applications of airships, having entered into a partnership with the World Food Program that he hopes will eventually see his invention delivering food to famine-struck regions.

The emphasis on charity might help to cover up some observers’ skepticism. “Hope springs eternal” is what aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia says when I ask him if the new airship ventures will change the market. “Frankly, it doesn’t scale,” he explains. “Air travel is all about scale, getting 300 people into a 777. You just can’t do that with these things.”

He can’t readily think of a cargo someone would need to send faster—and at a higher price—than by ship, but slower than by jet. And exotic cargo flown to remote locales is often a one-way trip. “Air cargo is all about equipment utilization, with UPS and FedEx being the best examples of that,” he says. “They have these elaborately choreographed route networks that are all about efficient use of equipment and not having too many one-way trips.”

LTA, Weston admits, is in a privileged position. With a nonprofit humanitarian mission and the backing of some of the world’s wealthiest people, Weston has been freed to think about the challenges of lighter-than-air flight one step at a time. He wants to build airships with no carbon footprint, and so hopes to utilize hydrogen fuel cells in Pathfinder 3 and beyond. Combine oxygen from the air and on-board hydrogen in a fuel cell and you can generate power as well as water, both for consumption and for ballast. “You’re generating the stuff you’re going to drink and use to wash your hands and take a shower with as you are flying around,” Weston says. “We actually gain weight with the water. One kilogram of hydrogen generates nine kilograms of water, so we have plenty of buoyancy control.”

He muses that the success of airships in humanitarian relief could spur the market more generally. Perhaps low-cost, hydrogen-powered cargo airships could spur other industries, such as shipping, to transition to hydrogen power. “I view this as the project of a lifetime,” Weston says. “There’s more opportunity, in my head, to do something useful than anything I’ve ever seen.”

To Buerge the aerospace engineer, helicopters seem like a reasonable analogy to the new airships. “I don’t ride on a helicopter with any regularity, and you probably don’t either,” he says. But even though the civilian helicopter market isn’t near the size of the commercial aircraft industry, “I wouldn’t call helicopters an unsuccessful technology, or a technology that doesn’t exist in a serious way.”

And there’s one element of airships that hasn’t been tested seriously in recent memory: the experience of flying in one.

Buerge once flew in two blimps, a Polar 400 and a Skyship 600, on one of those warm summer days that generate puffy clouds and bumpy rides in fixed-wing aircraft. The dynamics were more like a boat than an airplane, the bow coming up gradually, the ship gliding over a thermal, and then down again. Smooth. “The response isn’t anything that someone that is used to flying in heavier-than-air vehicles would interpret as turbulence,” he says. “It was as close to a magic carpet as I have ever experienced.”

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Jon Kelvey | | READ MORE

Jon Kelvey is a writer and freelance journalist focusing on science, health and aerospace.

• The Future of Air Travel: Toward a better in-flight experience

A snapshot from Air Travel Design Guide, illustrating artifacts, spaces, and systems that impact the passenger experience in travel. Illustrations by Isa He

Anyone remember air travel? In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe and international flights were hurriedly cancelled, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Laboratory for Design Technologies (LDT) pivoted its three-year focus project, The Future of Air Travel , to respond to new industry conditions in a rapidly changing world. With the broad goal of better understanding how design technologies can improve the way we live, the project aims to reimagine air travel for the future, recapturing some of its early promise (and even glamour) by assessing and addressing various pressure points resulting from the pandemic as well as more long-term challenges.

The two participating research labs—the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL) , led by Allen Sayegh , associate professor in practice of architectural technology, and the Geometry Lab, led by Andrew Witt , associate professor in practice of architecture—“look at air travel from an experiential and a systemic perspective.” As part of their research, the labs consulted with representatives from Boeing, Clark Construction, Perkins & Will, gmp, and the Massachusetts Port Authority, all members of the GSD’s Industry Advisors Group .

So far, the project has resulted in two research books: An Atlas of Urban Air Mobility and On Flying: The Toolkit of Tactics that Guide Passenger Perception (and its accompanying website www.airtraveldesign.guide ).  On Flying , by Sayegh, REAL Research Associate Humbi Song , and Lecturer in Architecture Zach Seibold , seeks “to facilitate a rethinking of how to design objects, spaces, and systems by putting the human experience at the forefront”—and in so doing “prepare and design for improved passenger experiences in a post-COVID world.” The book’s accessible glossary covers topics including the design implications of the middle armrest (“What if armrests were shareable without physical contact?”); whether the check-in process could be improved by biometric scanners; the effect of customs declarations on passengers; how air travel is predicated on “an absence of discomfort” instead of maximizing comfort; and the metaphysical aspects of jet lag.

The project “examines and provides insight into the complex interplay of human experience, public and private systems, technological innovation, and the disruptive shock events that sometimes define the air-travel industry”. Consider, for instance, the security requirements of air travel in a post-COVID world—how can the flow of passengers through the departure/arrival process be streamlined while incorporating safety measures such social distancing?

On Flying acknowledges that it’s hard to quantify many of the designed elements—ranging from artifacts to spaces and systems—that affect our experience of air travel. So the toolkit methodically catalogs and identifies these various factors before speculating on alternative scenarios for design and passenger interaction. A year into the project, Phase 2 will more overtly examine the context of COVID-19, considering it alongside other catastrophic events, such as 9/11, in order to better understand and plan for their impact on the industry as a whole and on passenger behavior.

Meanwhile, An Atlas of Urban Air Mobility , by Witt and Lecturer in Architecture Hyojin Kwon , is “a collection of the dimensional and spatial parameters that establish relationships between aerial transport and the city,” and it aims to establish a “kit of parts” for the aerial city of the future. Phase 1 considered the idea of new super-conglomerates of cities, dependent on inter-connectivity of air routes—specifically looking at the unique qualities of Florida as an air travel hub. The atlas investigates flightpath planning and noise pollution and other spatial constraints of air travel within urban environments. One possible solution it raises is the concept of “clustered networks,” where electrical aerial vehicles could be used in an interconnected pattern of local urban conurbations, reflecting a hierarchy of passenger flight, depending on scale and distance traveled.

Phase 2 will move into software and atlas development, expanding the atlas as well as their simulation and planning software. One intriguing aspect will be a critical history of past visions of future air travel: a chance to look back in order to look forward with fresh eyes. By studying our shared dream of air travel, the hope is to rediscover and reboot abandoned visions that may yet prove to inspire new innovations.

It’s a reminder that, not so long ago, international flight excited and inspired us—before the realities of delayed flights, lost luggage, rude customs officials, and poorly planned infrastructure stole our dreams. And that’s before we ever stepped onto the plane itself. According to the Air Travel Design Guide , the social contract of air travel has now become so skewed from the original glamorous proposition that today, “the passenger can feel as if they are at the mercy of nature, airport security personnel, or the airline cabin crew. They are directed where to go, how to move, and even when to go to the bathroom on the plane.”

Surely it can—and should—be better than this?

“We may not arrive more on time,” the team concludes, “but thanks to the introduction of better design practice—we might enjoy the experience better.”

Learn more about the Laboratory for Design Technologies and its Industry Advisors Group (IAG) partners at research.gsd.harvard.edu/ldt/

• Responsive Environments
• Transportation
• Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab’s “PULSUS” featured in Domus
• How can design improve disease modeling and outbreak response? A simulation tool by GSD alum Michael de St. Aubin offers answers
• From 3D-printed face shields to strategies for a just recovery: How the Harvard Graduate School of Design community is contributing to COVID-19 response efforts
• Rethinking the “Room” through the Pandemic: Isolation, Openness, and Confrontation

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Airships for city hops could cut flying’s CO2 emissions by 90%

Bedford-based blimp maker unveils short-haul routes such as Liverpool-Belfast that it hopes to serve by 2025

For those fancying a trip from Liverpool to Belfast or Barcelona to the Balearic Islands but concerned about the carbon footprint of aeroplane travel, a small Bedford-based company is promising a surprising solution: commercial airships.

Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), which has developed a new environmentally friendly airship 84 years after the Hindenburg disaster, on Wednesday named a string of routes it hoped to serve from 2025.

The routes for the 100-passenger Airlander 10 airship include Barcelona to Palma de Mallorca in four and a half hours. The company said the journey by airship would take roughly the same time as aeroplane travel once getting to and from the airport was taken into account, but would generate a much smaller carbon footprint. HAV said the CO2 footprint per passenger on its airship would be about 4.5kg, compared with about 53kg via jet plane.

Other routes planned include Liverpool to Belfast, which would take five hours and 20 minutes; Oslo to Stockholm, in six and a half hours; and Seattle to Vancouver in just over four hours.

HAV, which has in the past attracted funding from Peter Hambro, a founder of Russian gold-miner Petropavlovsk, and Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson , said its aircraft was “ideally suited to inter-city mobility applications like Liverpool to Belfast and Seattle to Vancouver, which Airlander can service with a tiny fraction of the emissions of current air options”.

Tom Grundy, HAV’s chief executive, who compares the Airlander to a “fast ferry”, said: “This isn’t a luxury product it’s a practical solution to challenges posed by the climate crisis.”

He said that 47% of regional aeroplane flights connect cities that are less than 230 miles (370km) apart, and emit a huge about of carbon dioxide doing so.

“We’ve got aircraft designed to travel very long distances going very short distances, when there is actually a better solution,” Grundy said. “How much longer will we expect to have the luxury of travelling these short distances with such a big carbon footprint?”

Grundy said the hybrid-electric Airlander 10 could make the same connections with 10% of the carbon footprint from 2025, and with even smaller emissions in the future when the airships were expected to be all-electric powered.

“It’s an early and quick win for the climate,” he said. “Especially when you use this to get over an obstacle like water or hills.”

HAV said it was in discussions with a number of airlines to operate the routes, and expected to announce partnerships and airline customers in the next few months. The company has already signed a deal to deliver an airship to luxury Swedish travel firm OceanSky Cruises, which has said it intends to use the craft to offer “experiential travel” over the North Pole with Arctic explorer Robert Swan.

Grundy said the company was in the final stages of settling on a location for its airship production line, which he hoped would be in the UK. He said the company would hire about 500 people directly involved in building the craft, and it would support a further 1,500 jobs in the supply chain. The company currently employs about 70 people, mostly in design, at its offices in Bedford. He said the company aimed to produce about 12 airships a year from 2025.

The craft was originally designed as a surveillance vehicle for intelligence missions in Afghanistan. HAV claims independent estimates put the value of the airship market at $50bn over the next 20 years. It aims to sell 265 of its Airlander craft over that period.

The £25m Airlander 10 prototype undertook six test flights, some of which ended badly. It crashed in 2016 on its second test flight, after a successful 30-minute maiden trip. HAV tweeted at the time: “Airlander sustained damage on landing during today’s flight. No damage was sustained mid-air or as a result of a telegraph pole as reported.”

The aircraft, which can take off and land from almost any flat surface, reached heights of 7,000ft (2,100m) and speeds of up to 50 knots (57mph) during its final tests. The company has had UK government backing and grants from the European Union.

• Air transport
• Greenhouse gas emissions
• Climate crisis

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• PLANET POSSIBLE

Greener air travel will depend on these emerging technologies

Electric engines, alternative fuels, and better navigation could reduce emissions—and mitigate the impacts of a global return to the skies.

