The Goodyear Inflatoplane, a crude inflatable aircraft from the 1950s, is often described in mocking terms, as if the whole concept is laughable. And yet… it worked. It didn’t work *great,* but it was a simple plane to fly and operate and would have been relatively cheap to build. It could of course fold up into a small space. Repairs could doubtless be achieved often enough with duct tape. I have often thought that a modernized Inflatoplane, with modern materials, an improved engine, smaller, lighter instruments, could well find an impressive market. Imagine a two seat aircraft with the performance of a Piper Cub that you could carry in a truck or an SUV. An aircraft such as this could take off and land from runways, roads, fields, ice, snow and quite possibly water.
The structural material that the aircraft was made from, “airmat,” was a simple rubberized fabric. Two layers were separated by a few inches, held in place by a multitude of simple threads. Once pressurized, the structure would hold its shape and turned out to have just about the highest strength to weight ratio of any “beam” type structure imaginable. Doubtless this could be improved somewhat with modern materials… instead of rubber and nylon, perhaps some form of teflon and carbon fiber/kevlar might cut weight, add strength, reduce packaged size and keep cost reasonably low. Modern propulsion systems, from improved props and internal combustion engines to hybrid systems to all-electric systems, could cut weight and cost while increasing range.
It seems to me that an aircraft of this kind should be mass producible on large scale at a low price. Heck: share the production line with civilian and military variants. Along with transporting troops and the like, an inflatable aircraft such as this would have a structure that should be virtually invisible to radar; repackage the propulsion system into a low RCS configuration and you could have a drone that could be packed three or four per Hummer and flown around over relatively modern enemy airspace, unseen.