"The Airlander 10, the world's largest aircraft." "Engineers have taken some of the best elements from helicopters, aircraft, and, of course, airships and wrapped them together in something that could be a complete game-changer." "To take aviation to new heights..." "What we're hoping to show with this aircraft is that we can move to a whole 'nother level of performance." "...engineers had to look to the pioneers of the past..." "Whoo-hoo!" "This is so cool!" "I love it!" "Wow!" "...to make the impossible possible. captions paid for by discovery communications" "since the birth of aviation, aerospace engineers have been creating aircraft that have pushed the boundaries to access as many places as possible across the planet." "But there are some locations and operations that aircraft have yet to conquer." "One of the things we really want to be able to do would be some fairly niche operations that no other aircraft in the world could do..." "Things like long-range disaster relief or search and rescue." "For test pilot Simon Davies, accessing the world's most remote regions requires aircraft that can fly for days and land anywhere." "For those sort of operations, you want something that behaves a bit like a helicopter..." "That can land, take off, offload cargo, or refuel without any fixed infrastructure." "You what something that's like a helicopter, but that can go further." "Engineering journalist Justin Cunningham is at a former military air base in Bedfordshire, England, to investigate an altogether new breed of aircraft." "This is Cardington airfield, home to a set of aircraft that we thought have been all but extinct, consigned to the history books." "But a group of engineers here want to change all that with this the Airlander 10." "This mammoth engineering marvel is the largest aircraft in the world." "Its design is an aeronautical masterpiece." "Airlander 10 is actually a hybrid aircraft, which means it combines elements of being a helicopter a normal aeroplane and also, the obvious one being an airship." "At a massive 300 feet long and 140 feet wide, it's the size of a football field." "Using fixed-wing helicopter and lighter-than-air technology," "Airlander 10 dwarfs everything in the skies." "With a 1.3 million-cubic-foot frameless material hull and hypersensitive pressure control, this hybrid aircraft can stay airborne, fully crewed, for five full days." "Four fixed and rotational turbo-charged diesel engines propel and maneuver the craft in any direction, and a cargo hold beneath the hull has enough capacity for an 11-ton payload." "And its inflatable skids allow the vessel to land anywhere, even water." "It's not like anything else anybody's done in aerospace for 50 or 60 years." "Airlander's structure is completely unique, and building it posed colossal engineering challenges, particularly in inflating the gigantic hull." "The inflation of the hull is absolutely critical to the structural integrity of the aircraft." "To fly safely, the gas inside the Airlander's frameless hull must not only maintain the ship's structure and provide buoyancy, but it must also be non-flammable." "But achieving this would've been impossible without the chance discovery of helium." "In 1617, father Francesco Lana de Terzi came up with an invention that rightly served the title of "airship."" "Hee-hee!" "But his dream never became a reality." "Ohh..." "In 18th century France, the Montgolfier brothers noticed how their washing bellowed when it was drying over a fire." "Ooh!" "And in 1793, they launched the first human-made flight with living passengers..." "A sheep called Montauciel..." "A duck..." "And a rooster." "Cock-a-doodle..." "But when they tried it with humans, the dangers of a midair bonfire became apparent." "Zut alors!" "That same year, fellow French brothers the Roberts launched the first manned hydrogen-gas filled balloon." "Nah, nah, nah-nah, nah!" "Hydrogen balloons and blimps became all the rage, but their flammability meant they were always vulnerable." "Uh-oh." "Fortunately, a solution wasn't far away." "Aah!" "Mechanical engineer Dan Dickrell is in Kansas to find out how the accidental discovery of helium on America's great plains changed airship safety forever." "The problem with early airships is they were filled with hydrogen." "Here, I have some hydrogen." "What I'm going to do is introduce this hydrogen gas into a solution of soapy water." "As the gas comes out, it creates bubbles." "These bubbles will be filled with hydrogen." "Now if I free these bubbles from its container, we see... ah... they float away, which is great for airships." "But there's one significant problem... fire." "This time, we're going to introduce a source of flame." "And let's watch what happens." "Here we go." "Whew!" "all right." "Hydrogen is very flammable." "However, in 1903, the tiny town of Dexter, Kansas, unintentionally stumbled upon a solution." "The 19th century had seen an economic boom in the mining of flammable gas for lighting, heating, and cooking." "And speculative drilling had hit a source of a new gas that spewed out millions of cubic feet of the stuff each day." "The town thought it had a potential fortune