Mark Piesing's Blog, page 6

My latest comment piece for The Bookseller: The Author’s Dilemma

Like founders of startups, authors have difficult decisions to make when it comes to scaling their business.

Read my latest comment piece for The Bookseller in full below – or the original here.

Check out my The Bookseller comment piece on publishing in another country here.

Watch my discussion for Byte the Book about the path to publication and the author–agent relationship here.

Click here to find out more about my critically acclaimed book, N-4 Down: the hunt for the Arctic airship Italia

When I first mentioned to a “tech-bro” friend of mine that I thought being a full-time writer was like running a startup like his, he nearly choked on his craft beer.

Yet, as I move into my second year as a full-time writer, the more I believe it is true. And it helps to explain why so many people dream of being a full-time writer, but why it is so hard to be – and remain – one, especially in 2023.

Obviously, a writer resembles a startup in that they are both prone to hype, promising the world before delivering their product. But the similarities go far deeper than this.

I can still remember the moment just over a year ago when my wife had left for work, my children had left for school, my colleague – the dog – had been walked, and I was left looking at a blank computer screen. Over the previous few years, I had taught part-time while I worked as a freelance journalist and traditionally published my first book.

During that period, my goal had been survival – to somehow stay in the writing game while fitting it around the kind of part-time job that didn’t, by necessity, respect part-time hours. Now, as a bona fide full-time writer there was suddenly too much time, and I had to think in a new way about what I was doing.

Writers are entrepreneurs, and writers are also founders of a one-person startup. Like any founder, I needed to make sure my startup had clear targets. I didn’t think Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” worked for a writer, but there was plenty of other advice handed out by founders – such as understand the market, identify your USP, set short-term and long-term targets, and even know what success looks like – which did help me structure my days.

For, yes, I was a founder of a startup, but one in which I must play all the roles myself, from product development to social media, marketing, business development and finance – I am sure I have missed some out – while somehow keeping to the nine-to-five days I was advised to follow to avoid burnout.

There is nothing unusual about this, but it is far removed from what many people believe a writer does. It also feels like there is greater reward for the risk taking in other sectors than as a writer, where the midlist has become a prison rather than a career, the chance of a Sunday Times bestseller feels ever more unlikely and AI is looking over your shoulder.

Luckily, writers don’t have to pitch to venture capitalists (VCs), merely justify their choices to mentors, partners, parents or close friends, which may be worse if they are itching to stage an intervention to stop this madness.

I didn’t think Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” worked for a writer, but there was plenty of other advice handed out by founders – such as understand the market, identify your USP, set short-term and long-term targets, and even know what success looks like – which did help me structure my days

I was told quite categorically at a workshop that it was only possible to be a full-time writer if you had a partner with a well-paid job to support you, which of course is true, at least in the beginning, but I think it is more useful to think of it in terms of seed capital, even if this seed capital is your partner’s patience.

For some reason I have never met a VC who wants to invest in a writer. So, as I am sadly not independently wealthy, I was lucky to be able to turn to some of the usual sources, such as “the bank of mum and dad”, my partner, and even a timely, bittersweet inheritance, to raise enough seed capital for the short-term freedom to write my next book to the best of my ability, continue to grow alternative income streams, such as script writing, for my solo startup, and survive the sometimes nervy lengthy wait for advances from a traditional publisher and invoices to be paid, without worrying too much about direct debits. An option that is not available to many writers.

But this seed capital must work even harder. It also must support me through the time-consuming – if fun – business of marketing and business development by building a following on social media, running a newsletter, appearing on podcasts, giving lectures – forgetting the time they take to research, write and pitch – and attending events, all of which can be hard to monetise. Let alone the grind of business administration.

The problem is that seed capital, financial or emotional, is not finite – and it is easy to burn through while you are enjoyably chasing targets. Like other founder’s, your burn rate becomes a calculation that your brain likes to churn over in the middle of the night. So, as for many startups, is scaling up the only way for my writer startup to successfully grow?

Scaling up to increase my productivity is hard to do as a writer because unless I employ a ghost writer, I alone can write a book by Mark Piesing. So, the only way to scale up, I believe – finances allowing – is to find skilled freelancers who can do all those time-consuming jobs that cut down the amount of time I can spend each day with my manuscript and other income streams, and quite rightly, these professionals don’t come cheap. Such jobs include research, copy-editing of a manuscript, fact checking, social media management, publicity and accounts. I am sure there are more.

Scaling up to this extent is, of course, an expensive strategy that only the more successful authors can afford to follow. Hiring a publicist to support a book launch can cost as much as the UK average book advance.

So, as I enter my second year as a full-time writer and continue working towards my next book, I face the same dilemma as other founders do. Stick with what is working for me right now and go for break-even – or twist and go for growth and scale-up the Mark Zuckerberg way by trying to raise further funding.

I still haven’t made up my mind. It’s not an easy choice. And it doesn’t help that the realities of these commercial questions for writers are not spoken about often or openly enough.

