Many remote areas remain out of reach for very heavy or oversized cargo. Roads are often nonexistent or impractical, and smaller aircraft can only carry limited payloads. The Franco-Canadian company FLYING WHALES offers an alternative: its enormous aircraft can transport the likes of timber, wind turbine blades, electric pylons, building materials and mobile hospitals, and load and unload cargo without ever touching the ground.

“Our airship functions like a floating crane,” said Tanguy Lestienne, CEO of FLYING WHALES Services. “Filled with helium, it hovers effortlessly and doesn’t need any ground infrastructure to pick up or set down cargo. And compared to planes and helicopters, its distributed electric propulsion cuts emissions by around 70%, with future models expected to reach 90%. That’s especially valuable for timber extraction, renewable energy, or new power line projects where moving and positioning heavy pylons is complex. In this line of work, we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by almost a factor of ten.”

The LCA60T is a hybrid helium-electric airship stretching 200 meters from nose to tail and standing as tall as a 15-story building. Designed to carry up to 60 tons of heavy cargo, this unique air mobility concept is now ready to move from prototype to production.

On the outskirts of Bordeaux in southwestern France, construction will soon begin on the production facility where FLYING WHALES’ hybrid airship will come to life. Spanning nearly seven hectares with ceilings reaching 60 meters high, the factory is enormous in scale yet designed with the same care for the environment as the airship itself. Inspired by biomimicry principles, it will blend into the surrounding landscape, collect rainwater for natural re-infiltration and integrate ecological compensation areas across the site. The facility’s optimized structural design will also use around 50% less steel than conventional hangars.

“The most striking characteristic of the production site is its scale and that means we have to think and work in three dimensions at all times” said Simon Debeugny, head of manufacturing engineering at FLYING WHALES. “We’ll need to know who’s working at which level, where and on what. The scale, the structure, the way the airship is assembled, everything is new.”

Managing this complexity, from designing the airship to planning how it will be built in the factory, is done entirely in Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud. “All aircraft development is handled on the platform, so it was only natural to use it to define our manufacturing methods and design all the tooling,” Lestienne said.

Continue reading about the Virtual Twin of the Purpose-Built Assembly Facility:

https://www.3ds.com/insights/customer-stories/flying-whales-hybrid-airship