Here’s one way to make people look up from their phones: fly a giant blimp over San Francisco. That’s what happened Tuesday, when a slow-moving aircraft was spotted circling the Bay Area skies. 

But don’t you dare call it a blimp — it’s a rigid airship, and if you don’t want the people at LTA Research to look down on you (from hundreds of feet in the air), you won’t make that mistake twice.

The bulky balloon is LTA’s Pathfinder 1, and it was once again slipping the surly bonds (opens in new tab) of Earth against mostly sunny skies before soaring over the Golden Gate Bridge.

The airship is the brainchild of Alan Weston, who founded LTA Research in 2013 with funding from Google cofounder Sergey Brin. They have the audacious goal of reviving lighter-than-air technology, an idea that went the way of the Hindenburg.

The airship, which also goes by N125LT, took off from Mountain View’s Moffett Federal Airfield shortly before 9:30 a.m. in what the company called a test flight. It was aloft until the afternoon over the southeastern end of the bay, according to FlightRadar24.

The company is led by CEO Brett Crozier, a retired U.S. Navy captain with a Wikipedia page (opens in new tab) that reads like a Tom Clancy novel written by a venture capitalist.

The prototype airship is electric, which is either environmentally responsible or wildly optimistic, depending on your view of battery technology. Unlike a blimp, which has no framework and relies on pressurized gas like helium to keep its shape, a rigid airship is built around an outer hull.

Move over, Goodyear, because at 406.5 feet long and 66 feet wide, it’s also the world’s largest aircraft.

LTA says (opens in new tab) the airship is “the first step toward realizing our vision of leading the future of aviation with innovative lighter-than-air technology.” 

The last time anyone got this excited about airships, it was expected that gentlemen and ladies would wear hats with brims, and the future of communications was the radio. 

In 2023, Pathfinder 1 "achieved indoor untethered flight,” which sounds like what your toddler does when you’re not watching but apparently counts as an engineering milestone. The airship then graduated to the great outdoors, where it underwent several weeks of tethered flights over Moffett Federal Airfield before taking to the clouds for testing. The team gathered data on its “responsiveness, stability, and system performance”; in other words, “We flew it around, and it didn’t fall out of the sky.”

In May, the airship flew over San Francisco Bay for the first time. Then it earned an expanded airworthiness certificate, authorizing longer flights and more complex maneuvers. Last month, the team flew it over the Golden Gate Bridge.

The aircraft boasts navigation systems, lidar, thrust vectoring performance capabilities, and communications systems. Engineers are studying the vessel’s behavior in “unique wind patterns and maritime conditions.” 

LTA’s stated goal is to revolutionize aviation with airships that reduce emissions and can undertake humanitarian aid missions. So yes, somewhere between the engineering specs and the Golden Gate Bridge photo shoot, there’s a genuinely hopeful vision for the future of cargo and passenger transportation.