Birds Before The Storm

I first heard that Abney Park (steampunk electronic rock band) was going to play on a zeppelin by way of their Official Page. I grew jealous. Then I discovered more details about it from Boing Boing and I was jealous of Boing Boing, for blogging about it first when I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. But then I realized that being jealous is useless. So I tried to sign up as a lackey for the flight, but that didn’t happen either.

So, like you do, I began to plot to kidnap/murder one of the members of the band to replace him or her for the duration of the flight. Naturally, I figured I should chose someone who it would be easy to disguise myself as.

But then I realized… Abney Park is a band of airship pirates. They will be stealing the zeppelin and either making use of it to harass British royal air freight or turning it into a populist form of travel.

Over at English Russia they’ve got a great bunch of photos of pre-communist russian airships. But the real treat is to look at the site where those images are coming from. It’s in russian, so you can’t read most of it, but info.dolgopa.org has great pictures of communist and pre-communist airships, like the one above, taken in 1924.

I secretly (openly?) started this blog because I wanted to run an airship blog. Airships and trains, that’s how to travel.

So we’ll start with this bit of news: DARPA (military mad scientists) was given $2 million to investigate airship manufacturer Aeros‘ latest attempt at technological advance, what they call BAAV. From the comments over at DangerRoom’s Article:

WorldWide Aeros claims that they can adjust the buoyancy of their ship by compressing helium into an internal reservoir. This is theoretically possible. No one in the airship community outside of WorldWide Aeros … believes that WWA can do it.
Posted by: Josh Geller