Green Flight Challange update:

Unfortunately, none of the really cool ideas made it to the Green Flight Challenge. Including my winner pick The Synergy, which proved to be over ambitious. Still the contenders that did make it are setting records with their fuel efficiency which could eventually lead to developments in extremely cheep flying.

One thing I do like about airplanes over airships is that they are usually a lot faster and thus the best method of travel when you need to get somewhere fast. That's not really true here however because hybrid airships average about 100knts and these Eco planes average, you guessed it, 100kts. Still the engine efficiency improvements that are being made here would benefit airships too, making them even less expensive to operate then they already are/will be.

Imagine air-buses (not Airbus), airships that can fulfill all the routs of regular commuter buses for the same price. Except they would be able to operate in place like Nepal or Alaska were the terrain is a hazard for everything but hybrid airships. Imagine getting off a cruise liner hoping on an air-bus and taking a 20 minute trip to the top of mount Everest and skiing back down the mountain. Impossible one might say? Not for the Hybrid airship.

And on top of it's already good environmental impact, the environmental impact of replacing buses, trains, trucks, roads with these flying machines can take that even further. Allowing for completely self sustainable oil rigs or mineral mines to be built in places without roads and huge changes to the surrounding ecological area that's caused by the need to get to these places. If you look at logging for example, the biggest environmental damage is caused by the roads that are made to get the trucks into the areas where they need to log. If logging became road-less, the environmental consequences of logging would be decreased.

The more I think about this, the more I realize how much corporations are going to use the Hybrid Airship more and more over other forms of transpiration because it's simply cost productive. It's far more expensive to build these roads then building a small fleet of hybrid airships. But unlike roads the Hybrid Airships can be used again when they discover another natural resource to exploit and decide there's a profit motive in building a facility there.

Depending on your prospective this could be a good and bad thing. Because it allows corporations to exploit areas of the world where natural resources have been and they've know about, but have decided ageist exploiting because they realized it would be too costly to set up the transportation systems to get there. Still it's only good news if you're a fan of airships like me, because you can start to see just how huge Airships can be in the future.