Posted by Graham Warwick at 3/23/2011 10:41 AM CDT on Aviation Week
Lockheed Martin P-791 - Image courtesy of Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works has signed a contract with a private Canadian company to develop, certify and produce a family of commercial cargo airships derived from its P-791 hybrid aircraft demonstrator, which flew back in 2006. Continue reading
Captain Garland Fulton
The National Air and Space Museum Archives have donated several books to the Lighter-Than-Air Society Special Collection which is housed at the Akron Summit County Public Library in downtown Akron. The books are from the collection of Captain Garland Fulton. Continue reading
The Lighter-Than-Air Society has awarded its “P. Rendall Brown Lifetime Achievement Award” to James R. Shock for his work to preserve the history of airships.
James R. Shock, an LTAS Honorary Board Member and airship historian, was born in Cleveland and raised in Sandusky, Ohio. Fascinated by the airships he saw flying over the north coast, he began accumulating airship data while still in high school and continued collecting except for three years of army service during World War II. Continue reading
FAREWELL (2009) 90minutes
– with restored found footage of the Graf Zeppelin in a fictional drama of the first round the world journey by a Lighter Than Air ship –
A giant shadow glides across wheat fields, cities, open plains. As it passes silently overhead, the faces of thousands of people turn skyward. The Graf Zeppelin, the granddaddy of all airships and a behemoth of 776 feet, is on its first round-the-world flight.
Sponsored by American newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Graf took off from New Jersey in August 1929 with English reporter Grace Drummond-Hay on board. An actress reading for Lady Hay, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air, narrates FAREWELL.
Told in the form of an invented diary set to breathtaking documentary images of the zeppelin’s majestic flight, the film brings to life Lady Hay’s vivacious personality and the buoyancy of the 20s, when technology seemed to be ushering in a new world of tomorrow. Though dedicated to her writing, Lady Hay is distracted by her feelings about traveling with respected fellow journalist Karl von Wiegand, a married man with whom she has had an affair. But Lady Hay’s simple longings and optimism will soon be things of the past. The era of the great airships will slip away, and faith in the future will be overshadowed by depression and war. 
–B.B.
from the Express and Star
Thursday 3rd March 2011, 11:30AM GMT.
The giant Goodyear Blimp is all set to return to the skies over the West Midlands for the first time in more than a decade — complete with a road safety message. Continue reading
