As documented by John McFee in his definitive history The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, the Aereon 26
was an experimental aircraft developed in the late 1960s by a group of rouge
inventors and scientists under the company name of The Aereon Corporation, and
first flown in 1970. The concept was one of those things that seems so simple
you would need to be a genius to think of it in the first place: an airplane
that doesn’t fall when it stops moving forwards. Or an airship that can climb
and dive like an airplane, depending on your point of view. Conventional
airplanes generate lift by forcing air over their wings, and thus have a
minimum speed (the “stall speed”) below which they can’t generate lift anymore
and plummet like rocks. Airships rise or fall depending on their buoyancy
relative to the air they are in – add more lift gas to go up and vent it to go down,
although there are also ways to control lift using ballast. If you want to use
either technology for commercial purposes, there are going to be issues…
As anyone who travels by air already knows, airplanes have
issues with needing inconveniently large runways to take off or land. Airships
can just float up, at least to a point, but have trouble exceeding the altitude
of their point of buoyancy, and can’t go down without venting valuable lift gas
(helium doesn’t grow on trees). There are also issues with how fast you can
propel an air-resisting mass of gas bags through the sky. The Aereon was
designed to combine all of the advantages of both technologies into a single
vehicle that could take off or land anywhere, fly for days on a tank of gas
that would only last a few hours on an airplane with the same payload, or even
stop in mid-air and wait, if that was what you needed. And, in fact, it
appeared that the prototype would be able to do all of those things, given its
remarkable performance without even being filled with helium…
And, unfortunately, that’s where things ended. The Aereon
company proposed a number of variants of their design, ranging from a small
patrol craft that could do everything a Coast Guard helicopter could do while
staying in the air for days instead of hours, to a heavy lift vehicle that
would have had 20 times the payload of a C-17 and operated using less fuel. But
in their innocence the people running the company apparently failed to consider
that exotic new technologies are difficult to sell, even when they aren’t
actually new or exotic, and that entrenched competitors are hard to contend
with even when they aren’t “donating” millions of dollars to the “re-election
funds” of government officials whose support you would need to sell such a product.
For much of the last 40 years the Aereon 26 prototype has been sitting quietly
in a hangar in the Midwest, waiting for the world to catch up…
There are any number of business lessons in this case – not the
least of which is that how well your invention performs is only one of the
factors involved in marketing it successfully. At this time it isn’t clear if
Hybrid Air Vehicles (the company behind the current blimp/lifting body
development) will be able to succeed where Aereon failed, but as of this month
they are at least getting development money from their national government, and
at least tentative interest from two other countries. Given the place that
wildcat inventors, high-tech visionaries and entrepreneurial geniuses have come
to occupy in contemporary culture, maybe this is an idea that will finally get
off the ground…
Keep watching the skies, folks…
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