A double first! My first piece for The Spectator (US ed) and my first book review!

Last month my first piece for The Spectator (US ed) and my first book was published in print and online. You can read it in full below – or by clicking this link.

For my first, I had the privilege to write about Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar’s blockbuster The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.

My next review has already been commissioned.

Broken Arrow isn’t just the title of a mediocre 1996 film, but the term for a serious accident involving a nuclear weapon. Over the last seventy years, the United States has officially experienced thirty-two Broken Arrows, where a nuclear weapon has been in a crash or fire, accidentally been dropped — or just disappeared. Incredibly, six have been lost and never recovered.

Artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Mustafa Suleyman tells one such story in his new book, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma. In 1961, a B-52 bomber carrying two live hydrogen bombs broke up in the skies above Goldsboro, North Carolina. One bomb disintegrated when it plunged into a muddy field. The other survived and had switched to armed with only one of its four anti-detonation mechanisms left in place.

For Suleyman, the Goldsboro incident, and the thirty-one other Broken Arrows, illustrate how hard it is to contain a technology — and how much that can depend on a hefty dose of pure good luck. What’s more, if humans have had only partial success at controlling the proliferation of a physical technology as expensive, industrialized and massive as nuclear, what chance will they have of stopping the spread of digital technology with all the benefits AI is supposed to offer?

“The coming wave” is also an apt description for this impressive book itself. Suleyman, with writer Michael Bhaskar, skillfully weaves together fantastic narratives about Hindu flood myths, the reasons why the printing press came so late to the Ottoman Empire and even an episode of The Simpsons — of course — to carry readers irresistibly into a discussion about AI that they might not otherwise have entertained. While its ebullient, almost upbeat tone can sometimes seem at odds with the dark themes it addresses, the book reflects Suleyman’s passion for what he does and his own uncertainty about the outcome.

He is formidably well qualified to confront “the 21st century’s great dilemma.” He was born a long way from Silicon Valley, in working-class north London. Dropping out of Oxford University, he became a social-justice campaigner, even working for the left-wing mayor of London Ken Livingstone. He went on to co-found DeepMind, the British AI company since acquired by Google, because he wanted “to create a system that could imitate and then eventually outperform all human cognitive abilities, from vision and speech to planning and imagination, and ultimately empathy and creativity.” The reason he gives for being willing to take this risk is to help humanity overcome challenges from “climate change to aging populations to sustainable food.”

As Suleyman outlines in his book, the steps DeepMind has made towards this goal are extraordinary. The ancient East Asian game of Go is far more complex than chess, and it should have taken decades for a computer program to beat a human Go champion. In 2016 DeepMind’s AlphaGo algorithm beat world Go champion Lee Sedol four games to one — so, a sliver of hope for humanity there.

Suleyman worked with Google to address the ethics of AI, and is now the CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI. He writes in The Coming Wave that waves of technology and innovation are at the center of his understanding of our species’ past and its future and explains why he believes containment of AI will be so difficult to achieve, but why it is so important to try — although his waves sound more like tsunamis.

To the DeepMind co-founder, a wave is a set of technologies that come together around the same time, powered by one or more general-purpose technologies that will fundamentally shape — even shake — human society, because “proliferation is the default.”

Each wave follows a “single, seemingly immutable law”: that the technology gets “cheaper and easier to use, and ultimately it proliferates far and wide,” finally becoming invisible, part of the background to our lives. And it is these waves that humans have rid- den to become the dominant species on the planet, so much so that we are in a symbiotic relationship with our technology — Homo technologicus, Suleyman calls us.

Suleyman refuses to get distracted by the “esoteric questions from otherwise intelligent people” about conscious superintelligent AI when the stakes are already so high. For him, artificial intelligence, the latest general-purpose technology, will combine with other no less scary technologies, such as synthetic biology or robotics, to “usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.” A terrorist could use these technologies to engineer a killer virus that could “cause more than a billion deaths in a matter of months.” Technotopia and dystopia are never far apart in The Coming Wave.

Suleyman titles his penultimate chapter, hopefully one hopes, “Containment Must Be Possible.” His suggestions about how “containment” of AI is to be effected seem a bit anticlimactic after the compelling preceding chapters. However, he includes sensible, practical solutions: checking that the data AI uses to learn from is not biased; ensuring transparency through opening up AI systems to external scrutiny; creating government regulation and, more dramatically, using choke points to slow the pace of AI development — the US, for example, is now restricting China’s supply of advanced computer chips — and social protest.

It is inevitable that in a book on such an epic scale some questions will not be fully answered. First it would be fascinating to know the deeper motivations for Mustafa Suleyman’s drive to create an AI that will outperform humanity, how it connects to his past and how he feels about what he has created — Oppenheimer famously opposed the creation of the H-bomb.

Then there are questions regarding exactly how AI will address such problems as climate change, food shortages or aging populations. The old joke that AI will solve these by eliminating all humans goes unremarked upon. Finally, The Second Wave is written from a Western point of view. How does AI look to Chinese scientists?

