According to The Montreal Gazette their is still a possibility that LEMV will be sold back to HAV for use in Canada's north as a cargo demonstration platform.
"We can probably carry four or five tons." Hardy Giesler, HAV's business development director, said yesterday in a telephone interview with Gazette.
This is good news, I had assumed that at this point LEMV was probably already deflated and put into storage. But perhaps that's not the case.
Releasing that much helium into the atmosphere is grossly wasteful in my opinion, and to not use LEMV for something else after it has already been constructed just shows that our military no longer has the creative intelligence that it once did. It's like saying back in the stone age "Well we built the worlds first ship, but we don't know what to use it for, so we are just going to take it apart and throw it away."
I mean, I'm sure anyone of my readers could think of a more productive use for LEMV then dismantling and dumping. What happened to the time when the US government was pioneering the concept of an airship-aircraft carrier? No one else could do it, not even the Germans. Yet, we did it, and we didn't care that it was dangerous.
It seems the U.S. Government is in sorry shape these days, it has more or less broken it's contract with the people and no longer stands for the ideals upon which it was founded. In all real measure we are teetering on the brink of collapse. The fact that HAV, the manufacture, had to be the one to point out that they could use LEMV for cargo operations is a testament that our government is no longer thinking long term about anything, it's now starting to just react to it's economic disposition with nee-jerk budget saving measures.
Proof to that, is when FAA cuts hit and flights were delayed for 3 hours, congress passed a bill fully funding the FAA. Of course the problem with that is that they now need to take away more funds from other programs, which in turn means it's only a matter of time before another budget crisis hits, or multiple budget crisis hit at the same time, and congress reacts with the same nee-jerk reaction.
There is only a few places this kinda behavior can take us, all of which are bad. What's most likely to happen here is that we are just simply going to default on our debt, which might cause hyper-inflation and total economic collapse but it might not as well. Barring that, the other most likely possibility I see is that congress is going to keep on funding programs that they consider "necessitates" by cutting all social services, which will lead to an armed revolution by the lower class.
I'm interested to see how this situation turns out for the FAA, which Senator Jey Rockefeller claim's has "no room" for budget cuts. What's going to happen at the end of the year when the FAAs budget concerns pop back up again? For that matter, what is going to become of air traffic control in a future without government? I think what's really going on here is that the middle and upper classes might actually think
about revolting if they are forced to deal with any more flight delays at the hands of government, so congress passed a bill funding the FAA to try and keep a revolt by the upper class at bay.
So consider this, dose the FAA really make us safer? What would the world be like without any regulation over human powered flight? Would it really be so much more dangerous? Or is it more dangerous to have blind faith in a dying institution that dose everything in the name of our safety and yet has no future?
I see a world after the government completely collapses where flying becomes the ultimate expression of libertarian adventurism. A world where you no longer need to fallow any government regulation and pay bureaucrats to certify you and your airplane to be able to fly. Instead flying becomes anarchistic and IFR standards are more or less eradicated.
If we lived in that kind of world already, the Aeroscraft wouldn't be sitting in some hanger in southern California waiting for the FAA to say it's ok to fly, and neither would LEMV. Maybe you believe the FAA makes us safer, but how can you be sure that people would not keep the same level of safety if there was no regulations at all? I think a common misconception is that if there was no law to make sure that airplanes are flight worthy, everyone would forgo flight inspections. Similarly some people believe that if it was not a crime to smoke marijuana that everyone would suddenly smoke weed. This logic a been proven to be false, and I think this applies to the FAA as well.
Regardless of what you think, the FAA needs to become more efficient and less restrictive, or in the very near future their wont be an FAA anymore, or a US Government for that matter.
