Grundy handed me a handkerchief-sized off-cut. The skin, a composite of tenacious, space-age materials, is barely a tenth of an inch thick but so strong that there is no need for any internal skeleton. The cambered twin hulls will be inflated with 1.2 million cubic feet of inert helium, not flammable hydrogen like most of the Airlander’s interwar forebears. Many of the scientific principles behind Grundy’s airship are a throwback to a bygone age, when Goodyears and Zeppelins carried affluent clientele around America and Europe and occasionally between the two. “We’ve completely normalized flying in an aluminum tube at 500 miles an hour, but I think we’ve got some big changes coming,” said Tom Grundy, an aerospace engineer and HAV’s CEO, who was showing me around the research facility. Unlike a passenger airplane, a passenger airship - buoyant and slow - doesn’t have to burn much fuel to stay in the air. Aviation is the most energy-intensive form of transport, and in recent years the industry has come under intense scrutiny for its environmental footprint. That idea was scrapped as America de-escalated its operations in Afghanistan, but by then a new application for airships was emerging. Hybrid Air Vehicles calls it the Airlander: a colossal, state-of-the-art dirigible that was originally conceived as a military surveillance platform for the U.S. For now, the airship of my imagination sat disassembled in front of me - an engine, the top section of a tail fin, a salubrious sample cabin. I disembarked from this flight of fancy and came back to reality in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the town of Bedford, a couple hours north of London. Down below, a huge oval shadow glides across the pack ice. Above you is a white canopy, the base of the great bladder of gas keeping you airborne. The ride is as smooth as a cruise liner cutting through a mirror sea.
From the vantage of a barstool in the center of a luxurious lounge, you look through panoramic windows to see an Arctic vista scroll past.
Picture yourself in an airship pushing into the northern latitudes. Henry Wismayer is a writer based in London.
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