New Years Greetings

In 2015 the reach of our small airship project „Windreiter“ has increased dramatically far beyond Germany, this is why this new-year retroperspective is in english.

Lot´s of people have somehow contributed to an unbelievable year and in this letter I like to point out the highlights of 2015 and take a look what could happen next.

The biggest thing that probably took the most time and stressed us out the most was the silent_runner Startnext crowdfunding campaign. We made a funny video with crappy sound that convinced lots of people that model airships can be built in a do-it-yourself way. In the frame of this campaign we visited the experTEC at the Intermodellbau in Dortmund, where we flew our airships through 7 huge event halls over more than 10.000 people, carrying a camera. But the real breakthrough happened at the Makerfaire 2015 in Hannover, where we showed our idea for two days to the tinkerers and geeks. The best thing was probably, that the coffee store next to us made a deal, that included free coffee and tasty brownies as long we flew his advertisement in the event hall. Despite we had really good coffee, the makers got deeply interested and within three days our crowdfunding campaign succeeded and reached more than double the amount of funding. But we did not rest and our airships appeared at the industry museum in Oberhausen, tackling with kids and at the “Nerd-Night” in Düsseldorf, which was even covered by the TV.

Once the Startnext campaign was successful we had the first time in 8 years of the Windreiter project an amount of money to play with. I think what we made out of this few thousand € is worth noting. First of all we developed the iteration 4 of the silent_runner, which is probably one of the most robust, easy to build and fly model airship in the world. At the same time we built and acquired machines that are now helping us to make lots of airships. We acquired the Ultimaker 2, we built an envelope welding robot that makes welding hulls a charming job for a single person drinking coffee most of the time. Further we built a CNC depron cutter that cuts the empennage of the silent_runner kits. Last but not least our team, in days and weeks of crazy work, made 50 full DIY silent_runner kits, each one including more than 70 little parts and shipped it all over the world, even to Australia.

But that´s not all, our team also visited the highly exciting events of the Airship Association including the International Airship Convention 2015, were André had dinner under the reconstruction of the Hindernburg´s passenger compartment and the SASU was funded. Thomas also travelled to the Airship Symposium, having a silent_runner in his suitcase that won the event´s regatta. Further we travelled to Zwickauwhere we had the great pleasure of seeing the TVN airship crew operating one of the most advanced camera airships of the world.

And finally there was the “Bodensee”-project. We built a 2.5 m long rigid model of the LZ-120, which weighs in the end less than 280 g and was fully capable of flying. This built was covered by the TV Show “DMAX – Die Modellbauer – Das Duell – Luftschiffe”, which also observed the Berliners building a beautiful model of the Zeppelin-NT. Despite all problems the model of the Bodensee did its virgin flight in hall of the Modellbau-Messe in Friedrichshafen, right next to the Zeppelin hangars.

But even though, we did a lot this year, let´s not forget it´s just a hobby and while in the Windreiter project happened a lot, much more happened in the real life of our team. There was a finished bachelor exam, a successful master thesis as well as a PhD defense, and last but not least Anke and me got our first child Emil.

Looking back to this year, it´s pretty hard to think about what could come next year, but we´ll definitely not stop looking into lighter than air technology. We have now the agreement of building a little Windreiter headquarter in a 30 m² room, and once it´s ready you´re all invited to come over and build airships with us. Second we´ll try to sell silent_runner DIY kits on a regular base, including all necessary material. And finally, wherever an airship race is held, you´ll see us fighting the Berliners in a fair but hard battle for rum and honour 🙂

It was a great year, thanks to all of you,
and see you in 2016,

Andreas and the Windreiter Team