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. The craft uses good-old-fashioned radio control, and except for the nylon envelope he spends the first 15 minutes of the video below designing and sewing up, the technology mostly comes from be from the world of R/C aircraft.

The big exception is of course the a propane burner used to generate heat, said propane being supplied by a pair of small green tanks such as you might use on a portable barbecue. Everything that moves is electric, though: there’s a 70 mm (about 2¾“) electric ducted fan acting to push the air up into the balloon so it keeps shape, and a great big brushless DC motor pushing an 18” (about 457 mm) prop for thrust. The steering servo is actually a repurposed winch servo from an R/C sailboat, rather than anything from the world of model aircraft. But it makes sense, as the meter-scale fabric rudder is more like a sail than the control surfaces of most R/C aircraft.

You might expect a blimp to be the biggest flying machine we’ve featured on Hackaday, but some truly giant-scale R/C aircraft have come our way in the past. We’ve also seen some pretty teeny blimps.

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