Come, let us begin the annual summoning ritual of resurrecting airships which will surely work this time, for reals....

Nearly 100 years after the dirigible Graf Zeppelin made the first nonstop airship journey across the Pacific Ocean, another airship has successfully completed a round-trip flight from New Mexico to Japan and back. But the significance of this modern feat was less about the journey’s length and more about its purpose: demonstrating how a lighter-than-air platform can act as a cell phone tower in the sky. The trans-Pacific flight that took place over a month between August and September 2026 was the most notable milestone yet for Sceye...

Wait, wait, Sceye ?

That's a naming choice so pretentious it's physically painful. I shall replaced this with Sky for the sake of my own well-being.

...has developed an uncrewed platform filled with helium for buoyancy and equipped with an electric-powered propeller for active propulsion, allowing it to resist most strong winds and keep hovering over the same location for long periods. The platform also uses top-mounted solar panels and onboard batteries to stay powered for stratospheric operations around the clock.

“We can stay over an area of operation, and we do that in the stratosphere right around 60,000 feet, so we’re twice as high as air traffic and we’re above the jet stream, and yet 30 times closer than low-Earth orbit satellites,” Mikkel Frandsen, founder and CEO of Sky, told Ars. “We can fly through day and night until the sun comes up the next morning and recharges the batteries, at which point we’re still at the same altitude and still over the same area of operation.”

There have been many past technology demonstrations and attempts to make stratospheric platforms commercially viable since the late 1990s, Frandsen said. In Sky' case, the company began testing a series of smaller prototypes in 2016 before eventually reaching the stratosphere with a 215-foot (65-meter) length version in 2021. The latest version extends to 270 feet (83 meters).

Sky's current platform has already done multiple flight demonstrations with payloads exceeding 220 pounds (100 kilograms) and can provide up to 1 kilowatt of onboard power capability for any devices that it may be carrying. The design could eventually scale up to a high altitude platform system (HAPS) capable of lifting payloads as heavy as 551 pounds (250 kilograms). That would be between 25 and 50 times more payload capacity than competing stratospheric platforms like high-flying drones, according to Helena, a US non-profit organization with a for-profit investment arm that has invested in Sky.

The stratospheric platform has an auto-navigation system that allows the airship to fly on its own between point A and point B while accounting for factors like local wind conditions, Truong explained. The monthlong mission to Japan and back—dubbed Service Test 1 (ST1)—was the longest test flight and deployment yet for Sceye’s platform. “There were times when our actual plan trajectory and flight path was disrupted by a change in the weather,” Truong told Ars. “So what it would do was actually just park itself at a safe, quiet place in the weather and just station-keep a while until it moved on.”

#Technology
#Airships
#Tragedeigh

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/1…