Zeppelins over San Francisco Bay

Operating out of Moffett Field, near Mountain View at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, Airship Ventures has announced that it has inked a deal with Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH of Germany (the successor of the same firm who made the Hindenburg and the zeppelins that bombed London in World War I) to acquire a modern, 12-passenger zeppelin.

The $8 million airship will be sent to California in September, where it will be used mostly for sightseeing excursions. Being much smaller than the passenger zeppelins of the 1920s and 1930s, it will have to cross the Atlantic on the deck of a ship.

From MSNBC. This airship is a semirigid, so while in one sense it is a zeppelin, in another it is not -- the essential characteristic of the zeppelins of old being that they were all rigid airships.

Further links: Airship Ventures, Zeppelin NT.

Posted by David on May 16, 2008 12:03 PM