Blimp Blues

The other day I felt the sudden and urgent need of boarding a blimp.

I am the son of a pilot. Throughout my life I have flown on a variety of aircraft. Big and small airliners, of course, as well as ultralight aircraft and gliders. I have flown in the pope's helicopter with my grandmother, who sat in the pope's heavenly soft seat like a saint herself, and traversed the Italian peninsula with it. In every case, I've found flying to be an exhilarating and stunning and insufficient experience.

Human flight is amazing, and it is also frustrating for how functional it is. For functional reasons, the cabin windows on passenger aircraft are one-twentieth the size I wish they'd be, and do not extend under my feet. Most of the time, the airplane flies at such high altitudes that I can't make out what is going on down there, and when it's lower down it goes so fast that I can't take a good long look anyway. Helicopters emit an unacceptable amount of noise. These machines are all so close to the quintessential experience of flight—as I envision it—yet they so intentionally avoid it. I could learn to pilot myself and take control of part of that experience, but I'd rather not be desperately focused on staying alive for the next five minutes if I'm to enjoy the whole stunt (this is also why I dislike driving and why I may never be able to live outside Tokyo again). Heavier-than-air flight is like a cliff-hanger ending to a film whose Part 2 has been forever canceled.

For mysterious reasons, I and everyone else seem to forget that we ever invented airships: a way to fly as slowly and as peacefully and as low as you want, a way to grant you the luxury of going through the multiple stages of awe on your own time, of thickly conversing with a landscape rendered so alien by the mere change of viewing angle and the inexplicable it's-all-just-one-place-ness. Excluding space stations, how else do you get a dose of the overview effect?

For all these reasons, I would like to ride one.

Apparently, blimps went out of fashion in the nineteen-thirties, when several of them exploded very theatrically or went out of control and crashed, burning or smothering their terrified passengers and losing their cargo. We still have a few of them today—the estimates I found count 25 in total—and they're all used to advertise car tires and beer and some for scientific observation. The very rare recent initiatives mostly aim for laudable and functional things like providing stratospheric internet hubs and "humanitarian and cargo transport". That's not what I want.

The year the Hindenburg exploded, 1937, was also the year with the highest fatality rate per capita of car accidents in US history. Those deaths weren't as flashy as a gigantic ball of fire in the sky, and people-killing cars remained in fashion until now, and in the meantime we've managed to make driving roughly 14 times safer than it was back then (relative to miles traveled). Surely we can do safer and cheaper passenger airships today, too. What's blocking us?

Consumed by these burning questions, I did what every rational person would do: I looked for answers on Reddit.

I will not relate everything I found there, but I'll paraphrase what I thought was the most convincing answer. To a redditor asking "why haven't airships evolved to be viable today?" a sardonic commenter answered: "but they did evolve: today we call them jetliners."

I admit that this is a powerful way to put it. It can shut you up for a minute. Hmmm... it's true. Jetliners are a much faster way to get to places than airships can ever hope to be. They need much smaller hangars, and they carry more cargo relative to their size. There really is no competition. Heavier-than-air wins hands down.

But wait a minute: it wins at what game? It evolved into airplanes based on which measure of fitness? Apparently, the commenter meant that today's aircraft are the culmination of a long series of optimizations toward the goal of traveling from A to B fast, safely, and with lots of cargo. But is that the one goal of flight?

I can think of an alternative goal: "enjoy and absorb the wonder of human flight and the wholeness of nature."

Right after Joseph-Michel Montgolfier had the idea for the hot-air balloon, he wrote to his brother and co-inventor Jacques-Étienne the following message:

Get in a supply of taffeta and of cordage, quickly, and you will see one of the most astonishing sights in the world.

A century after that, another pair of brothers (is this a coincidence?), still children, received as a present a toy helicopter. They much enjoyed playing with it, and even contemplated building a scaled-up version large enough to carry both of them. Later, they claimed that this toy was the initial inspiration for their pursuit of heavier-than-air flight, the result of which is now history.

While I can't know for sure, I get the impression that neither the Montgolfiers nor the Wrights were primarily motivated by the goal of "traveling from A to B fast, safe, and with lots of cargo". More likely, based on these reports, is that they simply wanted to fly. They wanted to know what it was like to be up there with a lot of air between their feet and the ground. They wanted to be able to visit this house and surprise that lady, loop around a clock-tower and under a bridge. Like Peter Pan. How I would like to be in their shoes the moment they finally attained some of those powers!

If my guess is right, the driving purpose for the invention of flight—both balloons and airplanes—was lost somewhere along the way. It looks like people forgot about it. Today we consider only transportation, business, war, and efficiency worthy of investment.

That's not to say that the goal of relishing in the miracle of human flight hasn't been achieved at all. Any form of flying, even with all the functional restrictions, is a wondrous experience, and it goes a long way towards the kind of contemplation I wish for. Many people choose to learn how to pilot small aircraft for nothing other than the thrill and fascination of being up there in the sky. That's a Good Thing. I'm not here to diminish that experience for the thousands who love it. All I'm saying is that we could make it even better, but apparently we aren't trying very hard.

This makes me wonder: where do purposes go? Why do they slip from our collective fingers so easily?

In some cases, changing who is in charge doesn't kill the original purpose. A newly-appointed CEO is still determined to maximize shareholder profits like their predecessor, and each relay runner still wants to deliver the baton to the finish line faster than the opponents.

In other cases the changing circumstances seem to warrant at least a partial transformation of the goals. For instance, the founders of many democracies originally set certain objectives of equality and justice, but they also pursued other ideals, like slavery and male-only voting, that we have long since disowned as discriminatory and bigoted. Similarly, if you set out to buy groceries but an earthquake hits you along the way, it's natural for the new goal of urgent self-preservation to supplant the original one of carrot-purchasing.

But I think it is possible for some goals to simply go missing in action, without people wanting or even noticing it. The spark of an idea, an inner promise to oneself, disappears without being inherited or understood or heard. Who knows how many times it has happened before? How many projects both ambitious and feasible—if not then, now—have been cut short by aleatory forces or hijacked by entirely different goals?

Do we have a duty towards the intentions of the people who began something we benefited from? Probably not, but I find it sad when we let them fall into oblivion. I believe that a purpose, a passionate enterprise, is one of the most alive things we can produce. Some of those are wrong or silly or impossible, but what about those that aren't?

Maybe there is still some hope for the Icarus-types like me, after all. During my idle internet searches, I eventually did find a few people trying to bring blimps back in fashion. This Swedish company is selling leisure airship cruises to the Arctic. I won't have my overview moment any time soon, though: the estimated date of first flight is "unknown", and the ticket price is "from 2Million SEK  (approx. $200,000 USD)". At least that purpose isn't entirely dead yet. ●