Headline of the Day

“World’s Largest Aircraft Mocked for Looking Like Giant Butt”  From a site called Futurism, and strictly because the headline caught my eye on Rantingly.  

Behold, the world’s largest aircraft: a gigantic airship called the Airlander 10 that, when viewed from a certain angle, looks a whole lot like a ginormous — and possibly, uh, plugged — butt.

The Airlander 10, for all of its glory, has a bit of a troubled past. It was originally designed in 2010 by the US military as a way to provide surveillance in Afghanistan for up to two weeks at a time, but the project was scrapped just two years later.

The story picks up from there, but I know you're waiting to see the picture, so here's the photo they link to on Instagram. 

Tough act to follow, but I'll note it only really looks like a butt from that angle. 

Although the original US DOD contract was cancelled, British developer Hybrid Air Vehicles kept the designs in case the desire for such an airship came back.  Lighter than air vehicles, airships, get talked about fairly frequently as some sort of wonderful green alternative to conventional aviation: remember this 2019 story about using gigantic airships in place of cargo container ships?  It seems they were smart to keep it as an option as a customer wants at least one.

A company called OceanSky Cruises is launching a new luxury air cruise to and from the North Pole in order to recreate a historic expedition Norwegian explorers undertook in 1926, CNN reported earlier this month. At the time, CNN noted that a newer, commercial version of the Airlander 10 was a top candidate for OceanSky’s vehicle of choice — and OceanSky has since confirmed that it will in fact be using the gigantic floating butt.

The combination of characteristics airships fly with; compared to a conventional aircraft they go slowly and they can go quite low, actually does seem like a smart fit for the kind of cruises that OceanSky wants to do.  I have no idea how many people are likely to sign up for such a trip, but that's their business - literally.  They're betting the money to develop the trips and buy the airship isn't wasted. 

The journey will make use of the Airlander 10’s ability to fly extremely slowly and close to the ground in order to give tourists amazing views of local wildlife and scenery — illustrating the tradeoff of low speed but high versatility that comes from flying in an airship rather than a plane.

“We can go down to 300 feet, even 100 feet if needed, as slow as a bike,” pilot Carl-Oscar Lawaczeck told CNN, “in order to offer our passengers a glimpse of those polar habitats to our passengers,”

It's not the most flattering image out there, but if you want to know what Airlander 10 looks like other than from the butt angle, this is an image of it after an early test flight that concluded less than optimally.

Photo credit on the top right of the frame, South Beds News Agency.  From the Futurism website.