Would you spend 37 hours on a trans-Atlantic flight between New York and London? What if it was on a space-age balloon designed to gently float above the ocean at almost 12,000ft and glide through the air at a leisurely 90mph, dipping lower if there was anything interesting and then rising back into the atmosphere to continue on its path? That's the vision provided by UK design company Seymourpowell, which has invented a 265m kite-shaped airship and dubbed it the Aircruise. The ship boasts a cutting-edge ecofriendly design, is powered by solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells, and has virtually no environmentally damaging emissions. And it looks mindblowingly awesome.
The predictable downside of course, is that a trip on the Aircruise isn't going to come cheap. If it was easy to use heated gas to lift things off the ground we would do it more often. But as we all know from looking at hot air balloons, you need a lot of space to carry just a little bit of weight. In this case, you need 330,000 cubic metres of hydrogen gas to hoist just 396 total tonnes, meaning that the Aircruise won't have much leftover room for people. Since a high cost per passenger was inevitable, the designers just went ahead and transformed the entire ship into a luxury travel "hotel in the sky."
The ship will have rooms and decks that allow flyers to view their surroundings out of gigantic panel windows as they walk around. There's even going to be a glass-floored viewing room for people who can handle it, having managed to totally suppress whatever sound instincts nature endowed them with. The airship will be controlled by six crew members who operate in shifts, while 14 staff members take care of passenger needs. You absolutely have to click through to the Aircruise Flickr gallery and see the concept paintings, but not before you check out their amazing video on the design:
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