Return of the Zeppelins

kfg writes: "While the world has focused its aeronautic attention on the Helios solar powered plane the Zeppelin NT has carried it's first paying passengers on a one hour "tourist" flight in Germany, the first Zeppelin to do so since the infamous Hindenburg disaster. This comes after its return from the Paris Airshow where it was an unqualified hit with attendees. I can't really tell you why but this news tickles me more than any other tech news in ages. Sometimes the oldest tech is the coolest. Oh yeah, tickets are $280 American." This is the baby brother of the Cargolifter model; CNN has a brief story.

Comments

These billionaires are fucking wusses.

[LMariachi]

I swear to god, if I was one of these eccentric billionaires, I would put my fun money towards building an enormous rigid airship instead of these sissy aluminum foil looking fly-around-the-world-in-a-balloon projects. I mean, who gives a shit about recreating 18th century technology (but much more visually boring) to do some Society for Creative Anachronism mission the biggest achievement of which is using your corporate muscle to secure right-of-passage through hostile airspace because if you don't catch the autumn jetstream you're fucked? Fuck that shit. These so-called anomalistic Richard Branson types haven't got even the imagination of a marketing exec. Stop wasting your whimsical millions on boring non-telegenic bullshit. I'll show you how it's done: Biggest zeppelin ever, and not plastered with a bunch of stupid ads for stupid shit. Just a plain grey floating aerolith the size of three Nimitzes. It wouldn't appear at such predictable events such as the Super Bowl or the Great Hasidic Chinatown Traffic Jam of 2003 (which, inconvenient as it was at the time, wound up leading to major breakthroughs in game theory, chaos theory, metatheology, and Cargo-Van-Fu), but rather as a massively imposing spirit borne upon the winds of change. Once the shadow of the rigid airship was nothing more or less than an implacable signifier of Empire; soon -- very soon -- it shall transcend such primitive jingoistic motivations to become a constant reminder of how much better an inconceivably wealthy person I would be compared to all these Donald Trump dipshits we've got polluting our worthy meritocratic ideal today. Believe you me, the first ones up against the wall... no, scratch that. Don't put holes in a perfectly good wall. As a matter of fact, someone loaded that brass shell casing with skill and love and care -- it would be an insult to their craftsmanship to waste it on those shitheads. Let's just let the masses have at them with the homemade machetes that look so crude yet perform so effectively. You're next, Giuliani.

Hmm ...

[Hagmonk]

Okay. Judging from the pictures, it doesn't look like it seats a great many people. How competitive is it going to be when placed against a 747? Obviously not with respect to speed, but it has to have at least a few advantages, otherwise people won't take to it.

Oh yeah - NT? New Technology? I'm told that's the same expansion as the NT in Windows NT. *sniff sniff* I think I smell a lawsuit.

"People may buy your Zeppelin NT instead of Windows NT by mistake, so we're launching this lawsuit." Don't laugh - they'll do it.