Latest news with #airship
CTV News
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Goodyear Blimp flies over Kingston
Ottawa Watch The Goodyear Blimp is flying over Kingston as the company celebrates the airship's 100th anniversary. CTV's Jack Richardson reports.
CTV News
17-06-2025
- Business
- CTV News
Goodyear Blimp flies over Kingston, Ont. to celebrate 100th year
The Goodyear Blimp taking off in Kingston, Ont. June 17, 2025. (Jack Richardson/CTV News Ottawa). The Goodyear Blimp is flying over Kingston, Ont. Tuesday as the company celebrates the airship's 100th anniversary. It made the journey from Akron, Ohio with a pit stop in Watertown, N.Y. before arriving in Kingston on Monday. 'It's one of three airships that are in North America for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber company,' said Jerry Hissem, the blimp's chief pilot. The nearly 75-metre-long blimp is taking groups of employees that work at the Goodyear Tire plant in Napanee for rides throughout the day. 'It's exciting for us as well,' said Hissem. 'We like to take our associates up for a flight for all the great (work) they do for the company.' Kylie Hinch has worked at the plant for 26 years and says the trip on the blimp was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Goodyear Blimp The Goodyear Blimp in Kingston, Ont. on June 17, 2025. (Jack Richardson/CTV News Ottawa) Goodyear Blimp The view of Kingston, Ont. from the Goodyear Blimp (Kylie Hirsh/Provided) Goodyear Blimp Two employees from the Goodyear plant in Napanee, Ont. after riding in the blimp. June 17, 2025. (Jack Richardson/CTV News Ottawa) 'Going up in the blimp was unbelievable,' Hinch said. 'To actually be on it is something you could never imagine.' Hinch explains that the views of Kingston and Lake Ontario from inside the blimp were unforgettable. The blimp is taking 10 trips total on Tuesday, according to Hissem.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Senior U.S. Defense And Policy Veterans Join Aeros To Accelerate National Cargo Airship Deployment
Dr. Anthony Tether (Former DARPA Director), Gen. Raymond Johns (Ret.), and Former Governor Mark Sanford Appointed to Advisory Board Driving the Airship-Based, Infrastructure-Free Logistics Revolution. Los Angeles, California--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2025) - Aeros, the pioneer of electric Variable Buoyancy Airships (eVBA), proudly announces the formation of its Government Advisory Board-an elite panel of national leaders in defense, logistics, and public policy. The board is convened to accelerate Aeros' mission of delivering zero-emission, infrastructure-free air logistics in collaboration with government agencies. Aeros Government Advisory Board Members To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: The founding members of the board include: Dr. Anthony Tether, former and longest-serving Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who led the agency during its early support of the Aeroscraft airship development. "I've followed the evolution of this technology since our early DARPA days. Aeros is now at the cusp of delivering real-world solutions that redefine strategic and tactical logistics. It's time to help bring that vision to full scale." The Honorable General Raymond Johns (Ret.), former Commander of U.S. Air Mobility Command. With decades of experience orchestrating the movement of personnel and cargo on a global scale, General Johns brings unparalleled insight into large-scale aerial logistics operations, military mobility strategy, and government readiness planning. "Our nation's logistics infrastructure, especially for the military, needs modernization. Aeros brings a platform that's scalable, strategic, and mission-ready. I'm excited to guide their efforts as they move from prototype to operational capability." The Honorable Mark Sanford, former U.S. Congressman and Governor of South Carolina, now CEO of a private last-mile logistics company. "I've worked on both sides of the logistics equation-from federal infrastructure policy to e-commerce fulfillment. What Aeros offers is a game-changer in all logistics needs, from humanitarian aids to commercial." The Government Advisory Board will help Aeros navigate regulatory pathways, pursue strategic public-private partnerships, and align its technology with national priorities for disaster response, defense, and sustainable infrastructure. About Aeros: Aeros is a global leader in designing, FAA certifying, manufacturing, and delivering advanced airships and aerostats worldwide. For over a century, airships have faced a fundamental challenge-losing stability as cargo is unloaded. Competitors have failed to solve this. Aeros has not only solved it-we've patented it. Like a submarine adjusting depth, our aircraft control buoyancy in real-time, enabling unrestricted logistics from transcontinental freight to last-mile delivery-without ground infrastructure. For more information about Aeros, visit Media Contact:Aeros Tsangaeros_pr@ Angeles, California, United Stateshttps:// To view the source version of this press release, please visit
Fast Company
09-06-2025
- Science
- Fast Company
This stratospheric airship is 65,000 miles above Earth investigating which gas companies are leaking methane
