Getting stuck in the age of sail was a thing. Waiting on the wind while you’re stranded and your supplies dwindling flat out sucks and can spell death if you’re not well supplied or rescued. Sailboats are still a thing albeit not popular anymore due to their drawbacks. Unpowered transoceanic flights are more of a niche than a desire of the average Joe.
All true. Waiting on the wind with a craft that can rise or fall easily shouldn’t be nearly as problematic, but wind power is certainly slower and more unpredictable no matter how you slice it.
Lessening the maintenance of a flying craft is something I won’t budge on and neither will any regulating body
The “regulating bodies” are the ones that prevent such individual autonomy and access to the skies - it’s core to their purpose/existence. This isn’t about maintenance schedules, or adherence to them - and that wasn’t the reason or method the dream of the “average joe’s” access to the skies was crushed. In any case, the maintenance on a neutrally buoyant sailing vessel will unquestionably be much lesser on such vessels - though that is not to say less important! No one wants anybody falling out of the skies - especially not over our heads!
You don’t see hot air balloons playing bumper cars for a reason
No one is saying you should! The chances for such a thing are far lesser is all, and design can play a huge role in that (as it could in cars too if we didn’t live in a malthusian and industrialized nightmare)
I love flying. I wish I could do more of it. I’d own my own small plane if I had the means and the money to build my own landing strip on my ranch. But allowing every Tom Dick and Harry to have an airship and fly however they want is a recipe for disaster.
There would undoubtedly be growing pains, but i am not envisioning giving anyone jet engines. Such needed safety margins and techniques to achieve them will never exist with that attitude, and are the purpose of its popularization. Almost nothing would be as dangerous or suicidal as “ford’s nightmare” we are currently living anyway.
But the world we live in doesn’t make it very easy to pull off now. The road has rules, the ocean has rules and the sky has rules.
But not rules we would or did choose for ourselves. They are certainly to our detriment as result. There is a reason for such authoritarian militarization of the skies, and it is the same reason we can’t just humbly request the stolen airspace back. If we really want to take to the skies safely (and slower, in my view) it is on us to do it and do so with new techniques! Sitting around for our enemy to “do the right thing” and return what they stole is not a good or effective plan. Dirigibles don’t need runways and are vastly more “green”/efficient even when equipped with giant diesel engines.
Once we reach the stars
And what if i told you that such rhetoric was only ever scifi (fiction) pushed by mass media? Would you still be content to “wait for the enemy to return what they stole from us”? Even if such a place existed, does it sound like a good plan in that case?
Getting stuck in the age of sail was a thing. Waiting on the wind while you’re stranded and your supplies dwindling flat out sucks and can spell death if you’re not well supplied or rescued. Sailboats are still a thing albeit not popular anymore due to their drawbacks. Unpowered transoceanic flights are more of a niche than a desire of the average Joe.
All true. Waiting on the wind with a craft that can rise or fall easily shouldn’t be nearly as problematic, but wind power is certainly slower and more unpredictable no matter how you slice it.
Lessening the maintenance of a flying craft is something I won’t budge on and neither will any regulating body
The “regulating bodies” are the ones that prevent such individual autonomy and access to the skies - it’s core to their purpose/existence. This isn’t about maintenance schedules, or adherence to them - and that wasn’t the reason or method the dream of the “average joe’s” access to the skis was crushed. In any case, the maintenance on a neutrally buoyant sailing vessel will unquestionably be much lesser on such vessels - though that is not to say less important! No one wants anybody falling out of the skies - especially not over our heads!
You don’t see hot air balloons playing bumper cars for a reason
No one is saying you should! The chances for such a thing are far lesser is all, and design can play a huge role in that (as it could in cars too if we didn’t live in a malthusian and industrialized nightmare)
I love flying. I wish I could do more of it. I’d own my own small plane if I had the means and the money to build my own landing strip on my ranch. But allowing every Tom Dick and Harry to have an airship and fly however they want is a recipe for disaster.
There would undoubtedly be growing pains, but i am not envisioning giving anyone jet engines. Such needed safety margins and techniques to achieve them will never exist with that attitude, and are the purpose of its popularization. Almost nothing would be as dangerous or suicidal as “ford’s nightmare” we are currently living anyway.
But the world we live in doesn’t make it very easy to pull off now. The road has rules, the ocean has rules and the sky has rules.
But not rules we would or did choose for ourselves. They are certainly to our detriment as result. There is a reason for such authoritarian militarization of the skies, and it is the same reason we can’t just humbly request the stolen airspace back. If we really want to take to the skies safely (and slower, in my view) it is on us to do it and do so with new techniques! Sitting around for our enemy to “do the right thing” and return what they stole is not a good or effective plan. Dirigibles don’t need runways and are vastly more “green”/efficient even when equipped with giant diesel engines.
Once we reach the stars
And what if i told you that such rhetoric was only ever scifi fiction pushed by mass media? Would you still be content to “wait for the enemy to return what they stole from us”? Even if such a place existed, does it sound like a good plan in that case?