Airships: Rooted in proven technology, advanced with modern materials and flight systems.
By designing and building a modern airship correctly, the problems of flight safety, structural integrity, low speed handling and control (positive full axis handling and control at air speeds under 3 knots) and economics (capital and operating costs) can be successfully resolved.
In 1917 the German Zeppelin L.59 attempted to fly 50 tons of military supplies from Germany to German troops in what was then German East Africa (Now Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania) under the command of Gen. Paul von Lettow – Vorbeck. The flight covered a distance of 4,200 miles, which is equal in distance to a nonstop flight from Germany to San Francisco, California using the great circle route.
Built in 1923, the US Navy airship Shenandoah regularly used less than 3,000 hp while transporting 53,500 lb of payload up to 5,000 miles at cruise speeds of about 70 mph.
In 1928 the German airship Graf Zeppelin was the first vehicle to circumnavigate the globe by air. It flew nonstop legs eastward from Germany to Japan, which was a nonstop distance of 6,988 miles, and then from Tokyo to San Francisco, which was a nonstop distance of 5998 miles.
Despite the vastly inferior design, materials and technology of the era, mission profiles covering strategic and transcontinental distances with very heavy payloads were routinely flown by airships in the first three decades of the 20th century. Airships of this era repeatedly exhibited operational capabilities that could not be duplicated by airplanes 40 years later.