Inside an airplane hangar in Roswell, New Mexico, a massive blimp-like airship—214 feet long—is getting ready to float into the stratosphere. Built by a startup called Sceye (pronounced 'sky'), the helium-filled aircraft is designed to gather information that satellites miss. In its next flight, in July, it will hover over New Mexico sending back real-time data about pollution from the state's hundreds of oil and gas producers. It can report not only that there's a plume of methane pollution in the air, but that a particular gas tank from a particular company is leaking a specific amount of the potent greenhouse gas each hour. 'We can see the specific emitter and the rate of emissions in real time,' says Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Sceye's CEO. 'And that's entirely new.' How a social entrepreneur started working with NASA tech Frandsen, a Danish social entrepreneur, is known for transforming Vestergaard, his family's textile business, into a company focused on humanitarian innovation. (The company makes mosquito nets to help fight malaria, for example, and a spinoff called LifeStraw makes water purification tech.) Because of his work, Frandsen was invited to be part of an effort to discover how tech from NASA could be used to help improve life on Earth. That's how he learned about HAPS, or 'high-altitude platform systems,' the technology that now underlies Sceye's work. HAPS are designed to go to the edge of space, around 65,000 feet above the surface of the Earth. 'You're twice as high as air traffic, you're above the jet stream, you're 95-97% through the atmosphere,' Frandsen says. 'So you can look up with great accuracy at stars, study black holes, look at asteroids. They were promoting this as a platform for science. I was reading this and thinking, sure, but you can also look down. You can have an entirely new way of addressing ocean conservation, or human trafficking, or last-mile connectivity, or methane monitoring, or early wildfire detection.' The concept for a HAPS airship wasn't new. 'It turned out the U.S. government had already spent billions trying to build this 'stratospheric airship' because staying below orbital altitude was considered sort of the holy grail of aviation,' he says. He started looking into why past efforts in the 1990s and early 2000s hadn't worked, and realized that some factors had changed. New materials like graphene, for example, could help significantly reduce the weight of the airship and the batteries onboard. A decade of R&D Sceye, which was founded in 2014 and is based in New Mexico, took an iterative approach to its R&D. 'I learned from studying those previous attempts that government funding often incentives you to go straight to prototype build,' he says. 'You don't have that iterative learning that tells you if you fail, why did you fail? Or if you succeed, why did you succeed? In every case, it didn't succeed, and they didn't really get their arms around the 'why.' So it all stranded there.' In 2026, the startup tested a nine-foot version of the device. A year later, that scaled up to 70 feet. The prototypes kept growing and flying higher. By 2021, the team succeeded in reaching the stratosphere. In 2022, they started doing demonstration flights. A year ago, the company successfully showed that the airship could operate through day and night. In the day, it runs on solar power; at night, it's powered by batteries. The company also raised a Series C round of funding in 2024, which Pitchbook estimates totalling $130 million. (Sceye declined to confirm fundraising numbers, but said that it was valued at $525 million before the Series C round.) This year, the company plans to use its flights to demonstrate that the tech can hover in place for extended periods of time. Eventually, the team aims to be able to keep the HAPS in position for as long as 365 days. The 2025 flights will also demonstrate some of the uses of the tech. The company plans to deploy its platform in several ways; the next flight will also test the ability to track wildfires, for example. But it's particularly well suited for tracking methane emissions. A powerful tool for tracking methane Methane is potent greenhouse gas. Over the short term, it's more than 80 times more powerful than CO2 at heating up the planet. Methane emissions are also surging; leaks from fossil fuel production are a major source of the pollution. New Mexico, which is part of the Permian Basin boom in oil and gas, adopted a methane waste rule in 2021 to try to tackle the problem. By the end of next year, producers will have to achieve a 98% capture rate for methane. 'We are looking at how we can make sure that gas is kept in the pipe and goes to its intended market instead of being released into the atmosphere,' says Michelle Miano, environmental protection division director at the New Mexico Environment Department. The state started working with Sceye in 2021, in a partnership with the EPA. Right now, much of the data about emissions comes directly from companies themselves; that obviously makes it difficult for the state to confirm accuracy. Satellite data can also help track methane emissions, but not in the same granular detail. 'From space, it takes a lot of time in order to crunch that data and trace it back and figure out who exactly is the emitter in a certain region,' says Miano. 'With technology that's closer to the ground, there is the ability to get closer to some of the facilities to understand more specifically where they might be coming from.' Because the Sceye airship is designed to stay in one position, it can continuously monitor emissions over hundreds of square miles in a region. Infrared sensors monitor methane emissions, while cameras take detailed photographs that can be overlaid with that data. The system means that it's possible to spot leaks that a satellite can miss because it only passes over an area temporarily. Satellites also don't have the same resolution. The European Space Agency's Sentinel-5, for example, sees methane in pixels that each represent seven square kilometers; the HAPS can get as close as one meter. (Sceye says that its approach is also more cost-effective than some other methods, including sensors on the ground that are slow to install, and planes or drones that have high hourly rates and can only take snapshots.) 