The contract was axed a year later. In , it broke loose from its mooring and drifted haplessly through Pennsylvania , trailed by fighter jets, before crashing in a field. A similar program in Afghanistan, which became notorious among Kabul residents , saw even worse results. The tethers that kept the Big Brother balloons in place were notorious for snaring helicopter blades—one incident killed five American and British service members. An aerial visualization of the Ocean Sky airship.
The market for military airships and commercial blimps remained limited thanks to past failures, though not dead entirely. The cruise company OceanSky is forging ahead with plans to send a passenger airship to the Arctic , using a ship originally designed under the U. In the vast expanses of the Canadian north, there has long been a need for reliable transportation.
Many communities are only accessible by road when winter rolls around and the ground and lakes are solid enough to drive on, if they are accessible by road at all. That means basic goods need to be stockpiled when the weather is cold or flown in by cargo plane—never mind supplies to build long-term infrastructure. Many of these remote communities are reliant on gas generators and are facing shortages of reliable housing stock.
In , a junior mining company in Quebec inked an agreement with U. That plan went belly-up when the minerals company went bankrupt, although Straightline is forging ahead with plans to offer commercial and tourism flights. The interior of the Ocean Sky airship. Stranded resources and communities are a policy concern in Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Russia, and elsewhere. Flights are expensive and carbon dioxide-intensive, and they require airport infrastructure. Shipping is more viable as Arctic ice melts, but that often requires deep-water ports and can have damaging impacts on marine life.
The opportunity is also caveated with an array of risks and problems. There is no guarantee that the airships will even fly in the frigid north— Le Journal de Quebec reported that the airships will need a significant amount of water, which may be hard to come by amid Arctic temperatures. But Pasternak and his team remain optimistic. Without any further issues, the Aeroscraft will be up for certification by the FAA in It might not bring back the glory days of transatlantic zeppelins — but it might at least prove that airships can be more than floating billboards.
This article is from the CityMetric archive: some formatting and images may not be present. Contact us. White papers from our partners. Siemens Smart Infrastructure. New criteria for a new, smart building era. Microgrids — the future of energy management. How the smart office acts as a team player in crisis management. More on Europe How to crash the housing market. If you cringe at the thought of 12 hours of stiff-backed, knee-crunched, parched-air flights, imagine something closer to a flying cruise ship: your own room, a bed, a restaurant and bar, maybe even a glass-floored observation room where you could see the landscape below drifting past in glorious detail.
Would all this make it worth the fact that 12 hours of travel would turn into 60? Airships travel at about one-fifth of the speed of planes; 20 knots versus And nowadays the lifting gas of choice is helium, despite being expensive and scarce. Google co-founder Sergey Brin also started an airship company. LTA which stands for lighter than air! The aforementioned lack of need for runways makes airships a promising and practical option for delivering supplies to remote, hard-to-reach locations.
To that end, Barry Prentice, who leads the Canadian company Buoyant Aircraft Systems International , hopes to use airships to transport pre-built structures for schools and housing to remote parts of Canada that lack good roads. Hydrogen, on the other hand, can be extracted from water and so would much cheaper. And since hydrogen is lighter even than helium and thus more buoyant, it would mean airships could haul more cargo. To minimize the risks associated with hydrogen, Hunt envisions getting rid of the crew.
The airships would operate autonomously — and would be loaded and unloaded by robots. As an additional bonus, Hunt said, the fuel cell would generate as a byproduct water that could be released as the craft passed over regions hit by drought. Lanteigne, who has written extensively about airships, said building such colossal craft would be an enormous challenge. But Prentice expressed confidence that, as airships grow more popular, regulators and investors will change their minds.
That could happen soon.
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