All the same, The Coming Wave is a rousing call-to-arms for humanity. It’s time we heard the call.

This article was originally published in  The Spectator ’s November 2023 World edition. 

I gave a virtual guest lecture at the University of San Fransisco!

“Your guest lecture was very good indeed” – Joseph May, CEO of Slipstream Services.

“Mark, fantastic job. Thanks so much for doing it. Your presentation was very well received by the class, and I learned a few things I didn’t know, which makes me even more appreciative.” – Professor John J. Geohegan.

I had the privilege recently of giving a virtual guest lecture on John J. Geoghegan’s fascinating course, When Giants Ruled The Sky, at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning, University of San Fransisco. My topic was the Race to Fly to the North Pole in the 1920s. This was the subject of my book N-4 DOWN: The Hunt for the Arctic airship Italia (HarperCollins, 2021).

I was joined as a guest speaker on the course by the visionary and inspirational Alan Weston, CEO of LTA Research, and the fantastic S. C. Gwynne, the bestselling author of His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine.

The course is based on John’s excellent book of the same name When Giants Ruled The Sky.

The robot aircraft with a nightmarish nuclear mission

The atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 were too dangerous for conventional aircraft to observe. Pioneering remote-controlled drones, however, were a perfect match.

Read in full below – or by clicking on this link – my latest feature article for BBC Future.

BONUS FEATURE – scroll to the end to read the tragic story of one of the Operation Crossroad’s drone pilots which was shared with me by curator Roger Connor, and which forced The Smithsonian to test this aircraft in their collection for radiation.

The newsreel whirls into action. “OPERATION CROSSROADS… UNDERWATER BLAST AGAIN ROCKS BIKINI ATOLL…” A site which makes history for the motion picture camera.

It is impossible to take your eyes away from the monstrous beauty and obscenity of the nuclear weapon explosion – only the fifth in the history of humanity. Or the sight of target warships shrunk to the size of toys by the vastness of the mushroom cloud, disappearing into the furious white depths of the sea.

In July 1946, the United States exploded two nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll in what was called Operation Crossroads. The first was exploded in the air, the second under water – and the stakes were high. These were the first tests of nuclear weapons since the Manhattan Project’s Trinity test in July 1945, and the first detonations since the destruction of Nagasaki the following month – and they involved a task force of more than 42,000 personnel, 250 ships and 150 aircraft, to set up, run, observe, record and analyse the tests.

But how do you observe a nuclear test when the blast and radiation are so hazardous to humans? You use drones.

The newsreel mentioned above cut to a shot of a single-engine fighter aircraft flying through the radioactive mushroom cloud, but it was no ordinary aircraft. It was a pilotless plane, and it wasn’t the only one deployed during the tests.

The Boeing B-17s were flown towards the radioactive zone under the control of a piloted aircraft (Credit: National Archives and Records Administration)

Off camera were a fleet of pilotless Grumman Hellcats and Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses. These warplanes, fresh off the production line at the end of World War Two, had been “droned” by the addition of a set of radio-controlled instruments, and, certainly in the B-17s, television cameras as well, to allow a pilot to fly the plane from a “control” aircraft nearby or a truck on the ground.

Bombs and guns were replaced by instruments such as air scoops and collection bags, filter boxes, Geiger counters, radio controlled cameras, telemeters and electronic recording instruments, to measure the radioactivity in the mushroom cloud and the effect of the blast on the plane itself.

For their first public test the pilotless aircraft had to make the most dangerous flight of all. They had to fly through the mushroom cloud.

Scientist Nikola Tesla and science fiction pioneer HG Wells conceived of radio-controlled flying weapons before World War One. In 1917, this vision came one step closer to reality when Britain flew the first pilotless aircraft. Named the  the “Aerial Target“, it was a rather insect-like experimental radio-controlled monoplane designed by planemaker de Havilland. Not to be outdone, the Americans tested an aerial torpedo called the Kettering Bug the following year. The biplane-like contraption used a gyroscope to fly into targets up to 75 miles (121 km) away.

In 1923 the first full-size radio-controlled aeroplane flew without a pilot at the Étampes Aerodrome in France

By 1899–1900, there’s already discussions about the idea that an aircraft could be guided by radio and turned into a weapon,” says Roger Connor, curator at the Aeronautics Department, Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “And in World War I, pretty much all the warring powers are investing in attempts to do this.”

Neither the Aerial Target nor the Kettering Bug saw service in WWI, but this didn’t stop the development of the technology. On 15 September 1924, for the first timein US history a remote-controlled aircraft took-off, was put through maneuvres and landed safely without a human pilot on board. Eleven years later, the British flew the DH.82B Queen Bee based on the Tiger Moth training plane using remote control. It was essentially a Tiger Moth without the pilot. More than 400 of these machines were made by 1943.