'If we work with an oil company, we can say, 'Hey, well number 62 has been leaking 68 kilos of methane per hour for the last 12 minutes,' Frandsen says. The company is now negotiating contracts with some fossil fuel companies, and planning to begin demonstration flights for them this year and commercial contracts next year. In a test flight over New Mexico last year, the team identified a 'super emitter' in Texas that was pumping an estimated 1,000 kilograms of methane an hour into the air—the equivalent of the hourly emissions from 210,000 cars. When Sceye shared that data with the EPA last year, it's not clear if the agency sent a warning letter to the polluter. Now, the Trump-era EPA is pulling back on enforcement. Congress also voted to stop the EPA from implementing a tax on excess methane emissions. But the New Mexico state government plans to continue doing as much as it can to fight pollution. Sceye's data could help it work more efficiently. 'We are looking at how to increase funding for our agencies so that we are able to utilize technologies technologies that are coming online up and beyond standard reporting and standard on-the-ground inspections,' Miano says. 'Because we have a limited staff, there are new ways that we need to continue looking at facilities with compliance issues to make sure that we can address as much as possible.'
BBC News
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Cambridge mystery of Edwardian family photo album solved
The fascinating story behind a pre-World War One family photo album found in a second-hand book shop has been painstakingly unearthed by a researcher. Stand-out images included ones of an airship, which came down in the middle of Cambridge during huge Army manoeuvres attended by George V in Michelle Bullivant dug into the story, she realised the family had links to the city, but were London-based, with connections to Fulham and Arsenal football clubs. "I'm now 100% sure it belonged to William and Kate Hall, who got married in Cambridge, but there are still so many stories to explore within the album," she said. Miss Bullivant was rummaging through a pile of books at antiquarian booksellers G David, in St Edward's Passage, Cambridge, two years ago, when she came across the album. Her attention was immediately caught by obvious links to the city - pictures of rowers on the river at Stourbridge Common, the university's Senate House and Great St Mary's church, as well as of the Beta II airship floating above Jesus Grove which was a small piece of land next to Jesus Green. "I thought I had to get it," said the archaeological and historical consultant from Cherry Hinton near Cambridge. It stayed on a shelf at her home until a recent bereavement gave her a "kick start to get on with things". Her first thought was the album might belong to the Marshall family, who set up a garage business which eventually became Marshall Aerospace and Defence 1912, their garage was close to Jesus Grove, and it was their mechanics who helped fix the broken airship during the Army manoeuvres. These were the last war games held before the outbreak of World War One and were based in and around Cambridge. Many of the troops were based on Midsummer Common, where the airship experienced mechanical Bullivant said: "The airship captain used a loud speaker to give instructions to the troops to manhandle the Beta II down, using ropes."Huge crowds of people gathered around the airship, so it was moved to the more secluded Jesus Grove. The second reason why she thought there could be a Marshall connection was the many pictures of cars, but her research soon ruled that discovered a large, detached houses pictured was Devonshire House in Battersea, London, then owned by an Augustus Hall."I compiled a family tree of all his brothers and sisters, cross-referencing their addresses and looking up their homes, and I recognised the house where everyone was having their pictures taken - Woodborough Road in Putney, said Miss Bullivant."It was owned by William Hall and it turned out he'd married Kate Davis in Cambridge in 1899 - so finally, I had my link to Cambridge." Census research confirmed Kate was the daughter of a college servant, living in Queen's Lane in 1881."But that seems quite strange, I mean what kind of servant? The family pictured seem quite wealthy," she couple had one daughter, Elsa, who appears in many of the Hall was a director of both Fulham and [Woolwich] Arsenal football clubs and he ran a successful metal work business in Bullivant believes at least one of the photos shows a Fulham match and she is waiting to hear if the Premier League club's archivist can verify this. It took her about a fortnight to track down these details, which she shared on her blog, hoping other researchers will add to the details. She also hopes any remaining members of the Hall family might get in contact."There's so many elements to it, the football, the rowing, the military pictures - and it's amazing how it's grown from me not knowing anything about these people to knowing so much," she said. Follow Cambridgeshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
