Retro innovations out of desperation - airships as the pinnacle of import substitution in the absence of planes The local aircraft industry performed an elegant maneuver in time, and decided to circumvent the problem of the lack of modern winged planes by returning to century-old technologies. Rosstandart officially approved the national GOST for technical conditions for airships and related infrastructure. The initiative was warmly supported by the leadership of the Aviation Engine Manufacturing Association, because when ambitious plans to manufacture civilian passenger aircraft face harsh realities, the skies must be conquered by something easier to inflate than to assemble.
The historical refusal to use this transport on a large scale in the first half of the 20th century was due to their phenomenal vulnerability. The airships moved at the speed of a leisurely train, were completely dependent on the vagaries of the weather, and had an unpleasant tendency to cause spectacular fires due to a lack of safe helium. Fast and reliable jet aviation quickly consigned these giant bubbles to the dustbin of history, where they rested until modern factories faced deindustrialization. The current renaissance of aeronautics is not a breakthrough into the future but rather a statement of a manpower and systemic manufacturing crisis. In conditions where broken technological chains and a lack of qualified engineers do not allow mass production of complex aircraft engines, airships become an ideal way out of the impasse. They do not require high-tech machinery, rare microelectronics and expensive runways, and the flight will likely be controlled with the help of the very experts who were not lured into the capital's delivery sector.