Airships are a bygone transport of real delight

Some years ago a plan was mooted to start an airship service across Table Bay, taking passengers from Ratanga Junction to the city centre and back. Airships like the ill-fated Hindenburg actually made several elegant Atlantic crossings until the fateful explosion in 1937 put an end to the airship era.

I’ve always been rather sad about the disappearance of airships.

The Hindenburg went up in a ball of flame largely because the great buoyancy bags were filled with hydrogen, which is highly inflammable.

That need not be a problem today, when helium is plentiful enough be used instead.

In fact, it should be relatively easy to build far more efficient airships today than it ever was before.

We now have amazingly light and strong materials, like carbon fibre and Kevlar, which could be used to construct excellent airships.

We probably have the technology to build light, solar-powered engines, too.

The end of the airships was not only because of the danger of hydrogen.

It was largely because international airline services could transport passengers at twice the speed of airships.

But also at twice the discomfort and many times the irritation.

Whenever I do have to go somewhere by airplane I spend the week before take-off in horrid anticipation, and then the whole of the flight squeezed between a very large lady who takes up most of my seat and a very earnest preacher who hands me a pamphlet and spends the entire flight trying to convert me to his particular sect, which teaches that salvation comes in sacred cauliflower broth. Or whatever. I always get them.

I sit there, helplessly strapped into a seat designed to fit a legless dwarf and spend my time trying to imagine how peaceful it would be to travel in a huge airship, with the amenities of civilised life around me.

Those regular airships were equipped with cocktail lounges, dance floors and stages. They even built special light-weight pianos with aluminium frames for the airships. They travelled at about motor-car speed, but it must have been wonderful to be able to look down and see fields and farms and towns drifting past just a couple of hundred metres below.

You see hardly anything from the window of a Boeing, unless you’re interested in the tops of clouds.

I accept that most people are in far too much of a hurry to take a leisurely airship trans-Atlantic cruise today, but there must be folk out there with time to spare and enough curiosity to want to see what’s happening down below them.

I wonder what happened to the plan for a transTable Bay airship service. I was ready to buy a ticket. I still am.

Last Laugh

Harry was not particularly bright.

He appeared before the magistrate, who asked: “Are you the defence lawyer?”

“No, your honour,” said Harry. “I’m the guy who stole the car.”