The atomic blasts were too dangerous for manned aircraft to fly near (Credit: Getty Images)

Inspired by the British success, the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) and US Navy both developed target drones: the air force used smaller machines, the navy, obsolete Boeing biplane fighters. In World War II, they extended the idea to large, multi-engined bombers. In World War II, they extended the idea to large, multi-engined bombers, and small “attack” drones.

At the start of these programmes, a human pilot had to fly these lumbering machines off the runway, and then parachute out. By the end, a pilot could perform the whole operation remotely. The small, purpose-built drones were able to drop a bomb or a torpedo on a target 425 mi (684 km) away – and saw some action against Japan in the Pacific.

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The atomic bomb marker inside your body An early fear of a nuclear end The nuclear weapons no-one can find

“While they weren’t particularly successful as weapons,” says Connor, “by the end of the war, when planning for [Operation] Crossroads is taking place it’s a fairly easy decision to say okay, these are the platforms that we would use for this purpose.”

Although some aspects of Operation Crossroads didn’t go to plan, the drones exceeded their controllers’ expectations.

F6F Hellcat fighters were converted so they could be flown through the radioactive zones via remote control (Credit: National Archives and Records Administration)

In both tests, the drones flew where humans feared. They passed through the mushroom clouds and over them, east to west, at altitudes from 10,000ft to 28,000ft (3,040 to 8,534m). It was only when the mushroom cloud of the second test didn’t rise as high as expected that some of the drones didn’t detect any radiation.

The drone fleet performed well during the tests. The Hellcats launched by catapult from an aircraft carrier, and all but one safely made it back to dry land. Its controls failed before the detonation of the bomb. Another, emerged from the mushroom cloud completely white, covered in ice, and a control plane came close to disaster, when the pilot flew too close to the billowing cloud.

It was the first B-17 operation in which all the take-offs, flights and landings took place without pilots, and the drones’ missions were achieved without significant incidents. A few doors and windows on the planes blew in – and the brakes of one bomber were damaged in the explosion, forcing it to overrun on its return.

The data they gathered about the nature of the mushroom cloud by measuring radiation levels, collecting air samples, and taking synchronised pictures by radio command furthered scientific understanding of nuclear explosions – as did the Geiger counters readings of the radioactivity on the aircraft themselves when they had landed.

“The tests marked the first time that drones were used in a significant way for data gathering,” says Connor. “The drones could go where no human-crewed aircraft could. There was simply no other viable option for the type of sampling done by these drones. This established the Cold War paradigm of using drones for missions that were too ‘dull, dirty, or dangerous’ for other aircraft.”

This image of one of the Bikini Atoll blasts was captured by an unmanned drone flying overhead (Credit: Getty Images)

A fortnight later, two of the Boeing B-17 drones went on to set the record for the longest unmanned flight with a 2,174-mile (3,500-km) journey from Hawaii to California.

The New York Times rather prematurely proclaimed that drones “will soon be a familiar sight in the skyways of the world as rehearsals begin for ‘push-button war’ in the air…

“Fleets of drones controlled by ‘mother’ ships – all of them carrying bombs – could probably saturate the air defences of any city in the world.

Yet the role of these early drones has largely been forgotten. “I think this is a simple case of availability bias,” says Sarah Kreps, John L Wetherill Professor, Cornell University, and Director, Cornell Tech Policy Institute. “We have recency with Predators and Reapers [drone types used today] so it can be easy to assume that time started with these and to discount the ancestors of these technologies.”

The drone B-17s had to fly through the radioactive cloud and then land at nearby bases so their samples could be collected (Credit: National Archives and Records Administration)

But this “push-button” future was still a way off in 1946. A drone squadron of converted wartime aircraft continued to be used to monitor American nuclear tests, and as targets for the missiles developed in the 1950s, until they were replaced by faster, droned jet fighters. During the Korean War, pilotless Hellcats packed with explosives tried to hit targets that would have been suicidal for crewed aircraft, with limited success. Drones then went on to be widely used in the Vietnam War.

“Some estimates suggest that the use of B-17s in Bikini Atoll accelerated the developments of drones by at least a year,” says Kreps. “I would see the experiences with atomic drones as just another data point in the long, but punctuated evolution of drones over the last century or more.”

There was another legacy of these atomic drones. “They’ve always tended to work in the shadows, validating new weapons systems, or operating in reconnaissance in areas that are too difficult for other aircraft to operate in,” says Connor. “All of those are things still don’t get talked about… and deliberately so.”

I have just recorded an episode of the History Hack Podcast!

I have just recorded an episode of the amazing History Hack Podcast!

History Hack is one of my podcasts – and my episode about my book N-4 DOWN the hunt for the Arctic airship Italia will be broadcast later this year, early next.

I will share more details when I get them.

Find out more about N-4 DOWN

Watch the N-4 DOWN trailer

Read The Wall Street Journal review

Read The Forbes review

Read the New York Journal of Books review

Watch my talk for the Royal Museums Greenwich at the National Maritime Museum.

Listen to my interview with Aviation Extended podcast

How do we warn future generations to avoid our buried nuclear waste?

