Sergey Brin’s Revolutionary $19 Airship

In March last year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin finally saw a return on the millions he has invested in a quest to build the world’s largest and greenest airship for humanitarian missions. After six years of development, his secretive airship company, LTA Research and Exploration, quietly made its first sale: an a 18-metre long, 12-engined, all-electric aircraft called Airship 3.0. The price? According to an FAA filing obtained by IEEE Spectrum, it was just $18.70.

This was not an effort by Brin to cash out his airship investment, but a key part of its development process. The FAA records show that the buyer of Airship 3.0 was Nicholas Garafolo, an associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Akron in Ohio.

When not working at the university, Garafolo leads LTA’s Akron research team, which includes undergraduates, graduate students and a number of alumni from UA’s College of Engineering. The nominal purchase price is probably a nod to UA’s founding year: 1870.

Airship 3.0 is actually LTA Akron’s second prototype. The first, registered in September 2018, was also a 12-engined electric airship, but only 15 meters long, or a little longer than a typical American school bus. It has undergone flight tests in Akron. Akron was where the US Navy built gargantuan airships in the 1930s, and is still home to the largest active airship hangar in the world—which, according to emails obtained under a public records request, LTA is also interested in leasing.

But Brin doesn’t want to recreate the glory days of the past, he wants to surpass them. Patents, official records and job listings suggest that LTA’s new airship will be safer, smarter and much more environmentally sustainable than the wallowing and dangerous airships of yore.

The biggest question in designing an airship is how to make it float. Hydrogen is cheap, plentiful and the lightest gas in the universe, but also extremely flammable and difficult to contain. Helium, the next lightest gas, is safely inert, but expensive and increasingly scarce. Virtually all new airships since the Hindenburg disaster have opted for helium as a lifting gas.

LTA’s airship, uniquely, will have both gases on board. Helium will be used to provide lift, while hydrogen will be used to power its electric engines. The lithium ion batteries used in today’s electric cars are too heavy for use in airships that LTA intends to deliver humanitarian aid to remote disasters. Instead, a hydrogen fuel cell will provide reliable power and could enable long range missions. [READ MORE]