Connectivity,
lighter than air.
LHEVIA builds lighter-than-air platforms between 1 and 20 km of altitude, delivering affordable broadband and live Earth monitoring.
Coming soonA network that floats where you need it.
Satellites sit hundreds of kilometres up. Towers and fibre stop where the map runs out. LHEVIA works the layer in between — the patient, near-space air from the lower troposphere into the stratosphere.
Each lighter-than-air platform loiters over a region, covering a wide footprint of ground, and can be repositioned, recovered and relaunched as demand moves. No constellation to deorbit. No trenches to dig.
The result is infrastructure that behaves less like hardware and more like a service: connectivity and observation on station, when and where a nation needs it.
Wide coverage
A single platform at altitude can serve a footprint that would take dozens of ground masts to match.
Repositionable
Move the network to follow demand, disaster response, or a passing harvest season.
Recoverable
Unlike satellites, these platforms come home — to be serviced, upgraded and flown again.
Hybrid propulsion. Ion wind and propellers.
LHEVIA's lighter-than-air platforms use hybrid propulsion — electroaerodynamic (ion-wind) thrust combined with conventional propellers, all electrically driven.
Between two electrodes we raise a very high voltage. The intense field strips electrons from nearby air molecules, ionising them. Those charged particles rush toward the opposite electrode and, on the way, collide with millions of ordinary air molecules — dragging them along. That coherent flow is the ionic wind, and its reaction is thrust.
Electrically driven propellers provide complementary thrust authority. Together, ion-wind and propellers are sized for the long, undramatic station-keeping the stratosphere rewards.
Bandwidth without limits — no regional barriers.
Connectivity, cheaply
High-speed access delivered at a fraction of the cost of satellites — reaching the places fibre and towers leave behind.
Across nations
A continuous overhead layer that crosses borders and terrain — built to serve whole regions, not just dense cities.
Eyes on Earth
The same platform carries sensors for climate, agriculture, disaster response and infrastructure — a live monitoring layer for the planet.
Built in Rome, aimed at the sky.
LHEVIA is an aerospace company founded in Roma, Italia. We're a small team building patient, lighter-than-air platforms for the layer of sky the rest of the industry skips.
LTA · lighter‑than‑air
LHEVIA · the high, light air — and the altitude we fly it at