Pathfinder 1: The airship that could usher in a new age

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

(Image Credit: LTA Research)

Mark Piesing ~ BBC

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

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

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

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

Read original full article by Mark Piesing:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250214-pathfinder-1-the-airship-that-could-usher-in-a-new-age