Jaunted

Luxury Travel / Technology / Green Travel / Balloons / Hot Air Balloons / → All Tags

We've Seen The Future, And It's A Floating Luxury Hotel Airship

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."

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Stupid Ideas / Denver Travel / Balloons / Colorado Travel / → All Tags

Balloon Boy Story Deflates In Face Of Possible Criminal Charges

For the hour or so that the nation stopped on Thursday, dying of anticipation and worry for the boy that supposedly had floated off from his family's backyard in a homemade balloon, we were entertained, titillated, alarmed...but most of all we were duped. It was declared over the weekend, after authorities spoke with the Heene family and after the boy, Falcon, made the statement that "we did this for the show" during an interview with Wolf Blitzer, that the whole incident had been a hoax to gain publicity.

Publicity for what? Well, a reality show of course, although one that doesn't exist and probably never will if felony charges are filed as promised. The Heenes, a storm-chasing family that regularly conducts science fiction-y experiments (hence the balloon) and has been featured on several dramatic episodes of Wife Swap had been shopping around a reality show following their family life; a "Jon and Kate Plus 8," but more like "Richard and Mayumi Plus 3 Boys Living Dangerously." So dangerously, that everyone believed that Falcon was indeed inside the balloon, only to later discover that he was hiding in a box in the garage's attic at home.

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Breaking News / Balloons / DIA / Denver / Denver Travel / → All Tags

Homemade Balloon Lands Near Denver Airport, Wife Swap Son Missing

Update 8am EST 10/16: The boy was found hiding in the attic at this house. Since then, the family has been interviewed several times, managing to embarrass themselves when the boy possibly revealed it all as a hoax on Larry King Live and then vomited live on air during the Today Show. We're sure this story will continue.

This afternoon, an emergency story gripped the nation and the internet as it was announced that a 6 year-old boy, Falcon Heene, had taken off in a homemade UFO-shaped balloon and was floating towards Denver International Airport, causing helicopters and air traffic authorities to mobilize in order to track it and bring it safely to the ground.

The balloon, a weak craft with a plywood bottom and a small door through which it is believed the child entered, floated between 5,000 to 7,000 feet for hours, taking off from near Ft. Collins and landing a field near Hudson, CO. The child was not inside of the craft and the search for him continues.

In the meantime, we have realized (as has Huffington Post) that the boy is the son of one of the families featured on the popular TV show Wife Swap. The family, the Heenes, were the reckless family who were stormchasers and daredevils; the wife was switched to a ultra safety-conscious mom. The episode was so spectacular that it opened the season for the show, and one of the children notoriously says "F*ck these rules" to the swapped mom. Check out a clip of that here.

The video, after the jump.

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