“This is a world worth wanting…both slimmer and far more elegant.” New eco-blimps beat new supersonic jets any day

The Airlander 10 (from Hybrid Air Vehicle’s website)

The Airlander 10 (from Hybrid Air Vehicle’s website)

We were presented with two extreme options for airflight in the future this week (with a hat-tip to Bill McKibben’s excellent newsletter).

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United Airlines has started commissioning a new generation of supersonic aircraft. Great for those of us with childhood memories of Concorde, but terrible for emissions, and hardly the best response to a Covid which compels a rethink in international travel (all the problems laid out in this excellent piece from The New Republic.

In the same news window, an entirely different flying experience, impact and maybe even philosophy: the return of the blimp, performing strongly on carbon and emissions.

From Positive News, here’s the story:

Carbon-neutral, short-haul air travel will be possible by the end of the decade, say those behind a project to put airships in the skies. Such a development could reduce emissions from aviation, a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonise. 

UK-based Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) this week unveiled air routes that it hopes to offer from 2025. Those include Liverpool to Belfast, Barcelona to the Balearic Islands and Seattle to Vancouver. 

The 100-seater airships would initially use both combustion and electric engines, providing a range of 460 miles. HAV told Positive News that the CO2 footprint per passenger would be about 75 per cent lower than on a plane. By 2030, the company aims to have an operational, zero-emissions all-electric fleet. 

HAV’s Airlander 10 prototype has undergone six mostly successful test flights (one ended in a crash landing). The blimp is regulated to fly in the UK. HAV said it will have three aircraft ready by 2025 and build 12 per year from then. 

More from Treehugger:

According to HAV, the Airlander will offer sustainable inter-city traveling when compared to other forms of transportation that either emit huge amounts of CO2, like short-haul flights or take a long time, like ferries.

Take for instance the trip between the Spanish city of Barcelona and the island of Mallorca, a popular tourist destination. According to HAV’s calculations, the Airlander will be able to fly between the cities in 4 hours and 32 minutes, about half an hour more than what it would take to travel by airplane when the trip to and from the airport, as well as check-in and boarding time, are taken into account.

It’s not clear exactly where the Airlander would land, but HAV says the airship “can take off and land on virtually any flat surface, including water.” The company envisions building landing sites near city centers because, unlike passenger planes, the Airlander will not need a long runway for take-off and landing.

As well as low-carbon traveling, HAV says the Airlander will offer passengers a unique traveling experience when compared to airplanes, which the company describes as “metal tubes with tiny windows.”

In his newsletter, Bill McKibben tries to evoke the shift in “experience” that a new flight system of blimps would bring, and ropes in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For The Future as further evocation:

I think the experience will be the thing: with no need for a runway (and no jet-engine noise), the blimps could land near the center of cities. And blimp passengers, instead of strapping themselves into a metal cylinder with tiny windows and enduring a cramped ride, will have huge windows to gaze out of and plenty of room to move around.

Yes, there will be luxury options for the rich—that feature of our world won’t disappear. But these options do sound nice: a Swedish firm has already ordered a dirigible outfitted with deluxe cabins for trips over the North Pole. I’d save for years to do that once.

So far, the best descriptions of what this new world could be like come from Kim Stanley Robinson, a science-fiction author who specializes in depicting the kinds of delights that a world that took our predicament seriously might produce. Travel by blimp has featured prominently in several of his books, most recently the wonderful “The Ministry for the Future.”

In the novel, he writes that takeoff “felt strange, lofting up over the bay, bouncing a little on the wind, not like a jet, not like a helicopter. Strange but interesting. Dynamic lift; the electric motors, on sidecars up the sides of the bag, could get them to about two hundred kilometers an hour over the land, depending on the winds.”

In Robinson’s book, the travellers stay aloft for days, their pilot following animals or dropping down to see the snouts of glaciers. And here’s the thing: the passengers can keep working if they need to.

As with the air, so the sea. In the early stages of Robinson’s new world, ships are outfitted with solar panels that run electric motors. But soon people are building clipper ships with six sails, each one made of photovoltaic material, so that it can capture both wind and sun power.

Because it’s possible to keep working on board, even the President of the Ministry of the Future, arguably the most important person on the planet, can take one, “winds pushing and pulling them, the sun, the waves. The glorious glide, crest to trough, trough to crest, long rollers of mid-ocean.” This is a world worth wanting, one that manages to be both slimmer and far more elegant.

More here. And visit the Hybrid Air Vehicles website for all the boosterism you’d ever need…

And here’s a previous airship article on A/UK from 2017.