on hand." "The people of Dexter, they were planning to celebrate the discovery with an elaborate "lighting of the well" ceremony." "The thought was a pillar of flame would rise up and light the sky for miles around." "But when the time came to ignite the well..." "The gas just wouldn't burn." "Samples of this mysterious non-flammable gas came to chemistry professors Hamilton P. Cady and David Mcfarland." "At the university of Kansas, they made an astonishing discovery." "They concluded that the mystery gas was about 2% helium, a substance which had been thought to only exist on the sun." "Not only that, in fact, further research concluded that helium here on earth underneath the great plains existed in almost unlimited quantities." "And during world war I, when the U.S. government replaced the highly-flammable hydrogen for its airships with a non-flammable gas, helium finally took off, and for good reason." "As the people of Dexter found so many years ago, helium..." "It just won't burn." "Both buoyant and non-flammable, the military declared helium a critical war material, and this made safe airship travel possible." "Today, the helium that lies under my feet here in the great plains is used in everything, from nuclear reactors to laser beams." "If not for that chance discovery in a tiny Kansas town so long ago, the world that we know today might be a very different place." "Airlander's engineers have used a staggering 1.34 million cubic feet of this breakthrough gas helium, to inflate the world's biggest aircraft." "Despite being filled with helium, its net weight is around a ton, something like the size of a small car." "And the reason they have done that is they get this maneuverability and stability that you just wouldn't get otherwise." "And it also means they only need to provide about a ton of thrust to get this thing airborne." "The helium maintains the aircraft's shape and creates buoyancy, and drawing on fixed-wing aircraft designs, the Airlander's unique elliptical hull acts as an air foil, which creates 40% of Airlander's lift." "We're demonstrating that, by using lighter-than-air technology, mixing it with other technologies, we can move to a whole 'nother level of efficiency." "This aircraft is going to show capabilities that no other aircraft have got." "Airlander 10 is pushing the boundaries of aeronautical technology, but for this aircraft to join the greats of aviation history, its engineers had to face many more challenges..." "Just look at this place." "This is somewhere where history truly was made." "This is hangar "Y."" "...to produce more impossible engineering." "The hybrid airship Airlander 10 is the world's largest aircraft." "Built for endurance, this 300-foot-long megaship is taking the aviation world by storm." "As a test pilot, being involved in the first flight of a completely new class of aircraft was a career high for me." "Really couldn't be better." "There's something quite magical about it." "It's a very exciting experience just to be around it." "Designed to operate in environments other aircraft can't," "Airlander 10 can cruise at nearly 100 miles per hour, stay airborne with a full crew for five days and without crew for up to three weeks." "What engineers have done here..." "They've taken some of the best elements from helicopters, aircraft, and, of course, airships, and wrapped them together in something that potentially could be a complete game changer for the industry." "This resilient craft can take off in 40-mile-an-hour winds, but as it rises to altitudes over four miles, its non-rigid hull must adjust to potentially catastrophic shifts in air pressure." "Really critically, as we climb and descend, the external pressure changes, as well, and we have to maintain the hull at a constant differential pressure between the gas inside the hull and the environment, or else the envelope could expand and rip," "or the envelope could collapse." "So, how do you control the hull pressure of the world's biggest inflatable flying machine?" "Engineers turned to something called a ballonet." "And with this device, the audacious French engineers" "Arthur Krebs and Charles Renard set out to create the first fully-controllable airship in the 1870s." "And physicist Andrew Steele is just outside Paris, France, to reveal the airship's high-flying origins." "And here it is." "This is hangar "Y."" "Just look at this place." "It might look pretty run-down now, but this is somewhere where history truly was made." "Behind these huge wooden doors lies the home of Krebs and Renard's pioneering airship, la France." "Wow." "La France was 160 feet long and was set up with the latest in aeronautical technology, including the as of then untested ballonet." "So, imagine that this is our airship." "We've got an external bag, and inside, this blue balloon represents a ballonet." "Now, at the moment, there's no gas inside this airship and that means, obviously, that it's heavier than air, and so... oop... it just sinks." "So if you want to make this thing take off, what you've got to do is fill it with some lighter-than-air gas." "Now, I've got a tank of helium just here." "There we go." "Now this thing