The return of the airship?

Long ago, John McPhee’s book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed made me a fan of airships.

Now an article in The Guardian gives one more reason why it may finally be time to bring back the dirigible: global warming.

A recent report on mobility by the Smith School, for example, quoted an estimate by one developer, UK-owned SkyCat, that it could carry twice the weight of strawberries from Spain to the UK of a standard cargo plane, with a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, much of which is from avoiding the huge fuel burn a jet engine uses to take off.

Other benefits included the possibility that airships would not need to use airports if they were fitted with “lifts” to pick up and land cargo. This in turn would reduce the need for trucking goods to and from transport hubs, and allow less well-connected areas, perhaps in inland Africa, to take part in international trade, said [Sir David] King. For the same reasons the blimps could also be used to reach devastated areas in need of humanitarian aid, he said.

A link from one of the comments let me know that it’s already possible to take a trip on a next-generation zeppelin in Germany, Italy, and (someday soon?) in San Francisco and New York.