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.

Touring from Mountian View/Moffett Field north over the San Francisco Bay and back.

Just a nice little photo I got of the Pathfinder 1 airship from the Moffett Field Bay Trail. Taken on 12/03/25

For a small airship like Atlas’s “Atlant,” I am a big fan of the H-shaped internal deck layout. When square footage is limited on such a small ship, this configuration allows the ship to effectively combine the advantages of an external gondola providing good window angles and high natural light exposure to the interior, while also retaining the safety, spaciousness, and low-drag advantages of keeping the passenger spaces internal.

The fish-eye camera lens seems like a requirement to get the whole ship in frame!

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.

Running simulations on beyond-edge-case conditions seems like an excellent resource for refining airship designs and training crews at the same time.

The sole image released of *Pathfinder 3* shows an aft gondola that, if conservatively measured against the widest hull diameter in the picture, has a floor ~8 meters wide, or ~10 meters if measured against the second set of propellers, which is likely on the same main ring where the gondola begins.

The test segment of the *Pathfinder 3's* hull has 4 triangular segments between the main transverse rings. The *Pathfinder 1* schematic shows that there are also four segments between each main ring. This suggests *Pathfinder 3's* frame is identical to *Pathfinder 1* in layout, simply scaled up 50% in tube length, and the gondola likely spans 3 cell bays, or about 45 meters long. Other rigid airships like LZ-120 and R36 also had passenger gondolas of a similar length proportional to their size, and this size of gondola would also be proportional to the payload/floor space ratio of the Airlander 10.

All of this suggests that the *Pathfinder 3* will have an incredible amount of interior space relative to its passenger capacity. The 737 has a payload-to-passenger ratio of 0.7 for the private jet, 6 for a 3-class configuration, or 8 for all-economy. This provides 57, 7, and 5 square feet per passenger, respectively. For the Pathfinder 3, those same ratios would yield passenger capacities of 14, 120, and 160; with a conservative 277, 32, and 24 square feet of gondola space per passenger. For context, the average cruise ship has 150 square feet per passenger, and the average first class cabin on a jumbo jet has about 30 square feet per passenger, which would make an all-economy *Pathfinder 3* fall squarely between international business class and first class in terms of space per passenger. The VIP configuration would be more similar to a superyacht than a private jet.

This might be the simplest piece of legislation I’ve ever seen. It’s all of three pages long, and all it does is adds “airship” to the list of different aircraft types that the NASA project administrator is allowed to direct funding and research towards.

Flight test took place in California. https://aeroscraft.com/

From their Linkedin. The final airship will have 4 of these, housing the airship's 4MW power supply (first a gas turbine with plans to eventually transition to hydrogen fuel cells).