A Zeppelin comeback
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With rising fuel prices dominating the news and affecting every level of the global economy, some solutions to fuel-efficient transport aren’t necessarily hi-tech ones. Many draw on older technology that until now was nearly obsolete. Germany has recently been producing airships again, which could soon be ferrying people around Europe and even to farther-off destinations. The slow-moving zeppelins are still as fast as high-speed trains, and in addition to low fuel consumption and low flight altitudes, very little new infrastructure has to be built to accommodate them. Let’s just hope they don’t still fill them with hydrogen.
1 comment
Vincent Sunday 10 August 2008
RE: let’s just hope they don’t still fill them with hydrogen”. I’m probably the first to fall in the elephant trap (and what an honor it is) but hydrogen wasn’t the problem with the famous zeppelin disasters. The general consensus now is that it was the aluminum coating on outside of the zeppelin blimp which caught alight because of a build up of static electricity (or something very similar to that).
Surprised that we continue to think zeppelins as slow when they’re “as fast as high-speed trains”. I wonder if the romantic image we have of them is simply cos. they were a ‘lost technology of a past era’. Would they suffer the same fate that wind farms are presently having – NIMBY.