How Hybrid Air Vehicles Is Making World’s Longest Aircraft Longer

Company’s Airlander 10 already has matched fixed-wing history.

Jack Daleo

Monday, July 07, 2025 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

With a length of 302 feet, Hybrid Air Vehicles’ Airlander 10 is designed to be the world’s longest aircraft. [Courtesy: Hybrid Air Vehicles]

Key Takeaways:

Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) is developing the Airlander 10, a hybrid helium-aerodynamic aircraft designed to be the world's longest, with future plans for even larger, hydrogen/electric models.
The Airlander 10 offers unique capabilities such as runway-free operation, long endurance (up to five days), and significant payload capacity for various missions.
It is being marketed for diverse applications, including luxury passenger tourism, heavy cargo transport, and military surveillance and logistics.
HAV aims for commercial introduction by 2029, focusing on type-certification and proving the aircraft's safety and reliability to the public following past prototype incidents.

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Extending close to the length of a football field, U.K.-based Hybrid Air Vehicles’ (HAV) Airlander 10—dubbed “The Flying Bum” by the British public due to its double-ellipsoid airframe—is designed to be the world’s longest aircraft. Eventually, though, the 10-ton payload model could be the smallest in the Airlander family.

“We’ve always looked at larger Airlanders,” George Land, executive sales director for HAV, told FLYING, “and we’d always thought that probably a 50-ton aircraft was the next step up.”