is just starting to be buoyant, and so the pilot has just enough of that buoyancy to take off." "When la France gained altitude, the external air pressure decreased, but that meant the gas inside would expand and potentially burst the hull." "That's where this balloon comes in." "We can stick some air into here." "Having a ballonet filled with normal air within the outer bag means that, as the gas expands..." "Whoa. there we go." "...air can be released from the ballonet." "Just let some of the air out of this internal balloon." "The shrinking ballonet gives the gas in the outer bag more space." "There we go." "The expandable ballonet allows the pressure between outside and inside to be regulated." "In 1884, the experimental ballonet system allowed la France to exit hangar "Y" and fly over Paris for what is now considered the first fully-controlled free flight." "Krebs and Renard's record-breaking airship was floating in these very skies almost 150 years ago." "It was their taking this simple innovation and putting it into engineering practice that revolutionized lighter-than-air travel forever." "Airlander 10's engineers have taken" "Krebs and Renard's ballonet system and super-sized it." "To give you some idea of the scale of them, they start in line with the seam that you can see just running up and down the hull, and the forward ballonets go all the way back to the forward propulsor." "And typically, on the ground, they're 2/3 of the height of the aircraft, so they're absolutely cavernous." "Concealed within hull compartments," "Airlander has four giant airfield ballonets." "As it takes off, a sophisticated venting system forces air out of them." "This process allows the helium inside the hull to expand, maintaining a constant air pressure between the inside and the outside of the ship." "We have a fixed amount of helium." "As we climb and descend, that helium expands and contracts, and we account for that expansion and contraction by the large air ballonets." "Incredibly, this happens automatically." "We're underneath the forward-right ballonet, and this is valve associated with that ballonet." "So, as we climb, these valves will open under spring pressure and let some of the air out to maintain the hull at constant pressure." "If I pull on the valve, you can hear some of the air rushing out." "And the valves pop closed again." "And when the Airlander descends, the ballonets increase in size as the helium gas compresses." "Over here, one of the key devices is a fan which we use to pump air into the ballonets as the aircraft descends." "So, you just hear in the background the fan running now." "It's pumping quite a high volume of air into the ballonets just to top off pressure." "By bringing ballonet technology into the 21st century," "Airlander 10 can stay airborne for an unprecedented five days with a crew and potentially up to three weeks unmanned." "But to land in some of the most inhospitable locations on the planet, its designers had to turn to yet another iconic innovation from the past..." "Whoo-hoo!" "This is such a privilege to be flying in this absolutely iconic, brilliant machine." "...to create even more impossible engineering." "The Airlander 10." "As the world's largest aircraft, the hybrid airship is no longer a thing of the past." "By adding some different technologies together, we can move to a whole 'nother level of performance for aviation." "One of Airlander's key tasks is to carry out operations in the most isolated locations on the planet." "Capable of delivering vital supplies, 11 tons of cargo can be stored in the 150-foot payload area, fixed just beneath the hull." "But actually landing this cargo in difficult environments is another matter, creating a huge challenge for test pilot Simon Davies." "For long-range logistics or operating out of remote, unprepared areas, the ability to land in confined areas would be a huge advantage to this aircraft." "You really would want a vertical-landing capability." "So how do you hover a 300-foot-long aircraft and land it with pinpoint precision?" "This would have been impossible without a great innovation of the past..." "The tail rotor." "Even mother nature finds hovering difficult." "Only a handful of creatures can do it, and only one..." "The hummingbird..." "Can fly backwards." "Pbht!" "Throughout history, humanity has attempted to imitate this very useful skill, with varying degrees of success." "Bravo!" "But from Da Vinci's flying screw to the jet packs of the '60s..." "That's left me shaken." "...none have taken off like one of the 20th century's greatest inventions..." "The helicopter." "Whoo-hoo!" "this is so cool!" "I love it!" "Wow!" "This is such a privilege to be flying in this absolutely iconic, brilliant machine." "Dr. Rhys Morgan is soaring high above the countryside in an American helicopter that revolutionized the aviation world in 1945..." "The bell 47." "This particular model of the bell 47 is actually 47 years old, but it doesn't really differ that much from the original model that was designed back in 1945." "This helicopter marked a milestone in popular aviation, but it owes a great deal to a pioneering engineer who, just