Autumn is a particularly vivid season in Germany, almost coercively reminiscent of the old Sinatra number which begins:
The falling leaves drift by the window,
The autumn leaves of red and gold . . .
But other things drift by as well. Yesterday I looked out and saw an airship passing idly by.
For a brief period during the late 1920s and the 1930s, the great airships provided those who could afford it with the ultimate in smooth, silent, flying comfort. But then a number of tragic and well-publicised disasters - notably the British R101 in 1930, the American Akron and Macon in 1933 and 1935, and the German Hindenburg in 1937 - swung public opinion against the use of airships, and after little more than a decade the lighter-than-air approach to flight was abandoned.
There are signs, however, that airships are about to make a comeback, just like Ol' Blue Eyes himself was wont to do. The one that passed my window was one of those used, not uncommonly nowadays, for advertising. It was, of course, tiny by comparison with its intercontinental pre-war ancestors, but these new aircraft are much safer and more sophisticated than their predecessors; they are equipped with modern avionics and filled for lift with the inert gas helium, rather than the traditional, but highly volatile, hydrogen.
It is not envisaged by even their most optimistic champions that airships will ever replace the aeroplane for transportation of the masses. But there are niches to exploit. Airships could be ideal, for example, for fishery protection duties or border control, for advertising, as we have already seen, for leisurely low-level world or continental cruises and, acting as flying cranes, for speedily transporting large, unwieldy objects of a size that would require them to be dismantled before being loaded on an aeroplane.
Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik, the direct descendant of the company founded by the Graf himself a hundred years ago, has built a prototype, the LZ NO7, that is 200 ft in length and which has already chalked up 300 flying hours. In Europe alone, the company hopes to sell 30 of these aircraft in the coming years.
But the LZ NO7 is small as airships go. Another German company called Cargo Lifter is developing the CL160, some 800 feet in length, which will be the largest airship ever built. It will be capable of lifting 160 tonnes, will travel at 60 m.p.h. with a crew of 12, and will be on sale in a few years, at an aerodrome near you, for a mere $50 million.