The sky over Cologne, Germany, is crisscrossed by condensation trails from airplanes. Because the pollutants in these so-called “contrails” contribute to climate change, researchers are studying ways to eliminate them—one of several ongoing efforts to make flying more sustainable.

Here’s a word you may have overlooked in 2020: flygskam, a Swedish term for the feeling of being ashamed to fly. In a year that saw a 66 percent decrease in flights, compared to 2019, you might think that flygskam has flown the coop.

But with a recent uptick in air traffic—and the anticipation of travel’s rebound thanks to COVID-19 vaccines —flygskam is taking flight again. The term originated in 2017 as part of a campaign to change how we fly, from the frequency of our flights to the technology of our aircraft. The goal: to mitigate the carbon dioxide emissions that experts think may triple by 2050 .

Aviation accounts for a relatively small portion of global emissions—2.5 percent. While bigger culprits, such as electricity and agriculture, account for greater emissions, they also benefit billions of people. Airline emissions, in contrast, come mostly from rich travelers in the richest countries: business class passengers produce six times as much carbon as those in economy class, and one percent of the most frequent fliers are responsible for half of all aviation’s carbon emissions.

Will the pandemic -caused travel slowdown be enough to shake up aviation and produce lasting benefits for the environment? In 2020, the drop in air traffic likely reduced carbon emissions by several hundred million tons . Some are calling to make those reductions permanent by eliminating contrails, using new fuels, improving navigation, and more. With climate change reaching a point of no return as early as 2035 , action will need to happen quickly.

( Wondering what you can do? Here are 12 ways to travel sustainably in the new year .)

Of course, flying less would have an even bigger impact, and there are calls for travelers to fly only once a year , give up flying for a year , and attend conferences virtually . Still, air travel is here to stay, so the cleaner the better. Here are some of the ways flying could clean up its act in the years to come.

Curtailing the contrails

Aviation emits more than carbon dioxide; it also produces water vapor, aerosols, and nitrogen oxides. These pollutants absorb more incoming energy than what is radiated back to space, causing Earth’s atmosphere to warm. This means aviation’s impact on warming might be an even bigger share than its carbon footprint.

The turbine engines of commercial aircraft, like this one at a maintenance facility in Singapore, rely on kerosene-based propellants. Companies are experimenting with biofuels and synthetic fuels that can reduce carbon dioxide emmissions.

An Airbus A300-600R makes its final approach before landing. The company plans to have a hydrogen-fueled plane in service by 2035.

The worst of the non-carbon impacts are from contrails, short for condensation trails: the line-shaped clouds that form from a plane’s engine exhaust. A small number of flights are responsible for most contrails. This is because contrails form only in narrow atmospheric bands where the weather is cold and humid enough.

Avoiding those zones could make a big difference in limiting aviation’s non-carbon pollution. One research paper modeling Japan’s airspace found that modifying a small number of flight routes to skip these areas could reduce contrails’ effects on the climate by 59 percent. The change would be as little as 2,000 feet above or below these regions. While flying a plane higher or lower can reduce its efficiency and require more jet fuel, the paper found that limiting contrails would still offset any additional carbon emissions.

“There is a growing realization that the impact of contrails is a really significant component of aviation’s climate impact,” says Marc Stettler, one of the paper’s authors and a lecturer on transport and the environment at Imperial College London .

The spots where contrails can form change from day to day, so airlines need accurate, multi-day weather forecasts to avoid them. In the future, pilots could report contrails, much like they now do with turbulence, so other planes could adjust their flight paths.

The EU’s aviation authority, EUROCONTROL, starting preparing last year to conduct trials on a contrail avoidance project . Stettler and his colleagues plan to continue research on how to go about implementing changes that could reduce contrails.

“This is the faster way that aviation can reduce its climate impact,” he says.

Related: Stunning views from an airplane window

Harnessing alternative fuels

Commercial airplanes rely on kerosene-based propellant, but companies are experimenting with turning biomasses, such as vegetable oil and even used diapers , into jet fuels. Some research suggests these biofuels could cut carbon pollution from airplanes by upwards of 60 percent . But all biofuels are not created equal.

Those that could be processed into food are unsustainable because of the planet’s growing population, which needs crops for calories. Used cooking oil and pulp leftover from agriculture or logging are expensive and not produced at a scale large enough to make a meaningful difference. But this doesn’t mean that other sustainable aviation fuels won’t be developed.

( How clean is the air on planes? Cleaner than you may think .)

“You hear that aviation is a hard sector to decarbonize,” says Andrew Murphy, the aviation director at Transport and Environment , a European nongovernmental organization. “That is only half the story. The other half is we haven’t tried.”

More-promising areas include e-fuels, or “synthetic fuels,” which don’t require engines to be reengineered. To make e-fuels, electricity—hopefully renewable—is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is then combined with carbon dioxide to make jet fuel. KLM recently conducted its first flight powered by synthetic fuel.

Another effort entails pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and using it as an ingredient in fuel. Although this technology is still in early stages, that doesn’t mean it has to be far off.

“The pandemic has shown us new technology can be sped up if we want it to,” Murphy says.

Going electric or hybrid

Cars aren’t the only conveyance undergoing electric innovation: one count found a hundred electric-powered aircraft projects in the works.

The first electric flights will be in small planes with a range limited to a few hundred miles. Norway , a country with numerous islands and mountainous terrain calling for puddle jumpers, has promised that all of its short-haul flights will be on electric aircraft by 2040 . Underserved areas could one day get new routes flown exclusively by electric planes.

“A huge fleet of these could radically change local transportation systems,” says Ron Steenblik, former director of the International Institute for Sustainable Development ’s Global Subsidies Initiative.

An airplane descends as the sun rises on Mexico City. Artificial intelligence is being used in efforts to improve flight navigation and lessen delays that cause planes to sit on the tarmac or circle the airport.

Going farther or flying bigger planes with electrification isn’t on the near-term horizon. But some companies are exploring a hybrid of electricity and hydrogen, which could extend ranges. Boeing and others are also looking at hydrogen as a means of propulsion even without electrification. Airbus recently revealed three different hydrogen planes with plans to have one or something like it in service by 2035.

“We don’t want to just make it technically feasible,” says Glenn Llewellyn, vice president of Airbus’s Zero-Emission Aircraft project. “We want to make it economically viable.”

The Hindenburg disaster in 1937 ended the first hydrogen era. The aviation industry tried and dropped a hydrogen effort again in 2010 after finding it too expensive. But Llewellyn points out that hydrogen has been improved by other industries, such as automobile and space, proving its safety, innovating on its uses, and bringing down its costs.

“The ecosystem is evolving in a much different way than 10 years ago,” Llewellyn says. “We have a better starting point.”

Giving navigation an upgrade

Airlines have used computers to help optimize routing and planning for decades, but they’re now putting artificial intelligence (AI) to work in finding new ways to reduce jet fuel needs.

Air France, Norwegian, and Malaysia Airlines are already using technology called Sky Breathe that relies on big data and AI to analyze billions of records from flights in an effort to find ways to save fuel. The company behind Sky Breathe says it has saved its customers more than $150 million in 2019 and reduced CO2 emissions by 590,000 tons.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is midway through a multiyear upgrade called NextGen , which will be a series of interconnected systems to improve how air traffic control sees, navigates, and communicates. The FAA says the technology will make it possible to schedule tighter landings and takeoffs and decrease delays that leave planes sitting on the tarmac or circling the airport.

“AI is really good at looking at patterns,” says Ashish Kapoor, an AI researcher at Microsoft who works on aviation projects. “We have years of experience of flying planes, so we have a lot of data out there.”

There will be more data as planes get kitted out in sensors, which will produce additional insights into improvements. All that data means that the next stage of aviation could look different. Algorithms could develop new plane designs and come up with flight plans, taking into account speed, comfort, and emissions.

“We don’t have to evolve like aviation has done the last hundred years,” Kapoor says.

But for this to happen, more than technology has to evolve; countries will need to change legislation, and airlines will need to fund expensive research. It will take incentives to encourage the aviation industry to become sustainable. Janice Lao-Noche, an environmental scientist and development economist, says it’s going to take a lot of flygskam and maybe the pain of climate change disrupting more flights for all the innovations to take off.

“I don’t think it’s futile,” Lao-Noche says. “[But] this is going to be, no pun intended, a bumpy ride for the aviation industry.”

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• SUSTAINABLE TOURISM

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The futuristic airship that will fly to the Med by 2028

A new fleet of airships will hit the skies by 2028, with UK-based Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) revealing plans for a major new manufacturing facility in South Yorkshire.

The production centre in Doncaster is where the Airlander 10, described by HAV as the world’s “most efficient large aircraft”, will be developed (subject to planning permission). HAV will have the capability to produce up to 24 of the aircraft per year.

Ed Miliband, the MP for Doncaster North, said: “This is absolutely fantastic news. This new production site will create over 1,200 much-needed highly-skilled jobs… as well as bring green air travel a step closer.”

Despite appearances, the Airlander 10 is not a traditional airship but rather a “hybrid aircraft” reliant on buoyant lift from helium, aerodynamic lift from its shape, and vectoring engine power for take-off and landing. 

The Airlander 10 will have the capacity to carry 100 passengers (an average Boeing 737-800 carries 189) or 10 tonnes of payload, and the value of its order book currently stands in excess of £1 billion. The Spanish regional carrier Air Nostrum will be the first airline to put it into service, with a scheduled launch date of 2028 – two years later than originally planned.

When The Telegraph visited HAV’s Bedfordshire headquarters in 2023 , the chief executive Tom Grundy said: “We’re working with Air Nostrum to create a network of city-to-city connections, much faster than a car, with 10 per cent of the carbon footprint of a flight, and affordable to the customer.”

Air Nostrum recently doubled its order to 20 ships, in a bid to expand its network from Spain into the Mediterranean and Malta . Potential routes include Malta to Gozo and Malta to Sicily . Other links to Italy and to Tunisia are in discussion. The Airlander 10 will have a top speed of around 100mph, closer to a car or train than a plane, meaning it is restricted in terms of how far it can travel without stopping. But reduced security protocols should speed up the boarding process. 

HAV has also been in talks with the Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Loganair to discuss developing A to B connections between Scottish islands. Possible destinations that could benefit from Airlander 10 services (both for passengers and freight) include Kirkwall, Papa Westray, Stornoway, Barra, Inverness, Sumburgh and Scapa Bay; viability surveys have been conducted in each of these locations

HAV has also had discussions with luxury tour operators to discuss the potential for safaris in the sky, or Northern Lights viewing experiences. One such company is Grands Espaces, an eco-tourism company which intends to use the Airlander for trips to the Arctic. For 25 years, the firm has operated polar exploration tours on small boats, and now plans to take passengers to the skies.

Christian Kempf, the founder of Grands Espaces, said: “We have worked for four years with HAV to prepare for this project and partnership. The signing of this reservation agreement is a significant step forward. We find in HAV the pioneering and innovative spirit that resonates with us, and we are confident that we will achieve great things together.”

