The Airlander 10 is 302 feet long, a good 50 feet longer than your average 747, and is the world's biggest aircraft. It can haul up to 20 tons of cargo, fly for several days on end, and is set for its maiden voyage in March.
Guess who's behind part of the financing for the airship? Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson! The man's goal for this one, aside from the fact that it's awesome and Dickinson loves aircrafts, is that he literally wants to help save the world with it.
“You want to put a hospital into Africa?” Bruce Dickinson, the company’s lead investor, said to me. “You put the whole hospital in the inside of this—whoosh. Start the generator. ‘Here’s your hospital, buddy!’ Job done. You know? You can just plunk the vehicle straight down on the farm, load it with fifty tons of green beans or whatever, and twenty-four hours later you land right next door to the processing plant. It’s a global conveyor belt. And water! With these vehicles, you could drop off a twenty-ton slab of water that is clean, drinkable, to an African village. It’s astonishing what you can do that you just can’t do with anything else. Shit, you can do that with it? Wow, you can do that with it? Seriously fantastic!”
Dickinson has sunk about $500,000 into the vehicle, which you can read an insanely lengthy article about right here, courtesy of The New Yorker.
