Airships will always have a home on this blog

Repairing the hull of the Graf Zeppelin in flight, 1933

I was perusing the 10 or so steampunk blogs I regularly view, when on the polish Steampunk Republika (a site in Polish that I navigate through pictures) I found a link to Rosebud's Early Airships and Aeroplanes site.

I quickly became locked out from sensations external to my desire to look at turn of the century aerodynes and rigid hull airships.

I know, I know, you think that airships have lost the race with aeroplanes and that there is no future for them.

Well, if you think that, you are wrong. And I will fight you over it. Not only are airships a superior form of travel but they are extremely more fuel efficient.

How is the airship better?

1. Airships are hard to bring down - yes, yes the Hindenburg blew up, but that was more of a design flaw than an inherent unreliability of the craft. For example, the Graf Zeppelin flew over a million miles and carried more than 34 000 passengers without incident.

2. On a large airship there is space to walk around. Sure the Graf Zeppelin only carried fifty passenger and crew, but the benefit of airships is that they can be scaled. You could literally have a skymall to walk around in as you took a nice two day journey across the Pacific. Too long for you? Would you rather sit in a seat, wedged in among row upon row of tired, aggravated passengers?

3. Fuel Efficiency - for the amount of fuel to send a jet across the Pacific, you could go around the world several times in an airship designed to carry the same amount of freight and passengers.

4. Because airships are cool.

Back to the site - the early aviator site has pictures of airships from before the halcyon day s of the Graf Zeppelin. These early aviators were braving the sky in new lighter than air vessels in pursuit of progress. Let's not forget that.

More airships to come.