While things are in motion now, the Airlander project got off to a rocky start. In 2016, the first prototype Airlander nosedived at low speed during a test flight from Cardington Airfield in Bedfordshire, damaging part of the flight deck. This, and the fact that some said it resembled a “flying bum”, made national news, while the subsequent successful test flights did not attract as much attention.

In 2017, after a successful test flight, the Airlander broke free from its mooring mast, triggering a safety system which ripped open and deflated the hull . As a result of the two accidents, HAV introduced new improvements to the design, including an air cushion landing system which allows the aircraft to land on any reasonably flat surface via six inflatable studs. 

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What the Future of Air Travel Looks Like

By Jessica Puckett

After a year like 2020, it's a safe bet to say that air travel will never be the same again. In an industry that was impacted at every level , countless changes have already occurred in order for airlines to adapt and survive. 

There's also renewed hope that the outbreak could soon wind down: Federal officials have approved a vaccine, and as of Monday, the first dose was administered in the U.S., kicking off a months-long campaign to inoculate the majority of the population. U.S. airlines, too, have already begun the complicated process of distributing the vaccines throughout the country. Even so, the ripples of this crisis will still be felt by both fliers and air carriers for years to come.

Here's a look at what the future of air travel holds—next year and beyond. 

1. Long-haul flights will see new innovations

From virus-sniffing dogs in airports to new apps that process travelers' COVID-19 information and contact-tracing from airlines, the air travel industry is getting creative in order to restart long-haul flights. Delta, for one, is set to restart flights to Europe with a new test regimen, while new apps will make vaccination status and test results easier for border officials to read.

Read more: How Airlines Are Trying to Get Passengers Back on Long-Haul Flights

2. Business travel will get a reboot

One of the most important parts of airlines' recoveries will be winning back business travelers. But this valuable sector of passengers won't settle for the same old premium cabin. Before they get back onto planes, business fliers want to see major adjustments like seats that are more spacious and private, fare classes with added perks, and lenient loyalty program policies—to name a few. 

Read more: Business Travelers Want to See Major Changes From Airlines

3. Vaccines are already making a difference 

A vaccine is on the horizon, and travelers are already feeling more optimistic about flying next year: Flight search site Skyscanner reported that U.S. bookings for economy round-trip flights jumped up 9 percent on the heels of the first positive vaccine news. Airline CEOs, including those at Qantas Airways and Delta, have already hinted that they will soon require their passengers to be inoculated before flying.

Read more: 5 Early Indicators of the COVID-19 Vaccine's Impact on Air Travel

4. New planes will change the airline experience

As post-pandemic recovery starts to take shape, experts say that the established trend of airlines eschewing larger double-decker planes, like the Boeing 747 and Airbus A380, will accelerate. Instead, carriers are opting for more nimble and efficient jets—and even investing in some futuristic designs like a “blended wing” aircraft. Smaller planes won't mean less comfort: Expect to see wider seats, larger windows that are able to dim, and more spacious overhead bins.

Read more: These New Planes Could Change the Way You Travel

5. Family travelers will determine airlines' newest destinations

Among the few reliable air passengers this year? Diaspora populations visiting relatives. What started as demand for specially coordinated repatriation flights for those stranded abroad amid the unfurling COVID-19 crisis became the inspiration for lucrative new international routes. Now, carriers around the globe are shaping new route launches around this demographic: places like New Delhi, Accra, Brisbane, Bangalore, and Lagos are just a few of the destinations airlines have added to their maps so far.

Read more: Airlines Are Picking Routes Based on Family Travel Patterns

6. Booking will remain flexible

Passengers have been afforded more flexibility during the crisis—and they will be loathe to give it up down the line. Fortunately, U.S. airlines seem to have already recognized this fact and have gone to work nixing inconvenient change and cancellation fees. Flying standby on the same day and putting frequent flier miles back into loyalty accounts are becoming free benefits, too. But the jury is still out on whether seat selection or baggage fees will see the chopping block.

Read more: U.S. Airlines Get Rid of Change Fees on International Flights

7. Medical care will be available at the airport

While COVID-19 testing in airports is becoming more and more ubiquitous, experts believe that the trend of medical clinics at the airport will outlast the virus. "For international travel in the future when you need to have your vaccinations and take meds if you're going on safari in Africa , [fliers will] be able to come to the airport and have that as part of your routine," says Doug Satzman, CEO of airport spa chain XpresSpa, which pivoted to offering COVID-19 screenings and antibody tests over the summer. "It's really a completely missing category in airports. We think we are at the forefront of creating a whole new industry of travel health and wellness."

Read more: From Manicures to COVID-19 Tests: How an Airport Spa Brand Pivoted During the Pandemic

More Inspiration from   Condé Nast Traveler : 21 Best Places to Go in 2021 The 50 Most Beautiful College Campuses in America Strange Facts About the U.S. 50 Things to Do in Europe At Least Once in a Lifetime The Most Beautiful Places in the World The Best Travel Movies of All Time

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The future of air travel

In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast , Simon London speaks with McKinsey senior partner Alex Dichter and partner Robin Riedel about the economics of the airline industry.

Podcast transcript

Simon London: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the McKinsey Podcast , with me, Simon London. In this first episode of 2020, we are going to be talking about the present, and future, of air travel. On the one hand, these are exciting times for aviation. The airline industry is enjoying an all-too-rare period of healthy profits, and there is very real potential in new modes of air travel, ranging from unmanned air taxis to next-generation supersonic planes.

And yet there is increasing awareness, among passengers and policy makers, that flying is a carbon-intensive mode of transportation. The concept of flygskam , roughly translated from the Swedish as “flight shame,” is a topic of conversation in the media and in boardrooms alike. To discuss all this and more, I caught up with a couple of commercial pilots turned McKinsey partners. Alex Dichter is American, now based in London; Robin Riedel is German, now based in San Francisco. They both work extensively with airlines and, like many of us, fly extensively for work.

Alex and Robin, thank you for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Robin Riedel: Glad to be here.

Alex Dichter: Great to be here.

Simon London: Let’s start with a little bit of industry economics. This industry is famous—has been famous over the years—for destroying value for investors. But the last few years have been better. Alex, just tell us what’s changed?

Alex Dichter: Sure. We are indeed about to finish the fifth year of consecutive profitability in the airline industry, depending on how you measure it. The industry’s made a small economic profit in each of the last five years. Certainly, no matter how you measure it, it’s been the most profitable five-year period in 80 years of industry history.

Some of that, to be clear, is good luck. We’ve had relatively robust GDP growth across the world, and certainly in the US, over that period. Fuel prices have been lower than average. But I do think that there are some things that the airline industry has figured out that are working better. Chief among them would be what the industry refers to as ancillary revenues.

To illustrate the point, in a typical year over the last five years, the industry as a whole has made an economic profit of, let’s say, $35 billion. In any of those same years, the global sales of ancillary revenue—[for] seat assignments, bag fees, credit-card fees—has been north of $50 billion. In other words, you could say that all of the industry profit is coming from ancillaries. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but it is a big structural change and it’s really helping the industry.

Simon London: It’s interesting. It’s like the biggest innovation in the airline industry over the last ten years or so actually has been revenue management, or pricing innovation, as opposed to fancy new aircraft.

Alex Dichter: I don’t want to discount the impact of fancy new aircraft. Certainly, as a pilot, those are very important to me. But, yes, it’s a big structural change and, by the way, it’s one that the airline industry didn’t invent. It used to be that we all paid for our checking accounts. Today, the checking account tends to be free and we pay a little bit extra for physical checks, a little bit extra for this, a little bit extra for that. It’s true in telecoms. It’s true in many other industries. What the industry is doing is responding to human behavior.

People are less responsive to changes in these fees than they are to changes in the price of the ticket. When the price of the ticket goes up by a dollar or two, airlines see an immediate effect in their demand. When we change the seat-assignment fee from $6 to $7 or $7 to $8, people may buy fewer seat assignments but they don’t buy fewer tickets. From an industry-structure standpoint, that’s probably a healthier way of building revenue rather than simply bundling everything into the ticket price.

Robin Riedel: I think what Alex said is absolutely right, and then I would add that, operationally, we’ve seen massive progress. They’re using aircraft a lot more than they have in the past and spreading the cost of those aircraft. At the same [time], crews are much more productive than they have been in the past. [For] all kinds of different cost items, we’ve found ways, over the last decade or so, to significantly reduce [them].

Simon London: This is where I’m going to put my traveler hat on. Is there a sense then, Robin, that this little profitable spell for the industry has been somewhat … passengers are paying for it? It feels like I do have to pay for a lot of things I never used to have to pay for. Plus, I have crowded airports, crowded planes. I think the traveler experience doesn’t feel like a great one at the moment.

Robin Riedel: It’s an interesting observation. I do think if you look at the data, it would tell a bit of a different story, a more nuanced story. I think there’s lots of positives that are better today than they were before. I think, on the one hand, you have more choice.

You say things are more crowded. You may pay for more things, but it’s actually your choice to do so. If you want the fantastic experience, you can pay for that and actually get it. You can get lie-flat seats, which 20 years ago you couldn’t. You can get great airport lounges. You can get fast track. You can even get private terminals in certain places.

All of that is available. Now, overall, costs have come down. If you could look at the real cost of air travel over the years, this is one of the only industries in the world where prices continuously go down and down and down. Today, access to air travel is a multiple of what we had even ten or 20 years ago, simply because airlines have figured out how to lower costs over time, which provides access to people.

Now, on top of that, beyond the choice and beyond some of the innovation we’re seeing, there’s a couple of simple things that have just gotten better. One is on-time performance. We’re so much better today in understanding weather patterns, understanding equipment, having much more reliable equipment. While it might sometimes feel like you’re stuck in the airport longer than in the past, the facts would actually show a different story.

Alex Dichter: Robin pointed out the benefits if you’re interested in a premium experience. But, quite frankly, even in economy class, the vast majority of the global airline fleet has inflight entertainment, often with hundreds of movies and TV shows to choose from. There’s Wi-Fi on board, sometimes for a fee, sometimes not. There are extra-legroom seats that you can pay for, at reasonable prices that a lot of people choose to pay for and can afford.

I think a lot of people who refer to the golden age of air travel don’t remember what flying was like in the ’60s and ’70s. I do. I did a lot of it. Fights were long, deadly boring. There was smoking on airplanes, which a lot of people don’t like. The connections were very difficult. You always had to leave the terminal. Lots of waiting in lines. You couldn’t do anything digitally. It wasn’t quite the experience that people remember it to be. I think the one thing that is clearly more difficult today is that planes are full.

The average load factor—the percentage of seats that had people in them—in the 1970s was around 60 percent, which meant that you were almost certainly, mathematically, going to get an empty seat next to you. Today, as anyone knows, getting an empty seat next to you on a typical flight is a real rarity.

Simon London: Yeah, and airports are more crowded as well, though, aren’t they? There is a fact, isn’t there, around the number of airports, globally, which are operating at or beyond capacity—and it’s high, right?

Robin Riedel: They’re more crowded. Now, the way it really manifests itself is security. If you go back to the ’60s or ’70s, there was no security, and so it was a much more open space. Today, once you’re through security, the airport experience is generally pretty good. You have restaurants. You have retail shopping. You have lots of seating space. You have light terminals with lots of window space. Security tends to be the number-one pain point for passengers going through the experience.