a few years earlier, made a game-changing design breakthrough." "Born in the Ukraine, American engineer Igor Sikorsky has been experimenting with the tail rotor concept since 1909." "It was a complex, ongoing aerodynamic challenge that continued to foil both him and his peers." "Helicopters fly by having blades that rotate at really fast speeds around a single axis, and that creates lift." "But early helicopters suffered from really bad stability and control issues, and that's because, as the blades are rotating at such high speeds, they're generating huge amounts of torque, or turning force." "So as the blades spin one way, the fuselage wants to spin the opposite direction, and that makes it really uncomfortable and very, very difficult to control." "Engineers experimented with different rotor configurations with mixed success." "But Sikorsky took the best rotor systems out there and combined them to make the world's first truly viable helicopter." "What Sikorsky did was have a single main rotor with a tail boom supporting a smaller anti-torque rotor, which counteracted the fuselage's natural tendency to rotate in the other direction." "As the main rotor spins in one direction, the smaller tail rotor spins in the opposite direction, producing a counteracting force to stabilize the fuselage." "It really transformed these flying machines." "This combination of rotor technologies, demonstrated in Sikorsky's vs-300a, created a blueprint for all further rotary-wing craft to come." "And Sikorsky's breakthrough tail rotor allowed the revolutionary bell 47 from bell helicopter to become the first certified by civil aviation authorities." "They've been used in all sorts of ways, from crop spraying to delivering mail." "Thanks to its ability to land on a sixpence and hover into areas that just were not previously possible, the bell 47 transformed how people thought about air travel." "And its full-bubble cockpit design would define the shape of helicopters for years to come." "But incorporating the helicopter's rotary technology into an airship the size of a football field is no easy feat." "To do this, the engineers had to take this technology another step further..." "We'll be able to do things that simply no other aircraft in the world can do." "...to make the impossible possible." "The Airlander 10." "As the world's largest aircraft, its mission is to perform rescue operations in the world's most remote and inaccessible locations." "To get there, Airlander's team has drawn on the rotor system of the helicopter and furthered it to fly an aircraft the size of a football field." "To lift off, test pilot Simon Davies employs two rotating engines for what's known as vector thrust." "If I select the vector to 20 degrees up, and then outside, you can see the whole docked propeller and engine assembly now pointing 20 degrees up." "But to produce near-vertical movement," "Airlander's engines are equipped to do more." "So, we're at the forward-right engine's propulsor number four." "To be more responsive, to also achieve a greater downward thrust, we can use the vanes behind the propeller to further deflect the airflow and change the thrust on the engine." "When these engines finally rotate 180 degrees, they will allow Airlander to take off and land practically anywhere." "We'll be able to move the vectors fully up to provide pure lift and zero thrust, and then we'll be able to fly effectively as a helicopter and land in confined spaces." "The vision to evolve helicopter technology sets Airlander apart from the rest of the world's flying machines." "So, if we can make the aircraft behave a bit more like a helicopter, we'll be able to land in confined spaces or hover over a point to deliver underslung loads." "We'd give the most possible flexibility to operators of the Airlander aircraft." "So, using thrust vectoring, we'll be able to do things that simply no other aircraft in the world can do." "Airlander's helicopter-like capabilities will allow it to navigate and land in hostile territory with extreme environmental conditions." "But this also poses a significant challenge, because the hull isn't made of metal." "Engineers here at Cardington, they needed to find a material that was up to the job." "It obviously needs to be super lightweight, but this is a vehicle that needs to go anywhere, so that material needs to be super durable." "So how do you ensure this inflatable airship's fabric hull will withstand the rigors of extreme air travel?" "Achieving this would've been impossible without the inspired discovery of Kevlar." "Go, go, go, go!" "This is such a gorgeous, little car." "Physicist Suzie Sheehy is revealing how Kevlar came to be..." "Whoo!" "yeah!" "...during the swinging '60s." "Saving weight in a vehicle can make a huge difference in terms of performance and efficiency, and in the mid-1960s, around the time..." "Aah!" "this gorgeous car was winning races, scientists in the U.S.A." "Came up with a way of doing just that." "Whoo-hoo-hoo!" "With experts predicting an impending oil crisis, researchers started to focus on trying to reduce the weight and therefore increase the efficiency of the cars." "And one area they