Of unconventional design, the airship featured three gas envelopes attached side-by-side, with the connecting structures shaped as airfoils to create extra lift as the craft moved forward.
Intended as a small prototype craft that would precede the development of much larger hybrid airships, the AEREON III was constructed between 1959 and 1965 but was destroyed during taxiing tests in 1966 and scrapped without having flown.
)[3] AEREON III was designed by Fitzpatrick and constructed between 1959 and 1965[5] at Mercer County Airport in Trenton, New Jersey.
[3] Even "thousand-foot automated Aereons moving in connected trains through the lower atmosphere" were foreseen by some of those involved.
There were ventral fins with rudders at the aft ends of the outer two hulls and elevons on the trailing edges of the connecting structures.
[8] The engine drove a 21 feet (6.4 m) diameter, two-bladed pusher propeller (actually a helicopter rotor rotating in the vertical plane).
[11] One source states that the AEREON III's buoyancy-control capabilities would allow it to fly using "gravity propulsion"—without the assistance of an engine—along the lines of Solomon Andrews's original Aereon but substituting helium heating for Andrews's dropping of ballast and helium cooling for his valving of hydrogen.
According to John McPhee's book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, the remains of the AEREON III were "virtually bulldozed back into the hangar, arriving more or less in flakes.
The new aircraft inherited its predecessor's McCulloch engine, along with aluminum tubing from the structure of AEREON III and several of its instruments.