The Second Age of Airships

The Telegraph has a story about a new generation of airships. It says "It's a new vehicle. It's a hybrid because we're combining helium lift, aerodynamic lift, a hovercraft landing system, and vectored thrust... If you can get beyond the word airship — because that has a lot of history — people think about them differently."

Comments

Helium

[Pete Venkman]

Is this really how we should be using the Helium we have left on Earth?

Re:Use hydrogen.

[erroneus]

This reminds me of a study covering the obvious which concluded that people will cling to their first belief regardless of the facts that are presented later. What you say about the Hindenburg is quite correct... and yet most people still blame hydrogen. The same is true about Holocaust stories -- many have been proven false and they are still repeated today. And we don't even need to talk about the office 9-11 stories.

Hydrogen is the correct answer, but people don't want to hear it because of the images of the Hindenburg crash. What people fail to understand is sad. Gasoline burns hotter than hydrogen, but thanks to the Hindenburg crash video, we don't have hydrogen cars either.

We get it, you're British..

[Paracelcus]

"football pitches" Huh?
"silver and crockery" you mean dishes, right?
"frolicking dogs" Whaddya?
"mug of Lady Grey" Tut, tut!
"mulish lay people" We call em Lusers
"sheep, a duck and a cockerel" a Whaterel, do you mean a chicken?
"too Byzantine for a computer to process" would it have killed you to say complicated?
"22 calibre armour-piercing incendiaries" I think you meant 22 millimeter