started to focus on was the steel bands inside the tires that give them their strength." "In 1965, research scientist Stephanie Kwolek was working on finding a new type of ultra-strong synthetic material." "After spinning one of her test solutions into a fiber, she discovered that the ultra-strong thread was practically impossible to destroy." "This new wonder-material was called Kevlar, and it's revolutionized our world." "To see just how strong Kevlar really is," "Suzie is going to push this revolutionary material to its breaking point." "This is Kevlar, and the reason this material is so incredibly strong is because of both its chemical structure and the way it's manufactured." "So, Kevlar starts out as kind of a long, thin chain of molecules." "These molecules extend and form straight parallel chains." "Because of this configuration, the strands form hydrogen bonds, which act like glue." "To put this to the test, a strand of Kevlar is compared to a strand of steel." "Though the same size, the steel is 10 times the weight." "This tensile testing machine can pull the samples apart with a maximum force of 5 1/2 tons." "All right, so, I've got my steel all set up and ready to go, and I've got a high-speed camera watching it so we can see exactly what happens when it breaks." "So, all ready to go." "So, it's stretching apart." "You can see it straightening the wire out." "Ooh!" "okay." "There, it's gone." "The graph reveals the steel broke under 110 pounds of force." "Let's try the Kevlar." "So, it looks quite different from the steel." "Just kind of looks like a taut ribbon." "Ooh!" "Oh." "And as it fails, it sort of pops out, so it fails in a really different way to the stainless steel, and you can see all these broken fibers here now have no strength whatsoever." "The graph shows the Kevlar broke under 440 pounds of force." "Thanks to the pioneering work of Stephanie Kwolek," "Kevlar can now be manufactured with such toughness that it now has eight to nine times the strength of steel of comparative weight, and its applications are almost endless." "To build the world's largest aircraft, engineers have woven the latest kind of Kevlar into a 75,000-square-foot hull using three layers of high-tech material." "What they decided on was not one material but three, and I've got a sample here." "On the outside, that's made of tedlar, and that's extremely weather-resistant." "It's going to allow it to land on any surface, as well as protecting it from weathering and U.V. rays." "In the middle is a layer of Mylar, which contains the helium atoms." "And on the inside, 50 years after its discovery, lies kevlar's latest spin-off." "Vectran... super strong, derived from Kevlar, and that gives this structural rigidity." "And you can actually see the individual weaved fabric there, just to add that directional strength that they need for this elliptical structure." "Pound for pound, this extraordinary synthetic material is 10 times stronger than aluminum." "It's a really critical component that makes this airship a success." "Airlander's innovations are making long endurance flight a real possibility, but to make it a reality, its designers had to draw on more breakthrough technology from the past..." "Oh, there we go." "That's amazing!" "Wow." "You can really see the laser just bouncing around." "...to produce more impossible engineering." "In 2016, engineers in Bedfordshire, England, launched an extraordinary addition to the skies." "The hybrid airship Airlander 10 is the largest aircraft in the world." "It's designed to fly up to five days continuously with a full crew and potentially three weeks in unmanned mode." "The drive for greater and greater efficiency in aerospace, we can move to whole 'nother level of efficiency, and that's primarily what we're trying to do here." "As engineers prepare for the next flight, pilot Simon Davies has the job of maneuvering this colossal craft." "As a pilot, it's absolutely vital that you have complete trust in your flight controls, and they're going to give you the same repeatable results every single time." "But connecting the joystick to the steerable propulsors 260 feet away at Airlander's rear is an engineering challenge." "So, we need reliable signaling, and we need to save weight wherever possible." "Every gram that you can save really counts." "Traditional electrical signaling cable is too heavy and prone to interference, so how do you provide a failsafe signal between the flight controls and the steerable propulsors?" "This would've been impossible without a genius innovation of the past..." "Fiber optics." "Porthcurno in Cornwall, England, is a picturesque seaside location." "But physicist Andrew Steele isn't here for the view." "He's unearthing an historic innovation that once linked this tiny beach cove to every corner of the globe." "By 1920, this beautiful, little beach was the single most connected place in the world." "It was the hub of the closest thing the Victorians had to the Internet." "At the height of the British empire, global telecommunications were taking off, and in 1870, the first of Porthcurno's many copper telegraph cables was laid in a system eventually