Date: 2007-02-03 02:57 Subject: Rising Above Airline Travel... Security: Public Mood: cheerful

I flew home for Christmas this last year. It was, each way, the most unpleasant 9 hours of my life. As it has been anytime I've flown anywhere (since the 747 was taken out of service, at any rate).

A big problem with the air travel industry today is that it is cramped, noisy, smelly, tiresome, and uncomfortable, fraught with bad service, bad food, bad movies, tiny windows, tiny seats, and tiny bathrooms. Everything has to be crammed into a tiny little missile-like shell with long, broad wings (which obstruct the view from those tiny windows) loaded with hundreds of gallons of extra-flammable fuel to run massive turbines which will propel the craft at hundreds of miles per hour. You're not allowed to get up and stretch most of the time, and even if you were, where would you go? And it's been that way for decades, and it's only gotten worse over time.

As 9/11 falls further and further behind us, I look back on my recent opportunity to travel by air and realize that all of the precautions taken by "Airline Security" are aimed, not at protecting passengers from terrorists, but at protecting airplanes from passengers.

Metal detection, shoe inspection, checked luggage and carry-on alike being pawed through by security for "possible weapons". No one can bring a pocketknife or a leatherman (which is a shame since they make resorting to cannibalism after the airplane crashes in the mountains SO much simpler) or a safety razor or an electric trimmer ("Crash the plane into a skyscraper or I'll scratch you with my unshaven chin!!") or a bottle of mouthwash or shampoo since those liquids could be replaced with Semtex....

Only about half the precautions are in response to what people have done (box cutters) or tried to do (shoe bombs); the rest are attempts to forestall passengers from things someone thinks they might do. Ever wonder what the real deal is with not being able to use celphones or DVD players during takeoff? Not because they interfere with anything, but because someone thinks they might be used to reprogram the avionics equipment to give incorrect readings, steer the plane off course, etc. You can't bring bottled water from the terminal onto the airplane because someone thinks you might have cultured a mutant bioweapon in it to infect the other passengers with some apocalyptic plague.

Airplane security used to be as simple as walking between the metal detectors. Now it's a 3-hour wait in line to pour all your loose change, car keys, jewelry, wallet, pocket posessions, jackets, belts, codpieces, etc into a basket to put it through a scanner which will tell them (Big Shock) that there's metal in there somewhere. Then the wand, the beep, take off the vest, the wand, the beep, take off the shirt, the wand, the beep, take off the pants, the wand, the beep, the cavity search. Then you get to put it all back on, standing up since there aren't any chairs available. And while you were dealing with all that, how long ago did your plane take off?

The only thing which keeps that abomination from being replaced with reasonable precautions and effective measures is the lack of competition. Oh, there are other airlines, but they all use the same airports, the same security, the same baggage handlers, etc. What are you going to do? Walk?

Well, there used to be competition for airplane travel. (No, I'm not talking Greyhound, or  AmTrak.)  At one time, airplanes used to share the sky with vehicles that made flying an experience to remember...fondly.  I speak of none other than lighter-than-air, bouyantly-flown rigid airships. You had the choice, back then, of squeezing into an airplane for a quick, bumpy, smelly ride to your vacation, or boarding an airship to take you on your vacation.

All of the literature and movies depicting airship travel portay it as the next best thing to hanging a 5-star hotel under a hot air baloon. The airship passenger spent days and nights, sometimes a week or more,  relaxing in opulent comfort, being waited on hand and foot by attractive stewards and hostesses, moving freely among lounges, theatres, and dance halls, and sightseeing from an altitude low enough to actually be able to see something, through banks of picture windows you could actually see something through.

And then the Hindenburg caught fire, and that was that. Well, no, not exactly....

For, you see, the airship has not been forgotten. And now that we have lifting gasses which don't explode into flame, and canopies which don't catch fire, and engines which don't require hazardous chemical fuels, and over a hundred years of accumulated experience in designing airframes which do what we want them to do and don't  do what we don't  want them to, it is now possible to revive the rigid airship for commercial leisure travel. 

And it is being done. A revitalized airship cruise industry will happen...in our lifetime. Possibly even within this decade. And I for one couldn't be happier.

Here are some links to the people who are making it happen.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/02/16/aeroscraft/  

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/aeroscraft-email.shtml
(A couple of "shape of things to come" articles about the future of leisure air travel)

http://www.aerosml.com/products.asp 
(The website of the manufacturer developing the airship design featured in the above article)

http://aeronautiqa.com/intro.htm  
(A commercial company offering vacation cruises, charters, and timeshares aboard their own brand of rigid airship)

http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/airship/introduction.htm  
(A clearing-house of historical and general info on blimps, semi-rigid and rigid airships, and their enthusiasts)