Airships and Travel Food

This is a compilation of three related posts originally published elsewhere on different dates.

Pie in the Sky

Originally published elsewhere on October 13, 2023.

The Empire State building was nominally planned as a dirigible docking station. At some point, one dirigible docked there for three minutes. No attempt to use it as such was ever made again.

I've been looking into dirigibles for some months. I read somewhere that using a skyscraper as a mooring station for onboarding and landing passengers isn't realistic if only because dirigibles use water as ballast and maneuvering them in relation to a docking mechanism involves dumping water.

A LOT of water. You can't reasonably dump water onto busy streets and sidewalks in densely built downtown areas on a regular basis to dock airships routinely.

I've tried to find out how much space you need to dock an airship. I have, as yet, not found any notes on that. It seems to take "a lot of space" but you cannot run calculations nor buy plots of land in hopes of creating an airship company based on "a lot of space."

Passenger airships are essentially a dead industry. The US has a short list of registered airships, many of which are used as billboards in the sky, not passenger ships.

I have no idea where you would begin to find pilots or a means to train pilots. It's a largely dead industry globally.

I don't know where or how you would begin to register a passenger airship airline, though supposedly newer solar-powered ones can use up to 85 percent less energy than airplanes for the same distance, making them much lighter on the environment. Given the long boarding times at airports, for short distances, airships aren't necessarily hugely problematic in terms of travel time, especially if compared to driving times in places with no good direct routes instead of comparing them to, say, private jets.

Olympic National Park is both a draw for the Olympic Peninsula and a barrier to development. I have been wondering if airships could solve that issue.

I have this idea of creating a company called Diamond Air with four mooring stations in a diamond shape, one in Aberdeen, one in or near Port Angeles (which has a ferry to Canada), one in the Seattle-Tacoma area, one on the Pacific Coast, perhaps near the Quinault nation. It could be marketed as a tourist attraction, letting people see Olympic National Park by air, and also serve to improve connections between some of the most urbanized parts of this odd little corner of the world.

Port Angeles is just 20,000 people, so I was surprised to learn the ferry to Canada can hold up to 1000 passengers and it runs twice daily in the off season and four times daily in the summer. That's up to 2000 people in the slow season and 4000 in the busy season passing through this small town DAILY.

There are some bus routes and there is an airport in the area, but I imagine most people get there by car. I assume that not too many of those people are local residents. It's probably mostly tourist activity and other travelers.

I'm quite poor and have no hope of trying to do this as things stand currently and I have hesitated to write about it because there is a history of people stealing my ideas and giving me no credit and no cut of any proceeds and actively cutting me out of any hope of it leading to money. But I am finding that I cannot even research it enough to determine how grossly stupid the idea may or may not be.

It seems to me you would need to be someone with money to burn on stupid shit to even TRY to pursue this, like Elon Musk BEFORE he bought Twitter and flushed scads of money down the drain pursuing his pet project of an "everything app."

So I'm not sure it makes sense to worry that this idea can be readily stolen. What fool would read a blog post, buy up large amounts of land in the region and try to solve for all the parts I can't even find info about? What fool would have that kind of money and still be that impulsively stupid -- aside from Elon and he's probably sort of tapped out for his "stupid personal indulgences" allowance. Probably blew it all on X.

And I grow tired of playing with the idea of somehow magically being the owner of such a thing and being able to have a home in one city and a pied-à-terre in another. I can't even figure out how to supply meals on the damn thing that would be sensible in my mind.

Apparently, delivering the meals on airlines which have such a terrible reputation for being rubbish involves a lot of dry ice and such. It sounds like airline food alone is an industry ripe for disruption with something more environmentally-friendly and probably also generally healthier and more appetizing as well.

The one airline meal I remember fondly was some vegetarian thing, some kind of chickpea-in-pita-bread sandwich, that I ordered in line with my policy of "When in doubt, get the vegetarian option. It's less likely to kill you or land you in the ER." It was WONDERFUL, but most airline food has an apparently well-deserved reputation as anything BUT wonderful.

So I find myself fantasizing about having a vending-machine-based eatery with salads and cold-prep ramen options and the like and I find myself fantasizing about serving similar food on my airship airline and I don't know how all the pieces play together. I'm probably the ONLY PERSON on the planet who even thinks cold-prep ramen with fresh diced or julienned veggies is even COOL.

I imagine other people would be galled at getting ramen in a cup with fresh veggies on a solar-powered airship. "I paid how much for my ticket and THIS is what they feed me????"

Meanwhile, in addition to how ugly the impact of airplanes is on our carbon footprint, they typically feed you garbage AND it's probably garbage which also has a ridiculously bad environmental track record.

I'm not rich enough to be some nutty "eccentric" trying to solve this issue. I can't pay my own damn bills.

But I still sometimes wish I could have stupid hobbies like Elon Musk has of spending billions to flush a project down the tubes for the fun of pursuing a mad dream of something better without knowing how in the hell to make it work. THIS would be one of my idiot projects that the world would roll its eyes at every time it hit the news.