I have always wanted to write for National Geographic, so it was great to have my first piece published by them earlier this year, particularly on the topic of nuclear semiotics which fascinates me.

Read it in full by clicking here (subscription needed).

When it is no longer classified as premium content, I will share it here as well.

I wrote 2 episodes of Noiser’s Real Dictators podcast and the feedback has been excellent!

In the Spring, I wrote the scripts for the two episodes of Noiser’s fabulous Real Dictators series on Attila the Hun – The Sword of Mars and The Scourge of God – which have now been produced and released, and the feedback has been excellent.

Hearing an incredible actor like Paul McGann speak my words sent chills down my spine!

Here is just some of the feedback for these two episodes! Click to enlarge!

My latest for The Smithsonian: Leviathans of the Air

Please find in full below – or by clicking this link -the FIVE double pages of my cover story and latest feature article for The Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine, published to coincide with the first flight of the USS Shenandoah, the first of four US Navy giant rigid airships, and the launch of a virtual National Air and Space Museum exhibition on the behemoth.

For this piece I also interview many veterans of the airship industry because I wanted to answer the question, what is it like to work in an industry that is not supposed to exist any more?

I also had the privilege to ask young men and women who are just starting in the industry their thoughts as well.

Thanks to everyone who helped me with this piece, including my great editor and the fantastic people I interviewed, who I could not feature in the piece.

IN PRINT

ONLINE

At 6:50 pm on September 4, 1923, the first American-built rigid airship took to the skies. The U.S. Navy had designated the 680-foot-long zeppelin ZR-1. A month later, it would be formally christened the USS Shenandoah. But that day, newspapers dubbed the vehicle “Leviathan of the Air.”

Front-page photos captured the scene: 250 men clutching ropes, slowly dragging the silver airship from the vast dark maw of Hangar No. 1 at New Jersey’s Lakehurst Naval Air Station. Engineers had spent seven months in the 224-foot-high hangar assembling parts that had been fabricated at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia. The design for ZR-1 had been reverse-engineered from a German airship forced down in 1917 after dropping 4,600 pounds of bombs on targets in Great Britain.

Images of the airship passing through the 1,350-ton steel doors of the hangar evoke another scene: when NASA’s Saturn V rocket slowly emerged from the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building in the late 1960s—the first leg of its long trip to the moon. Both moments heralded a new era of flight aboard colossal craft that loomed over their Lilliputian builders. And, like the rockets that would carry U.S. astronauts into space, the USS Shenandoah and the growing fleet of U.S. airships owed their existence to weapons of terror developed by German engineers when the world was at war.

Similar to the Saturn V, the builders of the first American zeppelin (“The Mightiest Ship of the Air!” proclaimed newspapers) had big dreams for their creation. The Navy envisioned a fleet of commercial airships that, like merchant marine vessels, would form a reserve force that could be mobilized to defend the country. Some believed the airships would completely revolutionize warfare. “The ZR-1 is the forerunner of the great airplane carriers of the future, those mother birds that will convey flocks of steel-beaked fliers armed with huge bombs capable of destroying battleships, forts, and encampments,” declared an editorial in the Maine-based Kennebec Journal. At one point, the Navy even planned to send the ZR-1 on an expedition to the North Pole.

Construction of the USS Shenandoah began on February 11, 1922. The airship’s first flight was on September 4, 1923.

But while the Saturn V would fulfill its promise of opening a new chapter of exploration, the airships would have a less illustrious destiny. To be sure, the lighter-than-air behemoths enjoyed moments of glory—most famously as aerial cruise ships outfitted with dining halls, cabins, and observation decks. Indeed, these early airships offered a luxury experience in the air that would be unmatched for decades.

Unfortunately, with the airships’ huge size came massive maintenance and refueling expenses, not to mention ground crews the size of small armies to handle landings and moorings. Safety became a growing concern: The lightweight construction materials made airships vulnerable to high winds and thunderstorms. The USS Shenandoah crashed in 1925, followed by the USS Akron in 1933 and the USS Macon in 1935. Meanwhile, as aviation technology continued to progress, airplanes ultimately proved they could get the job done faster and cheaper. The catastrophic failure of the Hindenburg in 1937 destroyed the market for airships as passenger-carrying transports, leaving them to eke out an existence as mostly niche aircraft (think Goodyear Blimp).

But after nearly a century in exile, airships seem poised to make a comeback, thanks to a new generation of engineers who are enamored with the golden age of lighter-than-air vessels and see their potential. By using electric propulsion systems powered by solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells, airships could help the aviation industry significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Airships could also play an important role in delivering humanitarian aid to places that have been devastated by natural disaster, since they don’t require infrastructure such as airstrips. And, airships are no longer quite so fragile: The era of cotton and aluminum has given way to carbon-fiber tubes and fire-resistant synthetic fabrics.

