Good morning everybody.

My name is Carlo Ribaldi.

I'm from Politecnico di Milano.

As Frank actually said

my major background is from aeronautical engineering and especially

aircraft design.

Since 2020

I think

or 2019

something like that

we have started also this branch of

research which is mostly concerned with airships.

But today I'm going to start also this conference

it's my honor actually

with a presentation

which is taking a quite different perspective from a purely technical one.

I'm going to talk about the technical economic feasibility of lighter than air.

So the starting point is basically an observation of what we have in store

of what we have

flying today.

So typically, modern small scale, lighter than air machine are already flying, but they

share mostly the same architecture.

So they are unmanned

or mostly remotely controlled

low weight and compact in size

so they are

pretty small in general, considering an airship.

I mean

they are small for an airship

then low altitude

so they are not embodying excessively

complicated metals for increasing altitude or for descending.

And they are, of course, electrically powered.

So this is one of the novelties.

Lifting gas might be hydrogen or helium.

You probably

and somebody here actually

built some of the airships which are represented

here.

So with that said

we also observed that the adoption of these machines for specific missions

where they kind of appear to be successful or promising is still sporadic.

So we tried the exercise of understanding why this is true.

So why is this

I mean

why this spreading is not going much further.

There are some possible reasons which apply to small scale machines, so just possible

reasons.

We tried to find them, and one might be the lack of ground infrastructure.

So comparatively