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Research dossier · History & Society

Rigid Airship Design

Dutch airship company

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 16, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Rigid Airship Design B.V. was a company founded in the Netherlands in 1998 with the aim of building a modern rigid airship. In 1996, Scottish intellectual and airship expert Ian Alexander initiated a project in the Netherlands in co-operation with the Technical University of Delft, to design and construct a modern classic rigid airship based on proven technology. The project involved leading Dutch companies RDM Aerospace N.V., Nevesbu, Stork N.V., and Fokker Aviation. Consortium Rigid Airship Design was established on 26 May 1998 but went bankrupt 1 August 2001. The Utrecht-based lawyer Sjoerd Warringa was appointed as trustee by the Utrecht court.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Rigid Airship Design” as dutch airship company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewMost valuable as an event-and-institution map that identifies actors, dates and record creators for deeper historical inquiry. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1998, 1996, 2001—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Rigid, Airship and Design can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as dutch airship company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1998, 1996 and 2001.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Rigid Airship Design”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Rigid Airship Design primary sources, Rigid Airship Design archive and Rigid research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Rigid Airship Design”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Rigid Airship Design” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.