Simon London: Yes, and I guess we cannot blame that on the airlines. That’s not something the airlines chose to put in place.

Alex Dichter: But you’re quite right about the crowding point. If you go to multiple airline terminals, particularly in hub markets today, during peak hours you’ll find that it can be difficult to move around. In an industry that grows at, depending on the market, 3 to 6 percent per year, it’s very clear that much of that infrastructure needs to be expanded and/or replaced and needs to be expanded or replaced quite quickly.

Simon London: Yeah. Just go back to legroom, which is always a topic of much debate.

Alex Dichter: Yep.

Simon London: It feels to me like legroom is probably less than it used to be. Again, am I just looking at the past through rose-tinted spectacles?

Alex Dichter: Here are the facts. Let’s go back to the ’70s. I think in the ’70s, the average pitch—this is a term that the industry uses for the number of inches or centimeters between one point on a seat and the exact same point on the seat behind it or in front of it—was about 34 inches. Today, if we looked at most network carriers, traditional airlines, it’s probably in the neighborhood of 31 inches. So that’s three inches fewer, which sounds like a lot. However, the seats are slimmer. A typical seat today is at least two inches slimmer than it was in the 1970s, so the amount of space available for your legs is not dramatically different.

Simon London: So we might have lost an inch over a few decades.

Alex Dichter: We might have lost an inch. I think we certainly lost some recline. I think fuller airplanes mean that we’re a little less socially comfortable reclining our seats, and that’s certainly had an impact. Let’s be clear: this [legroom] is also one of those things that people say they want, and yet, to the industry’s chagrin, there doesn’t seem to be an enormous amount of evidence that people are willing to pay for it or shift their preferences because of it.

Simon London: So as consumers, we do not vote with our feet or our knees.

Alex Dichter: Unfortunately, that is true. I think the happy equilibrium we’re coming to is [that] many airlines are offering extra-legroom seats. There are different names for these. There’s, of course, premium economy, which is sold as a separate class. In many cases, for anywhere from $20 to $100, you can buy an extra-legroom seat, which has quite a bit of additional legroom. So those who care can buy, and those who care less don’t.

Simon London: Yeah. So the golden age of air travel [was] maybe not quite as true as we’d like to remember. Let’s go back to this little golden period we’ve [now] got of industry economics, though. Will it continue?

Alex Dichter: The dynamics that have always led to unprofitability in this industry are fundamentally still there. This is still an industry that orders lots of airplanes when it’s doing well. Those airplanes show up two to three years later, typically all at the same time. And that drives quite a bit of cyclicality.

Simon London: The cyclicality of capacity planning and the fact that every airline seems to order in unison, and then you get excess capacity, is just a fundamental problem.

Alex Dichter: Sure. Fundamental problem. The fact [is] that capacity is perishable—meaning when a seat leaves the gate, it’s worth nothing. The marginal cost to put one more passenger on the airplane is very low, and that leads to a very strong incentive, and a rational one, to price below full cost when times are tough. In an industry where prices are relatively transparent, others respond, and you end up in a bit of a spiral.

Simon London: Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Dichter: I don’t think any of that has fundamentally changed.

Robin Riedel: I would maybe add that there are a few new storm clouds on the horizon here for the industry. One of the bigger ones has got to be the question of sustainability. I think we’re hearing lots of public outcry about the amount of carbon that aviation puts in the air. If you look at other emissions, it’s even higher than that. There’s a real question about whether demand is going to change because of environmental concerns.

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Simon London: Yes. There’s the word flygskam ; I’m probably butchering that. We’ll get letters from Sweden! This came up just in the last year or so and seems to have entered popular culture. Is this actually a real topic of conversation—again, at the capacity-planning level? When people are looking at the demand curve and thinking about orders in airlines, are they taking this into account?

Robin Riedel: They’re starting to. I think this is a relatively new trend. We’re seeing this over the last six months or so, but our surveys have shown that about one-third of the passengers are seriously considering flying less as a result of environmental concerns, which is something we haven’t seen before at this number.

We do see [this] in certain markets. In Scandinavia, we see pockets of demand falling off, especially domestic travel or short-term travel, as a result of this. We’re seeing lots and lots of airlines starting to come out with very bold messages around what they want to do. Right now, a lot of this is focused on how do we increase fuel efficiency with our flying? How do we think about alternative fuels—certifying them and getting them on board? How do we think about offsets?

But to be honest, there’s a lot more to be done, and there’s a real challenge for the industry coming up. Because of the density of power that sits in fuel, it’s very hard to go to other sources. Going to electric is incredibly hard for longer flights, if not physically impossible at this point.

Simon London: Just because of the density of batteries per unit of energy that they contain?

Robin Riedel: That’s exactly right. The problem is, other industries can go with alternatives. We’re going to look at electric cars and we’re going to see that ramp up. Even though aviation might be 2 percent, 2.5 percent, of carbon emissions today, aviation is rapidly growing compared to other modes and other polluters and doesn’t have as many alternatives. As the other modes put alternatives in, we will see the [carbon-emissions] number of aviation come up quite a bit. It’s not crazy to say ten years from now, aviation could be at 10 percent.

Simon London: It’s currently at this interesting data point. Currently, around 2 percent, 2.5 percent, of global carbon emissions are [from] aviation, and probably, on trends, that will rise. How far it will rise, we don’t know, but it could rise significantly.

Robin Riedel: That’s right.

Simon London: Presumably, the industry is heavily incented to get more fuel efficient because jet fuel is a significant portion of costs. What’s the record of the industry so far? Beyond the cleaner-fuel alternatives or biofuels, what’s the industry doing to try and reduce it?

Alex Dichter: It’s something that’s on everyone’s mind. I think even if you weren’t concerned about carbon, to your point, fuel is a large expense item, and everyone’s looking to use less of it. Certainly, for some airlines, that means investing in new aircraft types that are significantly more fuel efficient. Some of the new-generation aircraft are as much as 20 percent more efficient on a per-passenger basis.

Let’s be clear: those airplanes are expensive. If you look at most cases, it’s a clear business case, but it’s close—meaning you save a lot on operating costs, but you pay back quite a bit of that in capital costs for the privilege of having new aircraft. For some, that makes sense. For others, it makes less sense.

Robin Riedel: Maybe to add a few things to that, the record of the industry at reducing or increasing fuel efficiency has actually been quite good. On average, we’re seeing about a percent, 1.5 percent, of reduction per year. Every year.

The airlines are quite committed to that, to Alex’s point, because it saves them money. I think one of the big players that has the opportunity to do more is actually air-traffic control here, and this is in many cases government led. [We need] better ways to utilize the airspace, finding better ways to hand off between—for example, in Europe—between country-based air-traffic control and allowing aircraft to take more direct flights, staying at an altitude where they’re more fuel efficient for longer. That could make a big difference. I think there’s a lot of opportunity left to really see some improvement on the fuel efficiency.

Simon London: Yeah. To step back from that, even though consumers say they are concerned about the environmental impact of flying, we still expect the industry to be growing at GDP-plus for the next while. If it bends the demand curve, it’s going to be at the margin.

Alex Dichter: I think we do need to consider a scenario in which that changes. I think the fact is that a reasonably large portion of air travel today is discretionary. In Europe—I live in the UK—for a lot of people, the choice to go to Amsterdam or Spain for the weekend is an alternative to going to a football game and going to the pub, at not very different costs. It’s a way of spending your time. One of the airline CEOs in Europe says that his biggest competitor is the sofa, meaning that he’s really trying to get people to get out of their homes and decide to travel. And that creates demand. I think the notion of flygskam and, again, I’m sure I’m pronouncing it incorrectly …

Simon London: I think you did better than I did!

Alex Dichter: … is precisely to challenge people on that type of travel. I think if that mind-set becomes widespread, we could see a big change to demand. Businesses, too, while we as businesspeople think that much of our travel is essential, I think if we really looked at it with a sharp eye, we’d realize much of it could be replaced by videoconferencing and phone calls. I think that there is the possibility that we’ll see large changes in mind-sets toward travel, and that’s something that the industry needs to watch very closely.

Robin Riedel: Just to build on that, I think the same is true for cargo. If you look at air cargo today, a lot of it is perishable goods. Anywhere in the world you can get nonseasonal fruit and vegetables. You can get salmon from Chile and you can get flowers. You can get perishable goods from all over the world at any time. I think consumers will over time smarten up to that and say …

Simon London: … “what is the carbon footprint of my strawberries?”

Robin Riedel: Yeah. There you go.

Simon London: Alex, you mentioned a little earlier that the current-generation and next-generation aircraft are more fuel efficient. Without getting too nerdy, but I’m interested, how is that being achieved?

Alex Dichter: In the simplest form, much of that benefit is coming through an increase in what engine manufacturers refer to as the bypass ratio. That’s, effectively, the ratio of thrust that is created by the fan. That’s the big disc out in front of the engine that you see spinning. It’s effectively a propeller, versus the core of the engine.

The higher the bypass ratio, the more efficient the engine is, up to a point. It’s a very simple explanation of a very complicated topic. I think the issue is we’re up against a threshold where dramatic increases in bypass ratios are not likely, for two reasons. One is at some point the fan becomes so big that you can’t manage it geometrically. The second point is that the internal temperature of the engine goes up with higher bypass ratios. At some point, we run into the limits of the ability for materials to sustain those temperatures.

Simon London: So we hit a plateau of what you can get out of the technology.

Alex Dichter: At some point, physics wins. I think that the achievements of the engine manufacturers over the last 20 or 30 years have been remarkable. I think engineers do wonderful things and we’ll continue to see improvements. But I think the idea that we’ll at some point see a kerosene-driven, high-bypass-ratio turbofan engine that burns 50 percent less fuel than we see today, using the same basic concepts, strikes most of us as unlikely.

Robin Riedel: Then to build on that, I think the changes we would see in that next-generation aircraft will be new airframe designs. I think on the airframe side, we’re getting more aerodynamic wings. We’re building more aerodynamic fuselages overall, and we’re building lighter materials. There are a lot of carbon aircraft parts out there now.

Simon London: Yes. There are composites and things being built which are lighter than aluminum and so on.

Robin Riedel: That’s right, but we’re fundamentally still building the same kind of tube and wing designs that we’ve been building for the last 80, 90 years. The question is [that] to get to the next level of efficiency afterward, we’ll have to attack the design of the actual aircraft.

There are designs out there like blended wing bodies, which have significantly better lift performance and lower drag, that would achieve the next step change, but it’s not as easy as just taking an engine off, like we do today, and replacing it. As an industry where a new aircraft design will easily cost you more than $10 billion, something of that scale will probably cost you $30 billion, $40 billion. We haven’t gotten to the point yet to really invest in these new designs.

Simon London: Presumably, as an aircraft manufacturer, the big hairy bet that you have to make is when to take those kinds of more futuristic designs—next-generation or beyond-next-generation platforms—into production.

Alex Dichter: I think there are multiple considerations. I think one is you don’t want to kill the existing platform, which still has plenty of growth left in it. You’re trying to pay down that investment, which might be only five or ten years old. The second is you want to make those investments at points in which propulsion technology is ready for a step change.

