Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), the company behind the development of the Airlander 10 aircraft, has appointed Kevin Taylor as chairman.
.jpg)
Taylor has been involved in the aerospace community at an executive level for more than 30 years, including as the group strategy director at BAE Systems.
Last month, HAV began the relocation of its production facility from Hangar 2 at Cardington in the UK, to a new site, also in the Bedford area.
HLPFI readers may recall that in November 2017, just a couple of days after it commenced the next phase of flight testing, the prototype Airlander 10 had another major mishap, breaking free from its mooring mast and collapsing to the ground, as we reported here.
Following the incident, HAV’s internal investigation confirmed that there was no evidence of structural or functional failure of the aircraft that could have led to the de-masting. This assessment did, however, confirm that the root cause of the mooring mast detachment was a failure to correctly secure the locking mechanism between the aircraft and its mooring mast, which was not detected.
The internal report recommends a number of corrective and preventative actions to improve the mooring mast locking mechanism and to address all other factors that contributed to the incorrect application of the mast locks, to minimise the possibility of similar events in future. The aircraft design team has begun implementing these actions as it moves from the prototype to the production variant of Airlander.
