She flies ! I expected more of a fanfare than this.
At 92m long and 43.5m wide, this is the world’s largest aircraft, dwarfing heavyweights such as the Airbus A380 “superjumbo”. It is a bit cheaper, too, with a catalogue price of £25m, compared with $375m (£287m) for an A380. It can also carry a 10-tonne payload, comparable with military transport helicopters such as the Boeing CH-47 Chinook, the US Air Force’s workhorse of choice.
Hmmm. So it costs about 10% of an A380 but can carry 10% of the payload... of course it can also do stuff aeroplanes can't :
HAV’s chief executive, Stephen McGlennan, has his eye on a stock market listing toward the end of this year to raise up to £30m. He believes there could be 100 of the airships in the skies within five years and says there is latent demand for around 1,000. Potential uses include tourist pleasure cruises, cargo transport and disaster relief.
The Airlander is already attracting interest from military powers willing to spend where the US was not. “At first, 40 to 50% of its use will be military,” McGlennan predicts. The Airlander can stay airborne for weeks at a time, monitoring activity such as insurgents planting explosives.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/17/airlander-10-is-this-the-dawning-of-a-new-age-of-the-airship
A decade ago, a few close friends and I decided that if the airship became viable again as mass transportation, we'd ditch transcontinental airplane flights in favor of a more leisurely cruise.
ReplyDeletebreaks out the one-man band so she can provide the fanfare :D
Oh yeah, I've been wanting to do that for a while. It might take three days but at least there'd be legroom...
ReplyDeleteDescribing helium as "far less flammable than the hydrogen that filled the R101 and the Hindenburg" is a rather odd way to put it!
ReplyDelete