Last but not least, there is something to be said for managing the number of unknown unknowns in a design. The good news about reusing existing design features is that they’re very well tested. We understand them. We understand how to make them safe or safer. We understand how to build them. The more unknowns there are, the more uncertainty you have in the development process that leads to delays. It leads to manufacturing problems. Eventually, the industry tends to get there, but it can be a bumpy road.

Robin Riedel: Notwithstanding what we said, there are some very good ideas on the horizon that are actually coming to fruition in the smaller-aircraft space. We’re looking at electric propulsion. The floatplane companies in Vancouver have committed to going fully electric on their smaller aircraft.

There we see a bunch of innovations coming out that are electric propulsion, battery driven. On the next horizon of range, you have a bunch of new designs that have distributive propulsion. Instead of having one or two big engines on the aircraft, you have dozens of small, little propellers across the wing or across the fuselage, which have all kinds of aerodynamic benefits. While we won’t see that any time soon on the large airliners that we travel around [on] most of the time, we will see this on the smaller, regional aircraft.

Simon London: So the innovation tends to be on the shorter haul, basically?

Alex Dichter: I wouldn’t say it has been a pattern that innovation occurs on the shorter haul. I think the point is that when it comes to electric aircraft, the ability to do something that’s economically useful on short-haul aircraft today is in sight in a way that it is not for long-range aircraft. We’re not far away from being able to pack enough energy into a battery to be able to carry ten passengers 20 or 30 kilometers. We’re quite some way away from being able to carry 300 passengers 10,000 kilometers.

Simon London: Just talk a little bit about the air-taxi concept, which sounds incredibly futuristic. What do you think? Is it realistic?

Robin Riedel: It’s a space I’m tremendously excited about. Right now, we track more than 150 different manufacturers working on prototypes and business models around these vehicles.

Simon London: One hundred and fifty?

Robin Riedel: More than 150 just from the manufacturing-the-vehicle side. If you think of the whole ecosystem, it’s many, many more than that. You will have to recharge these vehicles. You will need infrastructure to land them. You need air-traffic control when you think about the lower airspace and lots of vehicles; it’s something that today doesn’t exist.

All of that is being spun up right now. There are dozens of companies that have working prototypes that fly with and without passengers, with and without pilots, today and are proving that technology-wise, we’re actually there.

Now, at the same [time], there are a lot of unlocks that need to happen to get there. Air-traffic control is one I mentioned. The thought that we will have dozens of these [air taxis] zipping through a city—it’s a problem that, technically maybe, we’re close to solving or have solved.

Simon London: Yes, it’s both exciting and scary.

Robin Riedel: It is both exciting and scary. Now, public perception is another issue. I think in the Western world, our surveys suggest that people are not quite ready to get into an autonomous plastic bowl with rotors on it and fly around a city, or there’s some skepticism around it. Now, in some of the emerging markets, there’s less of a concern there.

Simon London: You guys are both pilots. Will these things be pilotless or not? Because, presumably, the weight of the pilot, the economics of the pilot, fundamentally changes the game.

Robin Riedel: Let me give you a couple of the data points here. By adding a pilot, we’re about doubling the cost of flying on these vehicles. That’s because you have to pay for the pilot, for one, which isn’t necessarily cheap, especially if you only share the cost over a couple of passengers, versus a couple of hundred on big aircraft. Secondly, you’re designing the aircraft for the pilot to be in there. If you add an extra seat, that’s extra weight, so you’re roughly doubling the cost of the trip.

I think, secondly, it’s an interesting question of where these pilots will come from and how we incentivize them. Our forecasts show that by 2027, 2030, if this industry takes off, we’ll need about 50,000 pilots just for this urban air-mobility space. The value proposition for them is an interesting one because you’re telling them, “Listen. We want you to fly these,” but at the same time, as an industry, our number-one priority is to …

Simon London: … to get rid of you!

Robin Riedel: To get rid of you. To automate this, so that we can bring down the cost. If you think about the NPV [net present value] of a pilot’s career, you invest about $100,000 up front to get your pilot’s license. You spend two years of your life doing that. You have to recoup that afterward. If you only think about a five- or ten-year career until you get automated away, it’s a hard pitch to make. It’s a very interesting question for the industry how to resolve it.

Alex Dichter: The other thing I’d say is that we are very close to being able to master the technology that’s required for 100 percent–safe autonomous flight. Ninety-nine-point-something percent of the time, everything goes flawlessly.

That said, you see in your day-to-day life that technology fails, whether that’s having to reboot your computer or your phone. This happens on airplanes today—sometimes you need to reboot a system and have human intervention. Not surprisingly, the tolerance for technology failures in unmanned flight will be zero. The question in a lot of people’s minds is, “All right. If we’re 99-point-something percent of the way there, how far are we from 100?” That could be very close, and it could be very, very far.

Simon London: This is the same discussion that happens with autonomous vehicles. To what standard do we hold the systems? Do we hold them to the standard of perfection, or do we hold them to a human standard, which is a long way from even 99.99 percent?

Robin Riedel: You raise an interesting point there because the human standard is also not 100 percent. In a lot of cases, you would argue the human introduces a certain amount of risk as well because there’s human failure and human error. I think a lot of it is a public-perception issue, and how do we deal with the fact that we’re expecting 100 percent safety from aviation but yet we’re totally fine getting in a car and taking a significant risk on our way to the airport in the car.

Simon London: It’s cultural, societal, but also regulatory, and regulators will respond to politicians, who respond to societies. What about supersonic? Is there a future? Is it going to come back?

Alex Dichter: Many people my age had a chance to fly on Concorde when it was operating, and it was a wonderful experience. There are a couple of companies that have very credible paths, from a technology standpoint, to reintroduce supersonic aircraft—in some cases, to the business and corporate market.

That said, I do think that there are some real challenges. First and foremost, [supersonic aircraft] will not be more fuel efficient. I think that in a world where we become very focused on carbon footprints, at an individual as well as a collective level, that may impede the success of these models.

I think, second, there is a time-channel problem with supersonic flight that I think many people underestimate. What I mean by that is, nobody wants to arrive at 2:00 in the morning and nobody wants to leave at 2:00 in the morning. When you look at the rational departure and arrival time slots in many city pairs, supersonic does wonderful things for you in some city pairs and does nothing for you in others.

Concorde, for instance, was quite popular between London or Paris and New York, and it was less popular in the other direction because it left in the morning and arrived in the early evening, so you spent a day on an airplane. Whereas the alternative would be to spend a full day in New York, go to sleep in a first-class seat or a business-class seat—because if you were on Concorde, that’s probably your alternative—wake up in Europe, and have a productive day on the other end. That said, I suspect we will see some activity in this space at small scale.

Simon London: Let’s just finish with some tips. You are both pilots and frequent travelers. I’m sure you get asked this at dinner parties, so here’s the dinner-party question: “I fly. What should I do? What should I not do?”

Alex Dichter: My simple answer is, unless you really have to, don’t eat on planes. Nothing against the food. It’s fine. But in many cases, the flight is relatively short. If you look at the East Coast of the US to Europe, you have, at best, six and a half hours in the air. You have a big time-zone change ahead of you. Getting even a few hours’ sleep is really helpful, and an hour and a half worth of dinner, whether you’re in economy or business [class], takes away a significant portion of your sleeping time. Not to mention the fact that the airplane is a pressurized environment. Without getting into overly biotechnical details, your body doesn’t do a particularly good job of digesting food at altitude.

Simon London: Yeah. So rest, basically. Put your head down. Get some rest. Don’t eat. Robin, any tips?

Robin Riedel: Well, I still eat on airplanes, so I don’t quite agree [with Alex] on that one. I think getting smart on a stress-free way through the airport and through the environment is really what I spend my time thinking about, and that’s the tip I give people. Think about which security checkpoint you use. Is there a way for you to get faster through that by registering for a program or by being a frequent flyer? [Also,] understanding where the gate layout is, what are the right places to refresh or [where] the washrooms [are] in the area, et cetera.

Simon London: So a little bit of preplanning of the airport experience.

Robin Riedel: A little bit of preplanning of the airport experience. Absolutely. I think on the aircraft itself, I would argue get a window seat if you can, because you can lean against the window. People always argue that the person who’s in the aisle seat has all the power because they can get up whenever they want. Well, the reality is, if you’re in the window seat, you can also get up whenever you want, and you can actually make the other people get up at the same time. That whole aisle argument for me doesn’t count. For me, it’s a window seat.

Alex Dichter: One other tip that might surprise you is pack lightly, as that not only simplifies your life and makes dragging bags through the airport simpler but also reduces your carbon footprint. If you choose not to fly, at least in the short term that seat will probably be filled by someone else and, certainly, the plane will go. Every kilogram that you remove from your personal luggage reduces the fuel burn for the aircraft. I feel good about that. It also makes my life simpler.

Robin Riedel: One other [tip] I would add is bring a pillow. Even on shorter flights, being able to rest your head on something other than just the headrest is nice. I always carry a small pillow with me. I carry a pair of somewhat nicer eyeshades than you are given for free. Because that just makes a big difference to me—to be able to shut out the light and get a little bit of quiet time.

Alex Dichter: Another key one for me is knowing when not to sleep. The big challenge of long-haul travel, of course, is managing jet lag. That is as much a question of learning how to sleep as it is [of] knowing when not to sleep. A perfect example would be [that] a typical flight from the East Coast of the United States to Asia would leave in the middle of the day—let’s say noon—and arrive in Asia late in the afternoon, which, by the way, would be early in the morning on your body time.

If I look around the airplane, in most cases I would see people asleep for the last five hours of that flight. I know from experience that those people will end up tossing and turning in their hotel bed that night, unable to go to sleep again. That sets a pattern, throughout the subsequent days, of being groggy in the day, probably having to resort to taking a nap, and not being able to sleep at night. Keeping yourself awake so that you can shock yourself into the next time zone is an important discipline in managing jet lag.

Be friendly to airport and airline employees. There are a lot of things that go wrong in the airline industry, and the vast majority of them are not the fault of the flight attendant or gate agent that you are speaking to. Taking the time to smile and acknowledge that it’s not their fault, and [for them to] have a little human contact, makes their day better, makes your day better, and, again, creates that positive loop that we were talking about. I had a flight attendant come up to me not long ago to thank me for taking my headsets off of my head when she came to ask me a question. You would think that would be a common courtesy; it’s something I ask my kids to do but, apparently, that’s not something that’s often done. Those little things make a difference.

Simon London: We are out of time for today. Robin, Alex, thank you so much for joining and that was fascinating.

Alex Dichter: Great.

Robin Riedel: Thank you for the time.

Alex Dichter: We’ll see you all in an airport someplace.

Simon London: Yeah. Right. And, as always, thanks to you, our listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the McKinsey Podcast . Please do jet over to McKinsey.com to find more research on aviation, transportation, sustainability, and more. Alternatively, download the excellent McKinsey Insights app, which is available for Apple and Android devices.

Alex Dichter is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office. Robin Riedel is a partner in the San Francisco office. Simon London, a member of McKinsey Publishing, is based in the Silicon Valley office.

