
The USS Macon flies above New York in 1933.
Hindenburg.
Now, more than 80 years later, the giant airships may be poised for a comeback — not for passenger service, but as an environmentally friendly means of delivering goods around the globe.
As proposed in a recent scientific paper, the new airships would be 10 times bigger than the 800-foot Hindenburg — more than five times as long as the Empire State Building is tall — and soar high in the atmosphere. They’d do the work of traditional oceangoing cargo ships but would take less time and generate only a fraction of the pollution.
“We are trying to reduce as much as possible emissions of carbon dioxide because of global warming,” said Julian Hunt, a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, and the paper’s lead author. Hunt said the new generation of airships would get around by riding the jet stream, a powerful air current that circles the globe. He and his collaborators calculate that an airship a mile and half long could circle the globe in 16 days, hauling more than 20,000 tons of cargo while expending little energy.
When the Hindenburg flew, operators had only the most basic means of predicting weather patterns and the crudest materials for fabricating airships. “They used to use cow intestines to build the gas bags,” Hunt said.
Heck, they could've just used my wife for that...
Yes, we've come a long way since then. Long enough? That remains to be seen.