Transports of delight

Now face it, watching the A380 land at Heathrow was cool. Seeing something the size of a flying airscraper always will be. I found it strangely disappointing at first, though, watching on the TV, because proportionately it seems to be the same shape as a much smaller plane. It's not exactly the Fireflash or even something interestingly distinct like a 747. It was the undercarriage that finally did it - a similar arrangement to the 747, designed to take its massive weight when it plonks down on the runway. Once I'd made that mental adjustment, I looked at the rest of it with fresh eyes and thought, bloody hell, it's big.

That's Ben the boy technophile. Ben the wishy washy greeny type also admits that it's basically a bigger and better injector of water vapour and CO2 into our planet's atmosphere. Okay, it's engines are greener and more efficient than much of the competition - say, Concorde on full afterburn - but it's all relative. I'm forced to concede that fleets of these things blocking out the sun won't be great. So we can fly to Australia in one take - why are we in such a hurry to get there? (Sorry, Aussies.)

Ben the Would Be Planetary Dictator (because he concedes that's the only way any of this will happen) says: bring back airships. Look, they don't all have to explode (use helium) or break in two (use modern construction materials). And if watching a flying skyscraper is cool, how much cooler is it to see one drift gently past instead, politely ignoring the outraged yells of gravity? So a transatlantic crossing takes days instead of hours. So what? With modern IT, your physical separation from the office wouldn't be a problem either. You could put in all the work you needed and relax, stretch your legs, get a good night's sleep and everything else.

But there are some people who will always be in a hurry, so let me unveil the second prong of my transport strategy. Ekranoplanes. The Caspian Sea Monster could only possibly be out-cooled if someone invented a real-life Thunderbird 2. Okay, so it doesn't work in rough weather, making it currently a very expensive way of getting across a millpond. But that's why we need to spend money on research, perfecting the design and ironing out the creases. It would be like the old days of the steamships, except that now we would get fleets of these things cruising between Southampton and New York. And they could fly over the icebergs.

You know it makes sense.

UPDATE: The KM Ekranoplan pictured above, I learn, is 30 metres longer than a Boeing 747. That's 100m, as opposed to a piddling 70. Those things were BIG - and as we all know, boys, a big machine = a cool machine. Size matters..