LOTTE airship

LOTTE airship is the world's first autonomous solar-powered airship and has been certified under the registration number D-UISD, which was developed in close cooperation with the Federal Aviation Authority in Braunschweig, Germany, as there were no guidelines for the certification of solar-powered airships at the time of its construction. The world's first autonomous solar-powered airship was built in Stuttgart (Germany) by Prof. Bernd Helmut Kröplin and his team.^[1] The LOTTE airship has been operated since 1994 by Airship Technologies GmbH, a company founded specifically for this purpose.

The Institute of Computational Structural Mechanics for Aeronautical Engineering of the University of Stuttgart (Stuttgart University) started the research program of "LOTTE-1" airship in 1991, and the airship was successfully test-flown in April 1993. In 1996, the University of Stuttgart started a three-year research program to carry out relevant theoretical research and technical tests using the "LOTTE" airship as a test platform. In 1996, the University of Stuttgart began a three-year research program to carry out theoretical research and technical tests with the "LOTTE" airship as a test platform.

Historical design concepts for rigid or non-rigid airships could not produce the small airships that people wanted. Rigid airships have the disadvantage of high structural weight, whereas non-rigid airships cannot generate such high internal pressures and require less energy to stabilize the cladding. The result of this work is a new design concept, the quasi-rigid airship.^[2]

"LOTTE" was officially handed over to the Zeppelin Museum on November 27, 2014.^[1]