Engineers are contemplating airships in myriad forms. They can choose from zeppelins, which have an internal metal framework; blimps, which are essentially oversized balloons; and semi-rigid, which are blimps that have a metal keel extending along their base. Familiar concepts from previous decades are being dusted off and adapted to our own era. For the first time in nearly 100 years, a new generation of giant rigid airships is currently undergoing flight testing at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, by LTA Research and Exploration, a company founded in 2016 by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The company’s proof-of-concept, 400-foot rigid airship is called Pathfinder 1. 

Elsewhere in the world, other airship startups are under way. Russian engineers are building on a Soviet-era design for an airship in the shape of a flying saucer. Proposals are being drawn up to deploy airships for transporting hydrogen from one coast of Australia to the other. Flying Whales, a company backed by the French government, has just announced another $137 million of funding and has started construction of the assembly line for its LCA60T rigid airship. Israel-based Atlas has built and sold airships—12 blimps in total—and work has already begun on founder Gennadiy Verba’s latest design, an all-electric sightseeing blimp. The British company Hybrid Air Vehicles—whose Airlander 10 design is capable of transporting up to 100 on short-haul journeys—announced last year that the Spanish Air Nostrum Group had reserved 10 airships to fly on its regional routes.

“The problem with American big-rigid design during the 1920s and ’30s is that the technology didn’t match the dreams of their promoters,” says John J. Geoghegan, author of When Giants Ruled the Sky. “The materials used were not strong enough, and there was not a sufficient understanding of the aerodynamic forces that acted upon an airship in flight. This meant these big rigids were not robust enough to survive the weather conditions they encountered. Now, that has all changed.”

War and Peace

A French newspaper wrote a story about the German zeppelin L-49, which was forced to land at Bourbonne-les-Bains during World War I. The U.S. copied the L-49 design for its own airships. 

The airship industry in the United States can trace its beginnings to October 20, 1917, when a German zeppelin, L-49,was forced to land at Bourbonne-les-Bains, where it was captured by French forces. “Efforts of the crew to fire the ship on landing were frustrated and the recovery of the ship’s structure almost intact provided the source of much valuable design information for the Allies, and ourselves, for French engineers, with great thoroughness, carefully measured and recorded dimensions of each part,” concluded an assessment by the U.S. Navy.

Lieutenant Commander Zachary Lansdowne was a visionary who saw the potential of lighter-than-air (LTA) aviation for the U.S. Navy. In October 1924, Lansdowne achieved one of the greatest feats of the golden age of the airship when he flew the Shenandoahon a 19-day, 235-flight-hour journey across the U.S. from Lakehurst to San Diego, up the West Coast to Seattle, and back. Americans were in awe of the flying colossus.

But just 11 months later, on September 3, 1925, after a remarkable 56 flights, the Shenandoah got caught in a storm over Ohio and broke in two. Fourteen men out of 21 died in the crash. 

The Navy had done an impressive job reverse engineering the L-49, but therein was the problem. The German airship was a “height climber,” a class of advanced, high-altitude airships designed to fly too high to be shot down by enemy fighters and anti-aircraft guns. As such, the L-49’s metal skeleton had been lightened—and weakened—to enable the giant bomber to reach 25,000 feet, a fact that should have eliminated the design as a peacetime airship. “The German pilots had figured out that to survive they needed to slow down in the gusty air, almost completely coming to a stop to reduce the impact of the wind,” says Alan Weston, CEO of LTA Research and Exploration. “The American pilots didn’t know that.”

The U.S. Navy had great ambitions for airships and featured the USS Los Angeles in this recruitment poster.

For Ron Hochstetler, a retired airship consultant, the Shenandoah crash represents many of the challenges he faced in airship development during his career. “The Shenandoah’s creators had little experience with its delicate design,” he says. “Or with the limitations of the new materials that the ship incorporated.” Too little time and resources were given to understanding the operational limits of the design, and too much performance was expected from such an untried vehicle concept. “Yet its owners, builders, and flight crews invested extravagant amounts of faith and hope for its success only to have these dashed to pieces on the farmland of Ohio,” says Hochstetler.

Tragically, there was evidence that the Shenandoah’s crew had eschewed the cautious approach adopted by wartime German zeppelin pilots. One Navy lieutenant even bragged to a newspaper about his battles against the elements and his “thrilling races” with clouds and near brushes with death. “We had just cleared the gap through the Rocky Mountains when I saw a dim cloud dead ahead, too close for us to miss it,” he recalled. “We began shooting down like a plummet when the powerful down currents caught us. When we hit the cloud, we were more than 2,000 feet up. When we emerged from the storm, we were less than 300 feet from the ground, because our wireless antennae, which hangs from the cabin, had been wiped off.”

Rather than foreshadowing disaster, newspapers reported such stories as confirmation that U.S. airships could endure even the worst conditions as long as capable men were at the helm. And, despite the Shenandoah’s demise, America’s love affair with rigid airships continued to grow with the building of the monumental Goodyear Airdock (now called the Akron Airdock) in Akron, Ohio, and the construction of even larger airships—the USS Akron and USS Macon—in the early 1930s. Still, the Americans continued to fly their rigid airships more aggressively than the Germans, and the Akron and the Macon both crashed during storms. In contrast, the German zeppelins flew for around 19 years without a single fatality until the loss of the Hindenburg.

