Aeroscraft

Zeppelins died out for the most part after the Hindenburg disaster.  But there is a company that wants to bring them back.  Aeros is a company who wants to use helium to bring airships back to reality.  The company wants to allow transportation of cargo too hard to reach places and locations without airstrips for planes to land on.  The company has finished their designs of the airship and plans to start production of the full size airship.  The airship will be called the Aeroscraft and will have a larger payload bays than other cargo transport form and is designed to carry more weight than cargo helicopters.  The airship will be able to hover in place with zero speed while fully loaded.  The Aeroscraft is designed to have six vertical jet turbines to assist takeoff and landing eliminating the need for external ballasts or other external assistance for taking off and landing.  

The first Aeroscraft prototype (1/2 scale) was ready to be tested when the hangar it was being built in collapsed and severely damaged the airship.  This was a huge blow to the company as they had spent upwards of $50 million on the project.   The company now is in the process of building two full scale Aeroscrafts. 

Using airships in the future could greatly improve the ability to get supplies to areas that are hard to get to. With the use of airships many things could be better from scientific research to helping get medical supplies to disaster zones.  Because the airships do not require airstrips to land they would be able to bring scientific supplies to much more remote locations so that scientists could explore more extreme parts of the world such as the North Pole or different parts of Antarctica.  For the same reason the airships would allow emergency supplies to be delivered to places that would be inaccessible otherwise.   Countless lives could be saved by using this technology to our advantage.

Despite the fact that the Aeroscraft is beneficial it does have its shortcomings.  It will most likely be much slower than airplanes and would probably take some time to get to the location that it was needed in.  It could easaily be more expensive due to having six vertical jet turbine engines and because of its massive size.  These downfalls take away from the benefits it provides and but the idea definitely still has potential.

In the end the Aeroscraft definitely is a very interesting idea to use for certain things.  Because the concept has not been used before there is definitely going to need to be improvements made in order for the airship to reach its full potential.  The speed is something that can be worked around but the expense is something that definitely needs to be worked on, and like most new technologies the price usually decrease as time goes on.  All in all Aeros airship is a very large move forward as it could allow new places to be explored and new ways of helping people in need.