Blimp

Despite my fear of heights, I have no fear of flying, and would like nothing more than to hitch a ride someday on a blimp/airship/ dirigible/zeppelin.

I've always loved blimps.

When I was a kid, we occasionally saw one off in the distance, and spotting one - they were always heading west - from the back yard on a summer's evening was supremely exciting. How often this happened, I have no recall, but we spotted blimps on more than one occasion.

Where were they coming from? Where were they heading?

I have nary a clue.

I don't remember that they were advertising blimps - Hood Milk, Goodyear [or is it Goodrich?] - but they may well have been. I have a vague memory that they were military, but to what end they'd be sailing over Worcester, I can't imagine.

But just seeing them, off in the distance over one or the other of the Worcester hills, was both mysterious, thrilling, magical.

There was a cookie that my mother often bought - some type of butter cookie that came in the shape of toys. I remember a rag doll, a block, and - what could be more wonderful - a blimp.

Although they were exactly the same, other than for their shape, the blimp, my favorite, just tasted better than the others.

Blimp-spotting is more common now than it was then.

During baseball season, on a home game day, all I have to do is look west to see one.

And every time I spot one, it still makes me smile.

Other than the chilling old film of the burning of the Hindenberg - "Oh, the humanity!" - what's not to like about blimps?

Of course, I really don't know much about the distinction among different types of airships. They're all blimps to me, but apparently a dirigible has some type of metal frame that makes it rigid and gives it some strength and maneuverability lacking in the balloon-esque blimp.

Blimp or dirigible, they'll always be blimps to me.  So I was delighted to see a recent NY Times article on what may well be a new dawning of the "New Age for Dirigibles."

A French architect, Jean-Marie Massaud, hasn't quite:

...ironed out the technical details, nor has he found financiers or corporate backers for his project — to create a 690-foot zeppelin shaped like a whale, with a luxury hotel attached, that he has named Manned Cloud.

The Manned Cloud.

I like the sound of that.

Sure, Massaud may have his head in the unmanned clouds, but there are others getting in on the act with ideas that, if not more down to earth, exactly, are more tethered to reality.  Sort of.

The French postal service is looking into using them to get the mail to their overseas territories.

And a Canadian company, Sky Hook, has hooked up with Boeing to develop an airship that can do some heavy lifting - 40 tons, to be exact. SkyHook's tagline is "taking industry beyond the last mile", and the thinking behind it is that this is a more environmentally friendly way to get at (and extract resources from) mines, forests, and the petro-chemical underground. (Okay, you can argue that we should be leaving all that wilderness beyond the last mile alone, but we all know that we will hunt the last natural resource down with the avidity of rat scratching through a garbage bag to find that last chicken bone. So we might as well not wreck all the environs building roads and sending kazillion pound trucks in over all that fragile tundra and rainforest.)

Other companies looking into airships for ocean crossings. Given that the Queen Mary is making a resurgence with Atlantic crossings, there may well be an audience for those who want to poke along in an airship (which, according to The Times, over 400,000 souls - Oh, the humanity -  did before the Hindenberg exploded in Lakehurst, NJ). And, of course, it takes less time to poke along in an airship than it does to poke along in a ship-ship.

In an article on Good Clean Tech notes that they can go 150 m.p.h., so a trip from London to NY would take 26 hours. (I think I'd rather take in the other direction, with the wind to my back.)

There's also some sight-seeing potential - there are $500 a pop tours over Monterey Bay run by an outfit called Airship Ventures - but they're not likely to see a lot of build up, I suspect, in places where the weather is really terrible for, say, 6 months out of every year.

A number of airship ventures, apparently, haven't quite gotten off the ground. But with concerns about jet fuel costs, not to mention that environmental depredations visited upon us every time we take flight in a big old jet plane, the time for the airship may well have come.

The Manned Cloud may never take wing, but I like the idea of it.

And maybe, just maybe, someday I'll get a chance to sail around in a blimp.