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Imagine a future with nearly silent air taxis flying above traffic jams and navigating between skyscrapers and suburban droneports . Transportation arrives at the touch of your smartphone and with minimal environmental impact.

This isn’t just science fiction. United Airlines has plans for these futuristic electric air taxis in Chicago and New York . The U.S. military is already experimenting with them . And one company has a contract to launch an air taxi service in Dubai as early as 2025. Another company hopes to defy expectations and fly participants at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Backed by billions of dollars in venture capital and established aerospace giants that include Boeing and Airbus, startups across the world such as Joby , Archer , Wisk and Lilium are spearheading this technological revolution, developing electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that could transform the way we travel.

Electric aviation promises to alleviate urban congestion, open up rural areas to emergency deliveries, slash carbon emissions and offer a quieter, more accessible form of short-distance air travel.

But the quest to make these electric aircraft ubiquitous across the globe instead of just playthings for the rich is far from a given. Following the industry as executive director of the Oklahoma Aerospace Institute for Research and Education provides a view of the state of the industry. Like all great promised paradigm shifts, numerous challenges loom – technical hurdles, regulatory mazes, the crucial battle for public acceptance and perhaps physics itself.

Why electrify aviation?

Fixed somewhere between George Jetson’s flying car and the gritty taxi from “The Fifth Element ,” the allure of electric aviation extends beyond gee-whiz novelty. It is rooted in its potential to offer efficient, eco-friendly alternatives to ground transportation, particularly in congested cities or hard-to-reach rural regions.

While small electric planes are already flying in a few countries , eVTOLs are designed for shorter hops – the kind a helicopter might make today, only more cheaply and with less impact on the environment. The eVTOL maker Joby purchased Uber Air to someday pair the company’s air taxis with Uber’s ride-hailing technology.

In the near term, once eVTOLs are certified to fly as commercial operations, they are likely to serve specific, high-demand routes that bypass road traffic. An example is United Airlines’ plan to test Archer’s eVTOLs on short hops from Chicago to O'Hare International Airport and Manhattan to Newark Liberty International Airport .

While some applications initially might be restricted to military or emergency use, the goal of the industry is widespread civil adoption, marking a significant step toward a future of cleaner urban mobility.

The challenge of battery physics

One of the most significant technical challenges facing electric air taxis is the limitations of current battery technology.

Today’s batteries have made significant advances in the past decade, but they don’t match the energy density of traditional hydrocarbon fuels currently used in aircraft . This shortcoming means that electric air taxis cannot yet achieve the same range as their fossil-fueled counterparts, limiting their operational scope and viability for long-haul flights. Current capabilities still fall short of traditional transportation. However, with ranges from dozens of miles to over 100 miles, eVTOL batteries provide sufficient range for intracity hops.

The quest for batteries that offer higher energy densities, faster charging times and longer life cycles is central to unlocking the full potential of electric aviation.

While researchers are working to close this gap, hydrogen presents a promising alternative , boasting a higher energy density and emitting only water vapor. However, hydrogen’s potential is tempered by significant hurdles related to safe storage and infrastructure capable of supporting hydrogen-fueled aviation. That presents a complex and expensive logistics challenge.

And, of course, there’s the specter of the last major hydrogen-powered aircraft. The Hindenburg airship caught fire in 1937, but it still looms large in the minds of many Americans.

Regulatory hurdles

Establishing a “ 4D highways in the sky ” will require comprehensive rules that encompass everything from vehicle safety to air traffic management . For the time being, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is requiring that air taxis include pilots serving in a traditional role. This underscores the transitional phase of integrating these vehicles into airspace, highlighting the gap between current capabilities and the vision of fully autonomous flights.

The journey toward autonomous urban air travel is fraught with more complexities, including the establishment of standards for vehicle operation, pilot certification and air traffic control. While eVTOLs have flown hundreds of test flights, there have also been safety concerns after prominent crashes involving propeller blades failing on one in 2022 and the crash of another in 2023. Both were being flown remotely at the time.

The question of who will manage these new airways remains an open discussion – national aviation authorities such as the FAA , state agencies , local municipalities or some combination thereof.

Creating the future

In the long term, the vision for electric air taxis aligns with a future where autonomous vehicles ply the urban skies, akin to scenes from “ Back to the Future .” This future, however, not only requires technological leaps in automation and battery efficiency but also a societal shift in how people perceive and accept the role of autonomous vehicles , both cars and aircraft, in their daily lives. Safety is still an issue with autonomous vehicles on the ground.

The successful integration of electric air taxis into urban and rural environments hinges on their ability to offer safe, reliable and cost-effective transportation.

As these vehicles overcome the industry’s many hurdles, and regulations evolve to support their operation in the years ahead, I believe we could witness a profound transformation in air mobility. The skies offer a new layer of connectivity, reshaping cities and how we navigate them.

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Automatic Refunds and No More Hidden Fees: D.O.T. Sets New Rules for Airlines

The Transportation Department issued new requirements on refunds when flights are canceled or delayed and on revealing “junk” fees before booking. Here’s what passengers can expect.

By Christine Chung

The Transportation Department on Wednesday announced new rules taking aim at two of the most difficult and annoying issues in air travel: obtaining refunds and encountering surprise fees late in the booking process.

“Passengers deserve to know upfront what costs they are facing and should get their money back when an airline owes them — without having to ask,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement, adding that the changes would not only save passengers “time and money,” but also prevent headaches.

The department’s new rules, Mr. Buttigieg said, will hold airlines to clear and consistent standards when they cancel, delay or substantially change flights, and require automatic refunds to be issued within weeks. They will also require them to reveal all fees before a ticket is purchased.

Airlines for America , a trade group representing the country’s largest air carriers, said in a statement that its airlines “abide by and frequently exceed” D.O.T. consumer protection regulations.

Passenger advocates welcomed the new steps.

Tomasz Pawliszyn, the chief executive of AirHelp, a Berlin-based company that assists passengers with airline claims, called it a “massive step forward and huge improvement in consumer rights and protection” that brings the United States closer to global standards in passenger rights.

Here’s what we know about the D.O.T.’s new rules, which will begin to go into effect in October.

There’s now one definition for a “significant” delay.

Until now, airlines have been allowed to set their own definition for a “significant” delay and compensation has varied by carrier . Now, according to the D.O.T., there will be one standard: when departure or arrival is delayed by three hours for domestic flights and six hours for international flights.

Passengers will get prompt refunds for cancellations or significant changes for flights and delayed bags, for any reason.

When things go wrong, getting compensation from an airline has often required establishing a cumbersome paper trail or spending untold hours on the phone. Under the new rules, refunds will be automatic, without passengers having to request them. Refunds will be made in full, excepting the value of any transportation already used. Airlines and ticket agents must provide refunds in the original form of payment, whether by cash, credit card or airline miles. Refunds are due within seven days for credit card purchases and within 20 days for other payments.

Passengers with other flight disruptions, such as being downgraded to a lower service class, are also entitled to refunds.

The list of significant changes for which passengers can get their money back also includes: departure or arrival from an airport different from the one booked; connections at different airports or flights on planes that are less accessible to a person with a disability; an increase in the number of scheduled connections. Also, passengers who pay for services like Wi-Fi or seat selection that are then unavailable will be refunded any fees.

Airlines must give travel vouchers or credits to ticketed passengers unable to fly because of government restrictions or a doctor’s orders.

The vouchers or credits will be transferable and can be used for at least five years after the date they were issued.

Fees for checked baggage and modifying a reservation must be disclosed upfront.

Airlines and ticket agents are now required to display any extra fees for things like checking bags or seat selection clearly and individually before a ticket purchase. They will also need to outline the airline’s policies on baggage, cancellations and changing flights before a customer purchases a ticket.

The rules, which apply to all flights on domestic airlines and flights to and from the United States operated by foreign airlines, have varying start dates.

For example, automatic refunds must be instituted by the airlines within six months. But carriers have a year before they’re required to issue travel vouchers and credits for passengers advised by a medical professional not to fly.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024 .

Christine Chung is a Times reporter covering airlines and consumer travel. More about Christine Chung

Open Up Your World

Considering a trip, or just some armchair traveling here are some ideas..

52 Places:  Why do we travel? For food, culture, adventure, natural beauty? Our 2024 list has all those elements, and more .

Mumbai:  Spend 36 hours in this fast-changing Indian city  by exploring ancient caves, catching a concert in a former textile mill and feasting on mangoes.

Kyoto:  The Japanese city’s dry gardens offer spots for quiet contemplation  in an increasingly overtouristed destination.

Iceland:  The country markets itself as a destination to see the northern lights. But they can be elusive, as one writer recently found .

Texas:  Canoeing the Rio Grande near Big Bend National Park can be magical. But as the river dries, it’s getting harder to find where a boat will actually float .

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Air canada’s longest flight: new direct vancouver to singapore route.

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Air Canada has just launched a direct flight from Vancouver to Singapore.

Air Canada has just launched a direct flight from Vancouver to Singapore. This new direct flight not only marks Air Canada's newest international route but also represents the only non-stop service that links the country of Canada directly with Singapore. The route spans an impressive distance of 7,965 miles (12,818 kilometers) and is the longest in Air Canada's portfolio. The total flight duration can reach up to 16 hours and five minutes.

"Air Canada is thrilled to welcome customers onboard our newest route linking Canada and Singapore from our Pacific hub in Vancouver. These new Singapore flights are part of our strategic expansion at YVR, which together with an efficient and seamless in-transit connection process, further position the airport as the preferred North American gateway to Asia," said Mark Galardo, Executive Vice President, Revenue and Network Planning at Air Canada. "Singapore is also an important gateway to beyond destinations. Customers have a multitude of connection options travelling to Southeast Asia, Southern India and Western Australia with our longstanding codeshare and Star Alliance partner, Singapore Airlines."

"The reality of directly connecting Singapore, Southeast Asia's most active economic gateway and financial hub with British Columbia, Canada's gateway to the Pacific can mean limitless opportunities. This new direct flight opens fresh opportunities for travel and tourism, business collaboration, and access to global markets that will directly benefit people in Singapore, Southeast Asia, and throughout our province," said the Honourable Jagrup Brar, Minister of State for Trade, Government of British Columbia.

The Vancouver-Singapore route will use Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners and passengers will be able to ... [+] choose from three cabins

"I am pleased Air Canada has chosen YVR to host the only non-stop flight between Canada and Singapore," said YVR President and CEO, Tamara Vrooman. "This new route will generate $18 million in economic output and support jobs across the sector. We welcome this new service which will grow tourism, support increased trade, and importantly, connect families and friends across the Pacific region. The launch of service to Singapore speaks to the continued investment Air Canada is making in Vancouver, which in turn benefits our community and the regional economy."

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Rachel Loh, Senior Vice President, Singapore Tourism Board Americas shared, "We couldn't be more excited for the official launch of Air Canada's new direct route from Vancouver, increasing connectivity to Singapore for both Canadian and American visitors. We are delighted to welcome travellers to Singapore to explore new attractions such as the Bird Paradise or dine at our famous hawker centers and Michelin-starred restaurants. From cultural immersion to rejuvenating wellness offerings, Singapore offers a multitude of experiences to suit every passion. Be it world-class concerts or the adrenaline rush of the F1 Grand Prix in September, the city promises endless excitement. We eagerly await your arrival!"

