As one person in the CNBC video below points out, there’s something almost magical about watching airships in flight… sort of the inverse of what you feel when someone says, “dirigible,” which I swear makes me think of required safety trainings, possibly involving protective gear.
So I’ve paid attention to the articles here and there, now and then, that say airships might be making a comeback, including ones specifically to haul freight. And then, I realize that “airships might be making a comeback” is a sub-sub-category of article that I’ve been seeing for awhile. For example:
- A Popular Science article musing about luxury airships in 2015
- BBC’s Future section considering how airships could fill a niche in our skies, circa 2019
- Foreign Policy detailing some of the start-up companies and others working on bringing back airships, circa 2020
- The Wall Street Journal, in 2021, looking at how this could be “Blimp 2.0”
- And finally, the aforementioned 2021 CNBC video which talks about the history of airships briefly, including the iconic Goodyear blimps, and considers the future
While the return of airships does seem to be as slow as they appear to move across the sky, it feels like something is going to happen this century… and that return of a little bit of magic doesn’t seem bad.
However, I confess, whenever I read these articles, I also suddenly think of Monty Python and get derailed. Maybe that’s what’s happening to the balloon engineers. I mean, airship. AIRSHIP!