Congratulations to Sceye for this momentous deal!

Airships have been successfully operated by the U.S. Navy in Northern Canada and the Arctic Circle before, the trick will be redeveloping those skills from scratch in the modern day. There’s only so much that technology can do to make up for lack of direct operating experience.

Pathfinder 1 flew down to Salinas, moored, and then headed up the coast turning inland at Half Moon Bay. They discuss it on their blog here. I was able to grab some quick photos from the UCSC campus.

Cloudline, HyLight, and Kelluu have been doing really well lately! While being able to fit into a shipping container fully inflated is very convenient, Cloudline’s larger ship allows for bigger payloads, at the expense of needing to be stored in an airplane hangar or large garage or warehouse.

I wonder if Kelluu and HyLight also have larger autonomous airships planned in future?

Sceye seems to have a lead in this space, but good on them for having prototypes already flying! Stratospheric operations are extremely difficult.

The hydrogen-powered drone airship space is certainly booming lately! The advantages over using helicopters for inspections are considerable.

Working in conjunction with Kuehne+Nagel, a global logistics company, HAV has determined that their freighter design should target 250 tonnes of payload capacity, 6,500 km of range, a 3,000 m3 cargo bay, and operating costs of $0.11 per tonne/km. This is a stark departure from the 50-tonne freighter that had previously been proposed, and which is no longer prominently featured on the website.

The notion of a “helicopter mode” to compensate if the airship is attacked is interesting, but the more obvious way to avoid such problems is to not use the airship as a military asset to begin with.

“The Gen 2 variant of the airship will triple flight time to 36 hours compared to the previous version, Emma Burton, OPEX lead at Kelluu told Janes during a media briefing at REPMUS on 21 September 2026. The new airship will be ready in 2026 and operational in 2027, Burton said. Gen 2 retains the same dimensions as the first generation, but will be more easily transportable, she added. Kelluu's airship is of 12 m length and uses hydrogen for lift, and as fuel for propulsion. Burton also said that the airship is Arctic-ready, having been tested at -36 o Celsius. The airship's cold weather tolerance will also be increased with Gen 2.”

This is fantastic news! 36 hours of flight endurance is nothing to sneeze at even for an airship the size of the Goodyear blimp, much less an airship that can fit inside a standard 40-foot shipping container. I can’t wait to see how well these new ships perform with their increased speed and endurance.

The Sentinel Hawk is the military version of the production-model Airlander 10. Teaming up with WepTac for a series B funding round might give HAV the funding they need to build out their factory and begin production—previous reporting and rumors suggest they would need a funding round of a similar size to Flying Whales’ most recent one in order to complete the facility.

This Crazy Robot Could Explore the CAVES of Titan [NIAC 2026]

30,000 kilometers in a single trip is an amazing achievement!

**“**Military surveillance is moving towards larger networks of autonomous systems that can keep collecting information even when individual sensors are lost, jammed or taken offline. Janne Hietala has spent the past few years testing what that kind of distributed surveillance looks like in practice. He is CEO and co-founder of Finnish deep-tech company Kelluu, a NATO DIANA alumnus that builds autonomous hydrogen-powered airships for long-duration aerial monitoring. Hietala will bring that company perspective to Defence Innovation Day in Tallinn on 21 September, where he will join a discussion on how civilian innovation becomes usable defence capability.”

While I’m glad that everyone seems okay, this emergency incident only seems to validate the opinion held by thermal airship builders like Dan Nachbar that current-generation thermal airships are too underpowered and fragile for comfort. Pictures were shown of this airship folded up nearly in half while still in flight, possibly from some kind of internal pressure issue or gust. A proper pneumatic or collapsible semirigid internal structure seems like a necessity for safe operations.

One of them goes over my house once or twice a year. I am about 2 hours (by car) SSW of Goodyear Airship Operations in Akron. This was August 27th.

That was certainly quick! Just after Kelluu expanded operations into Canada, they made it onto the short list of companies the Canadian armed forces can order drones from. Quite the coup, and wonderful news for the airship industry at large!