The Vancouver-Singapore route will use Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners and passengers will be able to choose from three cabins: Air Canada Signature Class which comes with lie-flat comfortable pods, Premium Economy with extra legroom and additional services, and Economy. All cabins will offer inflight entertainment with more than 1,400 hours of movies, nearly 2000 hours of TV shows and more. Passengers will have the option to buy wi-fi. Air Canada Aeroplan members can enjoy free texting.

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Parker Kligerman on NASCAR’s international future, being a nomad and longevity: 12 Questions

Readers can now follow  NASCAR , Formula One and other motorsports content separately.  Customize your feed here .

Each week, The Athletic asks the same 12 questions to a different race car driver. Up next: Xfinity Series driver Parker Kligerman. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity, but the full version is available on the 12 Questions podcast .

1. What is currently the No. 1 thing on your bucket list?

To go endurance racing. I make the joke, (every) professional race car driver’s goal should be to get rich and go sports car racing. I totally am cool if it’s later in life that I pull it off and go do the (Rolex) 24, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Bathurst 12 Hour, Nürburgring 24. Most people maybe go play golf; I want to go do endurance races around the world.

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2. How much media coverage of NASCAR do you consume?

A ton. Way too much. I’m a subscriber to The Athletic. Obviously, I support all the journalists who are here. What we’re doing with “The Money Lap” (his podcast and newsletter with Landon Cassill) is we take in a lot of the media out there and try to aggregate it in some respects. So I probably consume too much.

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3. Beyond winning, what is the best way to measure success in racing?

Longevity. It is not only incredibly hard to get here, but it’s incredibly hard to stay here. And as someone who has seen the other side of obscurity and irrelevance, I can tell you it’s really easy to fall out of this — and it’s really, really hard to get back. I have such respect for anyone who has been able to do this for a very long period of time. Even if you are successful, just to keep going and keep showing up all the time.

I wrote about (17-year-old) Connor Zilisch, who wants to be the youngest Cup Series champion ever, right? That’s interesting to me, because it made me think about the oldest: Bobby Allison was 45 years old, and I just couldn’t believe that. Here I am, 33 years old — to get to where he did his final championship, that is a huge commitment and huge amount of longevity.

4. What is an opinion you have about NASCAR you don’t think is shared by the fans?

I don’t think the core fan base believes in the expansion of going to things like Chicago (street race), to expand NASCAR from its roots to try and create this new version of NASCAR. Going international potentially, I have a huge belief in that. Because in a lot of respects, I know the U.S. is a big country and it’s the most important (to NASCAR), but NASCAR has so much growth potential globally and so much potential out of what its core direction has been for so long. It would be weird to not go after that.

I see people who come from backgrounds you would never associate with NASCAR and who have never thought about NASCAR, and they come to a race (and love it). I had a group that came to Austin — finance guys from New York and Boston. And after the end of the day, they turned to me and said, “This is the greatest sport in the world. Why did I just find this?”

5. What is the biggest thing fans don’t realize about what you do for a living?

It’s so boring to explain how much of a grind travel can be. But we push it to an extreme. I truly believe this sport pushes human beings to the furthest you can go in terms of travel and living any semblance of a normal life. I was on four or five planes this week already and it’s Friday. You can’t even fit in anymore. And that’s the nature of the game.

I’ve seen some of the answers for this question are very similar. But the schedule is relentless, and it is a grind. I know we’re very fortunate to be here, but there’s no way to truly explain how far that pushes you as a human being when you’re being such a nomad.

6. This next one is a current issue about the person I’m interviewing. You recently touched on the difference between racing full-time and part-time. Is there any way to explain to somebody who hasn’t been in that position what about it is different? What decisions are you making on the track that is different about running a full season?

It’s massively different. There are mental aspects to knowing there’s a season-long trophy you’re playing for, and that you are a figurehead of this organization trying to accomplish that. Whereas in a part-time capacity, especially for me, my main income at the time was television. When it flips the other way, suddenly every result and everything you do is now more impactful. Because it’s become your full-time thing, your full-time income and everything you’re thinking about.

There’s a difference I don’t know if I fully accepted or thought about it before I did it. And then halfway through last year, I was like, “Well, this is very different.” And in the second half of the year, we were way more successful. As a team, we got better and learned all sorts of things, and I got better for sure. And a lot of it was to change my mentality of tackling races and preparing. This year has been a lot easier because I’ve done it for a year.

Imagine just suddenly changing jobs. You think it’s the same thing you’ve always been doing, but now everything is different. Every tool they use, every communication product they use. That’s us. If you move up the grid, or if you go from part-time to full-time, it’s that level of adjustment.

7. So the wild-card question is about “The Money Lap.” It’s been one year ago this week since you started this. But I know from experience podcasting is a grind and it’s very hard to build an audience. So why are you doing this?

Hardest thing I’ve ever done. Stupidest thing, maybe. As I got to the end of 2022, I had really done a lot with NBC, but I hadn’t built anything I felt was mine. I hadn’t really built a platform where I was like, “This is where I talk about motorsports and people know to get my opinion on motorsports and want to talk with me.”

We got to February (last year), and I just called Landon and said, “We need a podcast.” It took months to convince him, which is why we didn’t start until May, but we did about eight practice episodes, just talking to each other for an hour. And eventually we were ready to launch. The hardest thing has been doing it ourselves and doing it with our own group. It’s a great group of young kids I’ve identified from social media profiles and content they put out and said, “Hey, you’d be good at this, come do it with us and we’ll pay you.”

But it’s amazing. We built a system and a process that as long as we did that hour-and-a-half podcast, so much content would get created from it. There’s pockets of serious growth and then plateaus and it’s, “Oh, this is so difficult.” But I do believe it’s rewarding. I see what kind of reviews we get and how much people enjoy it, so that makes me want to do it even more.

8. What do you like about the place you grew up? You’re from Connecticut.

It’s home. That simple. I don’t get there a ton. Right now I’m trying to go back every week for at least a day or two because my girlfriend, Shannon, is going to Paris for six months for the Olympics . She works on the Olympics (for NBC). I was just there this week and went for a run outside and I was like, “I love the smell up here.” (Laughs) It’s just home.

I’m very proud to be from there, and I’m proud to be associated with places like Lime Rock and where I grew up in everything. It is unique to be (from) where I am and not be in finance or work in New York City. To be a NASCAR driver is definitely a talking point at any time, which is fun and different.

9. What personality trait are you the most proud of?

Positivity. I try to bring positivity into the world and try to be a positive person as much as I possibly can. In my quiet moments alone, I’m a very not positive person myself. But to the outside world, I try to be very positive because it’s so boring sometimes to be sad in front of the world. Everyone is fighting something, right? …

It’s funny: So many race car drivers can be such downers sometimes. I try to flip it the other way of just being the guy they’re like, “Oh, he’s happy. I’d rather have him around.”

10. Which driver would you least like to be stuck with on an elevator?

Landon Cassill because I listen to him all the time anyway. We’d never run out of something to talk about, but I’ve heard so much of it. I’d love to have someone who I don’t know well. Then it would be like, “Let’s dive into it. What are we gonna get into? What am I gonna learn here?”

11. What is a run-in you’ve had with a driver that TV or the medium missed?

Carson Hocevar at Pocono last year in the Truck race. We’re good now. Great. I talk to him whenever we run into each other. But we had a run-in where I was just upset with a move he had made that ended up wrecking our truck. Driving for Henderson, it was a small team and a brand new truck for us, a really nice truck. They put so much time and effort and resources in this thing. And he made a move that hadn’t worked all day — it made us three- or four-wide, and I was on the outside of that, and he came up and smashed us in the wall. So after the race, I just let him know I did not appreciate that.

12. Each week, I ask a driver to give me a question for the next person. Last week was Martin Truex Jr. and he wanted to know: “Ask him how close he thinks his team is to winning. And where does he feel his best chance is coming up?”

I’ll be honest: If you had asked me this question a year ago, I’d be shocked we haven’t won yet. I have certainly won with a lot less resources. But my confidence comes most of all from the strides we made as a team over the last year, especially in the second half of last year. We still have areas we have to continue to improve, but that’s the same for everyone in this game.

We’ve been as close as you can possibly be without breaking through and I think almost every single week is an opportunity to make it happen. With my love of road courses, obviously those are big opportunities and with the ECR motors and my love of superspeedway racing, those would be the favorites. But funny enough, I think the closest we have been was last fall at Texas.

To sum it up: I feel we are as damn close as you can be and almost every week to me is possible.

Do you have a question I can ask for the next interview? It’s with Tyler Reddick. 

Do you think it’s more impressive to be the youngest or oldest Cup Series champion? And why?

Inside NASCAR's charter negotiations: 'We're all not aligned, and that's not good'

(Top photo of Parker Kligerman at last weekend’s Xfinity race at Dover: James Gilbert / Getty Images)

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Subscribe to The Athletic for in-depth coverage of your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Try a week on us.

Jeff Gluck has been traveling on the NASCAR beat since 2007, with stops along the way at USA Today, SB Nation, NASCAR Scene magazine and a Patreon-funded site, JeffGluck.com. He's been hosting tweetups at NASCAR tracks around the country since 2009 and was named to SI's Twitter 100 (the top 100 Twitter accounts in sports) for five straight years.

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Russian IADS Redux Part-7: The Effectors

In the next part of our series on Russia’s strategic integrated air defence system, we look at the kinetic ground-based air defence systems it deploys.

In part-6 of our series on Russia’s strategic Integrated Air Defence System (IADS) we examined the command and control architecture it depends upon. The IADS’ role is ultimately to provide a response to air threats approaching or entering Russian airspace. In Russian air defence doctrine this response is provided using kinetic and/or electronic effects.

The kinetic side of the IADS depends on the Russian Aerospace Force’s (RASF’s) fighters and Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) systems. Sources have shared with Armada that both the fighter and SAM force would be deployed in wartime to protect key Russian strategic targets. Typically, these could include politico-military targets like the Kremlin, the seat of the Russian government in Moscow. Other potential strategic targets include hardened facilities believed to be earmarked for use by the Russian leadership in wartime. One of these facilities is thought to be located at Mount Yamantau, southwest Russia. A back-up facility may exist at Mount Kosvinsky Kaman, western Russia. Russia’s industrial city of Elektrostal, on the eastern outskirts of Moscow, was one of the first locations where the RASF deployed its S-400 (NATO reporting name SA-21 Growler) high-altitude, long-range SAM systems in 2010.

The SAM Systems

Moscow itself is ring-fenced by the RASF’s 53T6 (ABM-3 Gazelle) anti-ballistic missile system. The 53T6 employs SAMs equipped with a ten kiloton (one kiloton is equal to 1,000 tonnes of conventional explosive) nuclear warhead. These missiles would detonate at altitude in proximity to incoming salvos of ballistic missile warheads or formations of hostile aircraft. The logic is that this ‘shotgun’ approach will vaporise, or at least badly damage, these targets.

