Word: airship
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Just once, Scott Danneker would like to see a TV documentary or magazine story about his employer that doesn't feature the airship Hindenburg's bursting like a lava-filled egg over Lakehurst, N.J., on May 6, 1937. "What would happen if people felt compelled to mention Pan Am Flight 103 every time they talked about airplanes?" he asks. Danneker would rather talk about sleek, soaring dirigibles like the Norge, which in 1926 pinpointed the exact position of the North Pole for the first time, or about the millions of kilometers of uneventful flight the Hindenburg racked up before...
...German airship is the first of many that will soon be soaring over Europe. In the Netherlands a company called Rigid Airship Design is building a 591-ft.-long dirigible, which it hopes to begin testing at the end of next year. The company aims to carry as much as 30 tons of cargo or 240 passengers. In Berlin a company called CargoLifter launched a high-profile public stock offering on May 30 to fund the building of an 853-ft. colossus--49 ft. longer than the ill-fated Hindenburg. "I've been watching the airship industry for 15 years...
...Pasadena, California, reacted even before Vice President Al Gore announced which of three hotly competitive designs had been chosen as the space shuttle of the future. Lockheed Martin's VentureStar, which would be built in nearby Palmdale, looks like no other spacecraft, and when Gore reached for a model airship shaped like a giant piece of pie, the group burst into applause. Undaunted, the Vice President plunged on with his scripted gag, "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand the importance of this moment...
History repeated itself in the skies over Lakehurst, N.J., last week. Just three-quarters of a mile from where the hydrogen-filled dirigible Hindenburg exploded into flames in 1937, killing 36, an experimental airship known as the Heli-Stat apparently lost power, crashed and burned during a test flight at the U.S. Naval Air Engineering Center. One of the five civilian crew members was killed...
...just of size, but of trimness, tightness and fine lines. This is no "flying lumberyard," as the plane was derisively called during World War II when it was under construction as the prototype for what was to be a fleet of air-freighters. The Goose is an airship, dry-docked for the moment. The sum of the visitor's realizations comes to this: the plane could fly. Given a few weeks for testing and tuning up, it could still...