This article just makes my head hurt.
Apparently,
a sovereign wealth found of the middle eastern type, is looking at
starting the first network of airship services aimed at transporting
passengers around the UK.
They sound rather ambitious,
claiming that they will have their first services ready by the end of
the year. With a 100 passenger airship making all day trips between
South Wales and London at speeds of 150 Miles per hour.
Yeah, uhm, good luck with that.
Not
to sound pessimistic, this idea I admit is a really good one, and the
market is most defiantly there. The UK is in dire need of some new type
of transportation system, and Airships are perfect for their situation.
Yet, I don't see any real possibility of this happening in 9 months. The
Airship they are talking about using doesn't even exist yet, which
means that no matter how much money you have it is going to take at lest
12 mouths to build this airship, and then their will be all the
regulatory issues with certification, and the regulatory roadblocks that
will inevitably show up because they are trying to do this in the UK.
It's
far more likely that, if they are legitimate, they will be up and
running by as early as 2015-2017, rather then by the end of this year.
I
have a lot of questions, not lest of which is who is this middle
eastern sovereign wealth fund and how much money are they going to
invest? The way they are talking this must be one of those billionaire
oil sheiks looking to create his own airship empire. Which makes sense
as even if everything goes belly up with this UK transportation deal,
they can just re-purpose their airships for oil work on their oil
fields.
Usually I'm not a huge fan of what the super
rich wast their money on, but in this case, I'm obviously biased. If
they are investing more then a billion dollars then I do believe they
will be successful with at lest launching their service. But if they are
planing to build an airship empire, they would really need to be
investing about 30 billion to get a small fleet of passenger airships.
The
return on investment will be at lest 10 years down the road on a
project like this, so whoever is doing this, they must be doing it
because they really love Airships, to be willing to spend so much to get
so little in return. In 40 years the return on investment will be
rather high, but most investors are not willing to wait around that
long. So someone is looking to put a lot of their life into this, and
whoever they are they are gonna need a lot of money to do it, and they
just might have that money, but we don't know.
My other big question is weather or not these will be hybrid airships from HAV.
It's logical to assume that they will be hybrid airships as that makes
the most logical sense, but with big money, it's never safe to assume
anything. They could be considering using regular LTAs which would mean a
lot less cargo and a lot more trouble on the ground. Hybrids just make
sense for transportation of cargo and people from point to point trips,
LTAs are better for surveillance and staying still for a long time.
Whatever
the case is, I sure hope this doesn't turn out to be some type of
inverter scam as that's the last thing the Airship business needs right
now. But, if this is the real deal, then it looks like the middle east
will be the first to capitalize on revolution in airships. This will
probably lead to an entire new industries developing as airlines will
dump their routs of 500 miles or less in favor of airships that will be
much more economical for short trips with frequent stops.
I feel like this is a good thing.