The USS Akron, gliding over lower Manhattan in 1931, was popularly known as the “Queen of the Skies”—a moniker later given to the Boeing 747.

It’s understandable then, that today’s lighter-than-air pioneers have a bittersweet feeling toward the squandered opportunities of the past. They are hoping that this time hubris and haste don’t doom the airship a second time—just as low-carbon transportation technologies are needed most. “The rigid airships were the most extraordinary vehicles ever flown,” says Weston. “There were failures and great successes. It’s tragic that simple screw-ups like this doomed airships in the U.S.” 

Weston and other modern-day pioneers are determined not to repeat the same mistakes. “We all devour any old airship memorabilia we can find, but the technological advances over the last 100 years mean that we are really doing something completely new,” says mechanical engineer Jillian Hilenski, who is working on the Pathfinder. “We’re entirely redesigning components and using carbon fiber tubes and titanium joints to make up the skeleton of the ship. That alone is such a huge innovation compared to the 1930s that it almost doesn’t seem we are comparing apples with apples anymore.”

Mechanics tend to an engine in one of the USS Akron’s eight propulsion rooms.

Hochstetler’s dream of lighter-than-air flight began when, as a university student, he saw the Goodyear Blimp lit up at night on a local airfield where it was overnighting. “I was struck that airships were like clouds and belong in the sky, that they don’t have to scramble their way into the air like a jet or fall to the earth if they don’t keep going,” he says. “It was marvelous, and it totally intrigued me.”

Hochstetler’s first project was the Piasecki PA-97 Helistat. Built for the U.S. Forest Service, it was an experimental heavy-lift airship designed to carry timber from difficult terrain. Propulsion was provided by four Sikorsky H-34J helicopters attached with scaffolding to the bottom of the large helium-filled envelope, a retired Navy ZPG-2W blimp. “When I walked into the hangar that the Helistat was being assembled in, I was overwhelmed with the thrill of seeing a great big real airship for the first time,” Hochstetler recalls. “I was so excited to be part of what I believed was the renaissance of the giant airship age. But I also discovered I was the only person on that project who held this conviction. In time I began to understand the reason for my coworkers’ cynicism. The project was being done on the cheap. And consequently, it wasn’t likely to result in an exemplary aircraft. In fact, the other assemblers referred to the Helistat as the ‘Hindentitanic.’ ” The name proved to be prophetic. On July 1, 1986, after lifting off on a test flight, the prototype crashed, killing one of its pilots. 

“Realizing that the Helistat project was not likely to end well, I decided to leave the company in May of 1985,” says Hochstetler. “When I heard about the crash and the death of one of the pilots, I was shocked and saddened, but not surprised.”

The USS Akron was constructed inside the Goodyear Hangar, which, after its completion in 1929, was the largest building in the world without interior supports.

Hochstetler also worked on the now-infamous Cargolifter AG project, wherein a German company in the 1990s sought to build a gigantic airship, the CL 160, which would be equipped with a massive crane capable of carrying 160 metric tons. The company declared insolvency in 2002 after burning through $250 million worth of investments. Cargolifter failed because the challenges of building such a complex ship were underestimated by its promoters. A hangar was built for the planned airship. The largest freestanding hangar in the world, it is now a holiday resort featuring an indoor rainforest. The epic failure of the CL 160 still haunts the airship industry and engineers.

“It didn’t take me that long to realize that the reality of working in lighter-than-air was very different,” says Hochstetler. “I quickly found that there wasn’t a lot of romance and there wasn’t a lot of money.”

LTA Research hopes that future versions of the Pathfinder 1 airship—seen here during an indoor test flight—will one day support disaster response efforts.

Staying Aloft

LTA Research’s Alan Weston had long been interested in the potential for airships to be more fuel efficient than any other form of aviation. Now, it’s their potential for aiding humanitarian relief that really excites him. “I grew up in Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, and Zambia, and I know roads are terrible in many parts of the world,” he says. 

Bathed in light within its huge hangar, LTA’s Pathfinder 1 looks more like a spaceship than an airship. The company recently conducted a test flight inside LTA’s giant hangar at California’s Moffett Field, a duplicate of the Akron Airdock (which the company also now owns) originally built to house the USS Macon. Says Weston: “There is not enough space to turn around or do a loop-the-loop, but we can go up and down, sideways, and forwards and backwards to test our primary functionality—and do it tethered so it can’t hurt anything.” LTA is now preparing to conduct extensive outdoor testing.

The materials used to construct Pathfinder 1 showcase how 21st-century technology is being applied to 20th-century designs. The outer covering is flame-retardant and made of multiple layers of synthetic materials. As a safety measure, lidar sensors constantly monitor the helium in the gas cells. If there’s a volume change, the lidar helps indicate if it’s due to changes in elevation or temperature—or caused by a significant gas leak. Twelve electric motors lining the sides and tail of the airship can be rotated 180 degrees for vertical liftoff and directional control.