stretching underwater for over 5,000 miles." "The remnants of this ambitious system are still visible here today." "Lengths of cable like this would've connected Cornwall to the rest of the world, and it's no exaggeration to say that these kick-started a communications revolution." "At the center of this revolution was Porthcurno's tiny cable hut." "In its heyday, this is where all of the cables from around the world would terminate." "Each one of these was connected to thousands of miles of continuous cable running under the ocean." "But soon, there was a need to handle higher volumes of more complex information, and the copper-wired electrical network became overwhelmed." "In the 1960s, three American scientists..." "Donald Keck, Robert Maurer, and Peter Shultz..." "Were looking for an alternative." "They wanted to harness the speed of light to send signals via glass fibers." "So, imagine we want to send a light signal..." "That's this laser pen here..." "From this bucket down to that bucket on the floor." "If we shine the laser through here, you can see a dot comes out on the wall over there, and that is because light travels in straight lines." "And this is basically the problem that Keck, Maurer, and Shultz were facing." "Light doesn't want to go around corners, and in their glass fibers, whenever the curvature was too tight, light was escaping." "To overcome this tremendous problem, these scientists had to make the impossible possible..." "You can actually see a green glow down in that bucket." "We've successfully sent our message." "...and this communications breakthrough has also gone on to change the future of aviation." "The Airlander 10 is the largest aircraft on the planet, but connecting the joystick to the steerable propulsors reliably and with lightweight cables, draws on a great innovation of the past... fiber optics." "Keck, Maurer, and Shultz discovered that coating the internal surface of the glass fibers with a specific compound of chemicals created something called total internal reflection." "You can see this flow of transparent liquid is a bit like a glass fiber going around a corner." "So, now if we shine our laser through again, and there... oh, there we go." "That's amazing!" "Wow." "You can actually see a green glow down in that bucket." "We've successfully sent our message." "Wow. it's amazing." "You can really see the laser just bouncing around, and this is just like how it would pass down a glass fiber." "And it's this technique called total internal reflection that Keck, Maurer, and Shultz used to reliably transmit signals of light down fibers made of glass." "Called fiber optics, this radical technology had a 1,000 times greater capacity than copper and could send information 100 times further." "Today, the picture-perfect Porthcurno continues its unlikely role as a gateway to the world, with modern fiber optics coming ashore from beneath the oceans." "More than 50 years after its creation, fiber optics are governing the controls of the Airlander 10 airship with a state-of-the-art flight system known as fly-by-light." "So, when I move the stick, the signaling is, to all intents and purposes, instantaneous." "There's a box that digitizes the signal and measures the deflection of the stick, and that signal is then sent around six completely independent paths, so if we have a break in a wire, we can carry on operating the aircraft safely." "Connecting the central flight deck to every corner of Airlander's gigantic hull requires over four miles of surface-mounted fiber optics." "This is the gland that contains the fiber optic cables." "It's not buried behind panels." "It's outside." "It's accessible." "It's lightweight." "It's robust to the elements." "And it just gives us confidence that our systems all operate reliably and repeatably every time." "As the signals fly along these fiber optics, upon reaching the actuators and control surfaces, they're converted into power, driving the control mechanisms in an instant." "The scale of the aircraft, the complexity of the flight control systems..." "The fiber optic cables give us reliability and robustness in operation." "It's a great solution for this aircraft." "Launched in 2016, Airlander 10 signals the rebirth of an aeronautical era that many thought was long gone." "This really is the Genesis of a new generation of airships." "And this unique hybrid aircraft will open up the skies." "The process of developing our knowledge and understanding of the aircraft and improving capability all the time is really exciting." "Inspired by the innovators of the past..." "Whoo-hoo!" "This is so cool!" "I love it!" "...adapting their ideas, and making discoveries of their own, Airlander's engineers and pilots are making their Mark on aviation history." "There's immense pride over the technical achievements and the things we've learned and the game-changing capability that we're bringing." "They're succeeding in making the impossible..." "Possible." "You come and show people around, and they say to you," ""do you know what?" "You've got the most amazing job."" "So, for me, working here and leading this program is the most amazing thing, a real privilege."