Pie in the Sky Deux

Originally published elsewhere on December 29, 2023.

In my fantasy world where I am the founder of Diamond Air, I would like to hire a local with a wealth of knowledge about the area, the culture and the history, ideally an Indigenous individual or part Indigenous, to write narratives for air tours for each of the legs of the diamond being served.

I would want two or three versions for each so it doesn't get boring if you are a frequent flyer.

In my excessively idealisitic fantasies, we come up with some contract that allows Diamond Air to use the info and also allows the author to keep IP rights in some fashion or to some degree so if they wanted to write a book or something using their research, they could.

How do you do something like that without cutting your own throat or creating a business conflict of interest? I have NO IDEA.

But I'm a writer with a wealth of knowledge who struggles to make ends meet and the fact that you can either work for a pittance or take credit and gamble on making it big but probably fail makes me crazy.

There has to be a better way for humanity to compensate its knowledge-bearers and if I were crazy rich, it's a crazy idea I would like to gamble on.

Travel Food

Originally published elsewhere on April 12, 2024.

After several years of not traveling, I recently took a train trip.

A. I feel stupid. The biggest concern with travel food is eating while in a moving vehicle. The only way ramen with veggies works is if it's dried veggies and the method is perfected to make it noodles and veggies in a cup, NOT SOUP with scads of broth.

Someone would need to get the prep method just right to hydrate the noodles and veggies without leaving behind broth. Maybe steaming it instead of adding hot water?

Yeah, I kind of already knew that something like breakfast tacos would make more sense, but I'm human and cold prep ramen was a huge thing for me for a time, so I was like "I have an idea..."

B. I've been wondering for some time now how to research this. Realization: Me traveling regularly and trying plane/train food will not happen, even if I "win the lottery." I can barely eat while traveling. 

For this and other reasons, while I will certainly continue writing about food generally, I am giving up on the idea of starting an airship company and revolutionizing air travel food as part of that. (If someone actually wants to start "Diamond Air," have at it. I don't care.)

C. I grabbed a menu from the dining car knowing I'm not doing a meal with these people because I could barely eat. I did so as research. It seemed like an opportunity I would be stupid to pass up.

Amtrak could do a lot to make it more legible how all of this works. Some people seem to just KNOW how the food bits work. I assume that's their "frequent flyers" so to speak.

The e-ticket could include info on the snack bar and dining car, menus, prices and explanations about other logistical details. Their profitability might go up if they didn't assume coach passengers are too poor to buy food and helped them understand what was available, even if it's your first trip and money is an issue.

Rich people can afford to information gather by buying stuff and seeing what works for them before settling on something they feel has maximum bang for the buck. Poor people can't do that and are often treated badly for asking questions.

Please don't do this to your paying customers. You never know who their friends and relatives are etc. 

(I read something online once about a guy who didn't like how an airline treated him and tweeted about it. He didn't have a lot of Twitter followers but had more "pull" than it looked like because some of his followers had a lot of followers, so the airline ended up in shock over the impact.)

If you INFORM your passengers how everything works ahead of time, we might spend more money on food with you. Even people with serious budgetary constraints might spend more if they didn't feel intimidated by the process of trying to figure it out.

I'm a writer by trade. I asked if I could get a free diet coke in the dining car because the menu says "complementary beverage during meal periods" NOT "with meal purchase."

They aren't the same thing and I figured it was just poorly worded but I asked anyway. I was right: It's actually only free beverages with meal purchase.

And the person I asked was kind of a jerk to me. For one thing, he assumed I was asking for free alcohol -- at breakfast -- and told me that's only served during dinner.

I don't typically drink alcohol but was wearing an alcohol-themed t-shirt bought under emergency circumstances as the cheapest replacement shirt I could get while traveling. 

I still don't feel it was an appropriate assumption given the poorly worded menu. But most poor people aren't as ballsy as I am. 

Anyway...

If the e-ticket explained what your policies are, then we wouldn't have to ask "stupid" questions. And you wouldn't have to give stupid answers as if you haven't actually read your own menu recently. 

You could also include info on food and services available at any stations involved in the trip. Online links (or PDFs, whatever -- technical details, not my department) to menus, prices etc and blurbs about being allowed to take food bought at the station onto the train would help a lot of people who are coping with health issues, dietary constraints, motion sickness while traveling, etc.

And you should state in the email if wifi will be available on the train in question and, if so, how accessing that will work.

Footnote 

From what I gather, Idaho Has Issues. TLDR of years of social psychology and negotiation and conflict management and research for potentially moving to the state only to learn "you can't get there from here" and blah blah blah:

I think their reputation for being insane is rooted in real problems in the state, including mountainous terrain that is a barrier to development, and people are stressed and can't figure out exactly why things don't work, so they are losing it. 

Historically, they had two east-west routes running through the state and for decades had NO north-south road. In a state that's taller than it is wide.

Rather than getting wrapped around the axle about conservative values, someone should do some statewide analysis and regional transportation planning. And airships with a spoke and hub pattern might be a means to improve transit while protecting their valuable environmental resources.