More Than Hot Air

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The CargoLifter project, by contrast, started when logistics expert Carl von Gablenz had an epiphany a few years back in North Carolina, where he was a visiting professor of logistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was waiting for a lumbering freight train to cross the road in front of him when the tedium caused him to start thinking about ways to float heavy machinery over land. He began hitting up German logistics companies for capital to build something to do just that. "Using conventional means, it takes about 60 days and costs about $250,000 to haul 140 tons of freight from Germany to Kazakhstan," Von Gablenz says. "With the CargoLifter, the same freight would arrive in three days, and the costs would be about 20% lower"--assuming, of course, that the prototype gets off the ground in 2002. Von Gablenz needs $250 million to build a construction hangar and put a ship in the air. To date he has raised $160 million from shareholders--two-thirds of it from 16,000 private investors and the rest from institutional investors and potential users such as Siemens and Thyssen Krupp. Von Gablenz's company has successfully tested a one-eighth-scale version called Joey. The first freight could be shipped by CargoLifter in 2003.

So will the skies soon be filled with airships? Don't bet on it. Even if everything goes well, Zeppelin plans to build fewer than three ships a year if a market for its long-lost brainchild develops.