Hybrid Air Vehicles has built a scale prototype of what will soon be the largest flying vessel in the world – a huge balloon made of ultra-lightweight, super-strong polyester on top of a hovercraft landing system. If it works, it could change the future of flight.
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For the past 13 years, Taylor has been fighting a battle with investors, governments and the general public over the perception of the airship. ‘I’ve never seen a more peculiar industry than ours,’ he says as he leads me through the makeshift office on a bright mid-June morning. ‘There are more nutcases…’ He sighs and sips at his mug of Lady Grey. ‘You get what we call “the giggle factor”. People laugh at lighter-than-air vehicles and the guys who make them: the “helium heads”. It’s taken a long time to overcome that.’
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‘We’re regularly sent unsolicited proposals telling us how to build airships,’ Durham says wearily. ‘They’re either from 85 year-olds who were once engineers in the pencil business, or little design companies who think they’ve had a brilliant new idea and this is how it should be done.’
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Not everyone is convinced that ‘hybrid air vehicle’ will catch on. For one thing, it isn’t snappy and for another, the fundamental points of physics that differentiate it from an airship are beyond the grasp of most mulish lay people. As Dave Burns, the company’s steely-eyed Scottish test pilot, says wryly: ‘If it’s called an airship that’s a lot better than it could be called.’

Whatever you want to call it, the new technology has just won the company (or rather, their US defence contractor ally Northrop Grumman) a contract with the United States Department of Defence to the tune of half a billion dollars. In just 12 months the team at Cardington must build a 300ft-long surveillance vehicle capable of staying airborne for 21 days at a time. It will be known as the LEMV (Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle).