The Friday Fillip

“Slow is the new fast.”

Maybe.

When it comes to cooking, slow is newly fashionable, it’s true. But when it comes to computer speeds, not so much. And so far as travel is concerned… it’s problematic.

Everyone knows that jet travel nowadays is an increasingly gruesome experience, certainly if you fly steerage as most of us do. And even if you’re a first or business class flier, the dreary ordeal of checking in, checking baggage, and being checked in one or more security lineups, is enough to take the edge off any interest in, let alone excitement at, going somewhere else. If, as some philosophers would tell us, it’s about the journey and not about the arrival, we have a problem, Huston.

What to do? Let’s float a trial balloon.

Some romantics (in whose number I count myself, I’m afraid) dream of the day of the dirigible, of moving from somewhere to somewhere else a mere 200 metres above the Earth with a gentle whooshing sound. If your own romanticism is pitched in history, you might like to roam (slowly) around the incredibly spacious website about the greatest of all the airships, the Zeppelins, which plied the Atlantic for many years, taking somewhere between 75 and 90 passengers from America to Europe in half the time of ocean liners. Canada, incidentally, has a connection with the British dirigible-building project, constructing at St. Hubert, Quebec, a mooring mast to receive the first transatlantic flight of the R-100 [PDF] from England on August 1, 1930, seen in the image to your right. (Click to enlarge this, as well as the image below.)

I like to dream of the airship’s return. And to help me do that, there are some pretty interesting sites out there. We can start with a graphic fantasy that the “design and innovation firm” Seymourpowell ran up for Samsung. (It’s Flash, and will take a bit to load: sorry.) They also did a five-minute animation on YouTube that focuses mostly on the luxurious interiors they envisage. This would work for me — but then I’d already be flying first class on the old fire-breathers, I suspect, to afford this sort of glam.

Rather more down to earth, so to speak — and much closer to home — there’s the Newmarket, Ontario startup, 21st Century Airships, which makes all manner of lighter than air craft. They’re working on a 19-passenger sightseeing airship that sounds about my speed. I just wish they’d hurry up and get it into production.