The workers who constructed airships like the Macon had to climb tall, swaying ladders. Today, a cradle-like apparatus (nicknamed the Roller Coaster) slowly rotates the giant airframe on its horizontal axis, enabling workers to remain safely on the ground. 

And yet, both investors and potential investors have been frustrated by what they perceive as the slow pace to launch the modern airship industry.  “They seem to think that airships are in some way easy because they see these things bobbing around in the sky flying quite slowly,” says Mike Durham, chief technical officer at Hybrid Air Vehicles. As such, “there are still a lot of businesses in the lighter-than-air world that pop up, work from a garage or a garden shed for a few years, make all sorts of claims on the web about how great their product is, and then disappear,” says Durham. “The airship world has been tainted somewhat by those types of businesses.”

Initially, Atlas’ Gennadiy Verba was one of these people. “I did mistakenly think that airships were a very simple technology,” he says. “I couldn’t understand why this kind of aircraft that’s very easy to build was not everywhere.” The end of Cargolifter, for example, hit him hard because it was a large project that had received a substantial amount of funding. “Its failure created a lot of doubts among investors about airships and the possibility of implementing this technology,” says Verba.

The hangar for the failed Cargolifter project is the largest freestanding building in the world. After Cargolifter declared insolvency, its hangar was converted into an indoor resort.

The veterans of the lighter-than-air industry have a long list of lessons learned from such failed and cancelled projects. The bullet points include an understanding of the history of the airship and its complexity; prioritization of teamwork over charismatic leaders; designing aircraft that can be mass produced; and, finally, an effective method of controlling buoyancy on the ground, vital for heavy-lift airships. And then there’s an underlying conundrum: The potential customers for this new generation of airships are not always prepared to pay for their development. What’s an airship company to do?

Sébastien Bougon, founder of the French company Flying Whales, is taking a very different approach—a very French, state-backed approach—to building the next generation of airships. “Americans like to go straight to building an airship or a rocket,” he says. “In France, we prefer the Airbus approach of step by step, working hand in hand with the regulator, because airships make people very nervous here, even though we invented them.”

In this artist’s concept, a Flying Whales airship ferries parts to a remote wind power station.

Bougon’s vision of a rigid airship for heavy-lift transport came over dinner with the CEO of the National Forest Agency in France, who was struggling to transport enough logs out of remote regions of southern France. They approached the National Aerospace Agency, which agreed to support their idea. One year of preliminary studies moved into a four-year “de-risking phase,” when the French government and a consortium of French companies looked at more than 100 airship projects, including Cargolifter, to understand why they failed, as well as studying 12 different shapes.

The Shenandoah—moored at San Diego’s Naval Air Station North Island in October 1924—was the first rigid airship to fly across North America.

“We were design agnostic, but there are too many people in the industry who think they have the solution,” says Bougon. “They tell me we must make a blimp. Others, that it should be a rigid airship. Some, a deltoid shape. Okay, so let’s study them all. In the end, we decided on the same as previous centuries, a rigid airship.” A manufacturing line is being prepared near Bordeaux, with plans to ultimately produce 160 units.

Ultimately, it’s the success or failure of companies like Flying Whales and LTA that will determine whether these mammoth craft will once again be seen in the skies. Airships never cease to inspire wonder, and they resonate with those who yearn for more stately modes of transportation. Says Hochstetler: “It is a dream that has bitten so many people.” 

I was on the Aviation Extended Podcast talking about my book N-4 DOWN!

The true story of the largest polar rescue mission in history is pretty much unknown in most aviation circles. Until now!

Mark Piesing, author of the book N4 Down (HarperCollins 2021), joins us on AviationExtended to discuss this almost unbelievable story of human suffering and tragedy, political drama, incompetence and heroism. This story has everything!

I really enjoyed chatting with ⁦⁦Pieter Johnson (pictured) from the excellent ⁦AviationExtended ⁩podcast about my book N-4 DOWN the hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia. AviationExtended is Europe’s Premier Aerospace Podcast.

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, the Google Podcast app, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever else you usually listen to podcasts.

Website update No.5: AVIATION EXTENDED PODCAST – N-4 DOWN, THE HUNT FOR THE ARCTIC AIRSHIP ITALIA

The true story of the largest polar rescue mission in history is pretty much unknown in most aviation circles. Until now!

Mark Piesing, author of the book N4 Down (HarperCollins 2021), joins us on AviationExtended to discuss this almost unbelievable story of human suffering and tragedy, political drama, incompetence and heroism. This story has everything!

I really enjoyed chatting with ⁦⁦Pieter Johnson (pictured) from the excellent ⁦AviationExtended ⁩podcast about my book N-4 DOWN the hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia. AviationExtended is Europe’s Premier Aerospace Podcast.

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, the Google Podcast app, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever else you usually listen to podcasts.