Aeroship: A New Flight Platform

This paper proposes the aeroship concept for challenging terrestrial and planetary flight missions such as personal flight, planetary flight and high-altitude flight. In contrast to the conventional flight platforms like fixed-wing aircraft, rotorcraft and balloon/airship, the aeroship concept explores a unique combination of an airship module and a wing/propulsion module by optimizing a delicate equilibrium between the aerodynamic and aerostatic forces to meet demanding requirements in takeoff/landing, low-speed flight, and control and maneuver. The performance analysis indicates that aeroship has distinct advantages over the conventional flight platforms in the difficult flight conditions. Personal aeroship provides a promising solution to personal flight to accommodate some stringent features in takeoff/landing, low-speed flight, piloting, cost, maintenance, noise, and emergence safety. Terrestrial high-altitude aeroship is an economical and robust air vehicle that is able to cruise at the altitudes above 30 km for surveillance, reconnaissance and scientific research. Planetary aeroship (e.g. the Mars aeroship) is feasible for lowspeed flight and short takeoff/landing in rarified planetary atmospheres. ⋅