The S-400 is the mainstay of the RASF SAM force. A typical S-400 battalion includes two batteries. A battery comprises between eight and twelve individual launch vehicles, each equipped with four missile tubes. Thus, an S-400 regiment could have between 56 and 84 individual missiles ready to launch if fully loaded.  Each battery has a command post, a 91N6 (Big Bird) S-band (2.3 gigahertz/GHz to 2.5GHz/2.7GHz to 3.7GHz) 324 nautical mile/nm (600 kilometre/km) range surveillance and tracking radar. The 91N6 is joined by a 96L6E (Cheese Board) C-band (5.25GHz to 5.925GHz) early warning and target acquisition radar. This radar has a range of up to 162nm (300km). A plethora of SAMs can be launched by the S-400 with an array of engagement ranges from 21.6nm (40km) using the active radar homing 9M96E missile. Engagement ranges can reach up to 216nm (400km) using the 40N6E missile which has a reported engagement altitude of 98,425 feet/ft (30,000 metres/m).

Legacy systems used by the RASF include the S-300PS (SA-10B Grumble-B) and S-300PM (SA-10D/E Grumble) which have subtle differences. An S-300PS battery has three Maz-543 launch vehicles each with four launch tubes. The battery is also equipped with a single 5N63S (Flap Lid-B) X-band (8.5GHz to 10.68GHz) fire control radar. An S-300PM battery has a single 36N6E (Flap Lid) X-band/Ku-band (13.4GHz to 14GHz/15.7GHz to 17.7GHz) fire control radar with a 162nm (300km) range. Joining the 36N6E is a 76N6 (Clam Shell) X-band (8.5GHz to 10.68GHz) search and track radar with a 70nm (120km) range. The rest of the battery is comprised of up to eight Kraz-260 launch vehicles each with four tubes. Both the S-300PS/PM are thought to deploy 48N6/E SAMs which have a reported 81nm (150km) range. The S-300PS/PM’s 5V55R missile has an engagement range of up to 48.6nm (90km).

Sources have shared with Armada that RASF SAM batteries are not routinely deployed but may deploy from time-to-time to support exercises or training. The batteries would only be deployed in anger to protect key strategic targets like those discussed above. The sources continued that the task of the SAM units is to provide a protective ‘bubble’ above these targets. Air defence coverage up to 54 nautical miles/nm (100 kilometres/km) altitude and a range radius of 189nm (350km) around the target would be provided. The SAM units would work to attrit any incoming air attack as much as possible. Russian air defence doctrine focuses on safeguarding as many strategic targets as possible in anticipation of an eventual counterattack.

One crucial part of the RASF’s SAM force is its 96K6 Pantsir-S1 (SA-22 Greyhound) combined medium-range SAM and anti-aircraft artillery systems. 96K6 units would deploy with S-300 and S-400 batteries. Their role would be to destroy air-launched weapons like anti-radiation missiles or attack helicopters engaging the batteries Armada’s sources added.

Over the longer term, the RASF is looking to introduce new SAM systems to enhance the strategic IADS in the form of the S-350E and S-500 Prometey long-range, high-altitude SAM systems. The S-350E is mooted as a replacement for the RASF’s S-300PS/PM batteries. Open sources state that a S-350E battery has one 50N6A X-band ground-based air surveillance radar with a range of 215nm (400km). The 50N6A is joined by a single 50K6A mobile command post and up to eight 50P6 launch vehicles. Each launch vehicle can fire 9M96/E or 9M100 SAMs with engagement ranges and altitudes of up to 65nm (120km) and 98,000ft (30,000m) respectively. It was reported in January 2020 that the first S-350E battery had entered service, although a developmental system may have been deployed to support Russia’s military presence in Syria. The VKS could receive twelve S-350E batteries by 2027.

The S-500 is mooted to have a longer engagement range than the S-350E. The S-500 ensemble includes a 91N6A(M) air surveillance and battle management radar. This radar is an enhanced version of the 91N6A radar accompanying the S-400. The S-500’s 96L6TSP target acquisition radar is an enhanced variant of the S-400’s 96L6E. These two systems are accompanied by the 76T6 multimode fire control radar, itself thought to be a derivative of the 92N6. Also forming part of the S-500 ensemble is the 77T6 anti-ballistic missile engagement radar the capabilities of which remain largely unknown in the public domain.

Open sources say that missiles equipping the S-500 could hit targets at ranges of up to 270nm (500km). Russian sources have claimed that the S-500 could engage targets at up to 656,168ft (200,000m) altitude. Russian media, seldom the most reliable source, claim that the first S-500 regiment went on combat duty in October 2021.

The long-term prognosis for the S-500 and S-350E systems remains uncertain. As documented by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based thinktank, the Russian defence industry is dependent on clandestinely-sourced Western microelectronics for sophisticated weapons systems. Will Western efforts to clamp down on Russia’s access to such technology have an impact on the fortunes of the S-350E and S-500?

Stay tuned for more analysis on Russia’s strategic air defence capabilities in the next instalment of our Russian IADS Redux series.

by Dr. Thomas Withington

Read our other Russian IADS Redux   articles:

• Russian IADS Redux Part-1: Resonating with Resonance
• Russian IADS Redux Part-2: Hilltop View
• Russian IADS Redux Part-3: Strategic Skywatchers
• Russian IADS Redux Part-4: Missing Link
• Russian IADS Redux Part-5: Reset Password?
• Russian IADS Redux Part-6: Fundament-alists

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Today, Delta unveiled its custom Airbus A350 Team USA aircraft livery in Toulouse, France honoring the airline’s commitment to celebrate these athlete’s journey and connect them with their dreams as the official airline of Team USA.  

The Team USA-inspired A350 celebrates Delta's eight-year partnership with the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which runs through the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.  

“Unveiling the Team USA aircraft for the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024 marks a major milestone for Delta’s support of Team USA as we look toward the start of competition in just a few months,” said Chief Marketing Officer Alicia Tillman. “This plane, designed by our in-house creative team, represents Delta’s commitment to Team USA and our partnership to elevate these athletes to reach their highest potential. As this plane flies around the world in the coming months and years, we hope it is seen as a symbol of hard work, dedication and the upward momentum to being the best that Team USA and Delta innately share.”    

DELTA’S CHAIRMAN’S CLUB TAKES DELIVERY IN TOULOUSE  

The celebration in Toulouse – home of Airbus’ global headquarters and where the plane was built and painted this year – had a special audience this year, with Delta’s Chairman’s Club – a peer-selected honoree group of the airline’s top 100 employees from divisions across the company – being a part of the reveal moment for the first time.  

These employees, who are nominated by their peers and Delta’s most senior leaders, represent top employees from across the business. The honorees, which are selected annually, are chosen based on their merit and ability to exemplify the Delta brand each day. Each year, Chairman’s Club Honorees receive the distinction of flying on a new Delta aircraft home to Atlanta as recognition of their commitment and dedication to the brand. To celebrate the countdown to the Paris Games, the 2023 honoree class was able to unveil the brand-new Team USA livery design and be the first to fly on the newly minted plane. Members of the 2023 class were in attendance for the occasion.  

“Team USA athletes are resilient and perseverant – much like Delta’s own people who work each day behind the scenes to connect the world," said VP of Global Communications Gina Laughlin. “Celebrating this moment alongside our 2023 Chairman’s Club Honorees is only fitting as Delta’s people and Team USA work diligently each day to bring the best of themselves to their work. No one better understand what it means to Keep Climbing to the top.” 

Delta’s Chairman’s Club Honorees will fly the aircraft back to Atlanta on May 3.  

DESIGNING THE LIVERY   

The custom livery was designed over several months by Alessandra Rabellino and Delta’s internal brand design team, Window Seat. The bespoke design boasts red, white and blue colors with ‘Team USA’ proudly written across its side and maintains elements of the Team USA Livery design for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, as a nod to the beginning of the partner journey, while also incorporating features that look ahead to Paris and beyond.   

“We evolved one of the main features from the Beijing Livery – the jet stream – into the shape of the Eiffel Tower, symbolizing momentum as we countdown to Paris,” Rabellino said.  “Being able to see the big reveal after the curtain drop was so exciting. But what is even more special is being part of this occasion alongside the Chairman’s Club Honorees who have such a big impact on our company – it's a true honor.”   

On May 2 Delta unveiled its custom Airbus A350 Team USA aircraft livery in Toulouse, France honoring the airline’s commitment to celebrate these athlete’s journey and connect them with their dreams as the official airline of Team USA. NBC’s Keir Simmons shared an exclusive look inside on TODAY.

ABOUT DELTA’S TEAM USA PARTNERSHIP 

To further its commitment to Team USA, Delta has also proudly partnered with 15 Team USA athlete ambassadors for the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024. This group of inspiring athletes will join Delta on the road to Paris as the airline will support them both on and off the field of play, celebrating their stories of resilience and perseverance as they pursue their Olympic and Paralympic dreams.   

U.S. Olympic Athletes:    

Allyson Felix, 11X U.S. Olympic medalist, Track and Field 

Gabby Thomas, 2X U.S. Olympic gold medalist, Track and Field 

Ilona Maher, U.S. Olympian, Rugby 

Brooke Raboutou, U.S. Olympian, Sport Climbing 

Jagger Eaton, U.S. Olympic bronze medalist, Skateboarding 

Chase Kalisz, 2X U.S. Olympic medalist, Swimming 

Victor Montalvo, U.S. Olympic hopeful, Breaking 

Ashleigh Johnson, 2X Olympic gold medalist, Water Polo     

U.S. Paralympic Athletes:    

Brad Snyder, 8X U.S. Paralympic medalist, Para Swimming & Paratriathlon 

Oksana Masters, 17X U.S. Paralympic medalist, Para Cycling & Para Cross-country ski 

Kaleo Kanahele Maclay, 3X U.S. Paralympic medalist, Sitting Volleyball 

Trevon Jenifer, 3X U.S. Paralympic medalist, Wheelchair Basketball 

Roderick Townsend, 4X U.S. Paralympic medalist, Para Track and Field 

Chuck Aoki, 3X U.S. Paralympic medalist, Wheelchair Rugby 

Mallory Weggemann, 5X U.S. Paralympic medalist, Para Swimming 

As Team USA’s official airline, Delta will manage travel for all U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes to the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024, Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Milan 2026 and Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, where it also is an inaugural founding partner.  

The partnership with Team USA furthers Delta’s longstanding support for sport – and the airline’s proud history supporting Team USA and the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Delta served as a past sponsor of its hometown in the Olympic and Paralympic Games Atlanta 1996 and Salt Lake City 2002.   

The foundation of Delta’s partnership is in the alignment of values and a shared focus on excellence, a passion for connecting people and cultures and a drive to be the best and the gold standard difference. Learn more about Delta’s partnership with Team USA .   

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Drone flying toward Moscow downed in Elektrostal

MOSCOW, November 19. A drone flying to Moscow has been downed by air defense systems in Elektrostal in the Moscow Region, no one was hurt, Moscow’s Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said on Sunday.

"In the Elektrostal municipal district, air defense forces repelled an attack by a drone, which was flying toward Moscow. According to preliminary data, its fragments fell down incurring no damage. No one was hurt," he wrote on his Telegram channel .

According to the Moscow mayor, emergencies services are working on the site.