Don’t Worry, This R/C Airship is Supposed To Be On Fire
Avery Flies has constructed a 27-foot thermal airship that combines the lift principles of a hot air balloon with the directional control of a dirigible. The craft utilizes a propane burner for heat generation and electric propulsion systems for thrust and shape maintenance. It features a repurposed sailboat winch servo to steer a fabric rudder, distinguishing it from standard radio-controlled aircraft.
- ▪The airship is 27 feet long and operates as a thermal dirigible using hot air for lift.
- ▪A propane burner supplied by two small green tanks generates the necessary heat for the nylon envelope.
- ▪An electric ducted fan maintains the balloon's shape, while a large brushless DC motor drives an 18-inch propeller for thrust.
- ▪The steering mechanism uses a repurposed winch servo from an R/C sailboat to control a meter-scale fabric rudder.
Hackaday files mainly under tech. We currently carry 549 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/10/06/dont-worry-this-r-c-airship-is-supposed-to-be-on-fire/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 07 Oct 2026 05:00:19 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-07T05:02:44.300Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-07T05:02:44.300Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | _ppdlQrzptiL · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Don’t Worry, This R/C Airship Is Supposed To Be On Fire No comments by: Tyler August October 6, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy We’ve had a lot of flying hacks here over the years, and that includes just about any way to get airborne you can think of — but very few of those have been airships. Fewer still have been 27-foot thermal airships, like the one [Avery Flies] designed and put together recently. A thermal airship, in case the name doesn’t give it away, is a dirigible hot air balloon. Like a hot air balloon, it gets its lift from the density difference between hot air and the regular atmosphere. Unlike a hot air balloon, it has control surfaces and an engine so it goes where you tell it to.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Hackaday
