What’s that thing in the sky?

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Are you even allowed to show that on YouTube? In fact, this is the world's largest airship lumbering through the skies. It’s called the Airlander 10, and it’s not just big.

Its designers also hope to launch the aviation industry into a new era of fuel efficient, versatile air travel for passengers, cargo, and whatever else we might want. Yes, by looking like a big butt in the sky. This aircraft cherry picks the best of everything we know about making flying machines to make a really good flying machine.

It’s like a… playcopterblimp. Why didn’t I think of that? [♪ INTRO] Now, we know how to make stuff fly at this point. The Earth's gravity pulls stuff down, so in order to fly, simply don’t fall.

Aircraft use a few different ways to do that: You’ve got buoyancy, vertical thrust, lift. Though many aircraft rely primarily on just one of these modes. Think blimps, helicopters, and planes, in that order.

But to understand how our butt-plane uses all three, we’ll need to talk about each one. The idea behind buoyancy is that a denser fluid exerts a force on a less dense solid, causing the solid to float atop the fluid. We might not think of flying the same way we think about a cork bobbing in water.

But to a physicist, anything that flows is a fluid and that includes gasses like air. In other words, to make an aircraft buoyant, it just has to be less dense than air. Even the lightest weight materials, like aluminum or carbon fiber, are far too dense to get the job done on their own.

The trick is to add in materials that are less dense than air, until everything is less dense overall. Which is just like what happens in a party balloon. It’s made of latex, which is more dense than air, but it still goes up when you fill it with helium.

Buoyant aircraft are basically fuselages connected to very large balloons, like blimps or zeppelins. The balloons are filled with a light gas, usually helium. Ultra-flammable hydrogen went out of fashion circa the Hindenburg.

Luckily, helium is a noble gas and would not undergo a chemical reaction if you paid it. The reason this is such a good idea is, you know, not to state the obvious, but the darn thing floats. The Airlander 10 has four 325 horsepower engines.

That amount of juice adds up to around six small SUVs. Compare that to a large conventional aircraft like the Boeing 787, which is packing the equivalent of around four hundred SUVs. This lower engine requirement means that less power is needed to operate the Airlander 10, compared to more traditional airplanes.

Of course, there is a catch, buoyant aircraft are not capable of carrying a lot of stuff. Think what happens when you tie a weight to that party balloon. A typical buoyant aircraft like a blimp can only carry a bit over 1.5 tons of payload.

Which may seem like a lot, but that same 787 can carry over 20 tons of cargo. Of course you can always make the hull bigger to hold more helium, but that will eventually become impractical. And the Airlander already comes in as the largest aircraft, at 92 meters long by 26 meters tall and 43.5 meters wide.

So it’s a good thing the Airlander 10 isn't just buoyant. The Airlander 10 also employs two vertical thrusters that help to keep it in the air. This is similar to how a helicopter flies, using thrust to force air downwards and in turn force the aircraft up.

The helium is still doing a lot of the work, which saves a bunch of energy. But the thrusters mean there’s some extra oomph there when you need it. So that's it?

The Airlander 10 is a giant helicopter blimp? Not just yet! We have not talked about lift!

But first, I have to talk about a company that boosts our YouTube videos by supporting SciShow, and that’s Brilliant. Brilliant is an online learning platform with thousands of interactive lessons in science, computer science, and math. And they cover the concepts I just touched on, like buoyancy, in their Classical Mechanics course.

That course uses physics to help you understand what moves stuff, like this giant aircraft through the air! Well, their course description says they’ll cover everything from firefly bugs to rockets, and I think this plane is somewhere in between. But if you don’t want to risk it, Brilliant offers a 30 day free trial.

You can find it at Brilliant.org/SciShow or by clicking the link in the description down below. That link also gives you 20% off an annual premium Brilliant subscription. And thank you to Brilliant for lifting up our channel.

Now, lift is probably what you’re used to hearing about in terms of how airplane wings make an airplane fly. If I’m being fully honest with you, we don’t 100% understand how lift works, but we have a good enough idea that we can design airplanes and wings successfully. The basic requirement is motion: air must be flowing over and around the wing.

The collision and flow of the air with the wing generates a force. Small variations to the shape can have big changes on these forces and pressures, so making an adjustable wing allows the airplane to control how much it interacts with the air. All of these complex interactions work together to generate lift.

Lift is incredibly powerful, and it’s what allows airplanes to weigh hundreds of tons and still soar through the sky. Because motion is required for lift to exist, airplanes need huge engines that push them very fast through the air. While the Airlander may have tiny engines compared to a jetliner, its huge hull gives tons of area for moving air to interact with the ship and generate some lift.

And since the Airlander is a transport vehicle, and moving is very much the point, might as well get some lift into the bargain, right? Furthermore, because conventional airplanes gotta go fast, they need long, carefully maintained runways to take off and land. The Airlander does not.

Lift is only the icing on the cake for it, giving it a little extra payload capacity. So to take off? It can just go up!

Which is normal for, like, a hot air balloon, but the mental image is still incredibly amusing to me. So the Airlander is not a blimp, not a helicopter, and not a plane. It's a mix of all three.

Here’s how that comes together. At the time we’re filming this, the Airlander has made 7 voyages, which is enough to call it a real thing in my book. And like a kids’ building set or a Chipotle burrito, the Airlander is modular.

Meaning you can swap out and customize parts of the craft. Whether you want passenger travel, cargo transport, extended flight operations, or scientific research, the Airlander 10 can do that, with up to 10 tons of payload capability. While that’s not as much as a traditional cargo plane, it’s a decent amount for way less fuel.

And because it is mostly blimp, some configurations of the Airlander 10 can stay in flight for up to 5 days at a time. Since one goal of the Airlander is scientific research missions, that could help those missions keep going without interruption. Passenger configurations boast low emissions of about 9g of CO2 emitted per passenger, compared to around 130g of CO2 per passenger for traditional airplane travel.

Now, this ain’t exactly the Concorde 2. At speeds of around 25 meters per second, travel by Airlander is leisurely. But given the low CO2 emissions, Airlander could be a green way to travel in style with a fantastic view.

The designer of the Airlander 10 has plans for the even bigger Airlander 50, another efficient aircraft that would carry up to 50 tons of payload. Which makes me realize that that’s what the 10 was the whole time! In the end I have to say, this butt plane looks pretty goofy.

And making a playcopterblimp sounds like something a 5-year-old would come up with, not a real way to innovate air travel. Except for the part where it works. Perhaps 5 year olds have been onto something the whole time. [♪ OUTRO]