Skyborne Whales Skyborne Whales
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picture by Daniel Mróz (archive)
Dreams and Visions

Skyborne Whales

The Rise (and Fall) of the Airship
Andrzej Krajewski
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time 12 minutes

Large airships were too sensitive to wind gusts and too sluggish to win against aeroplanes. But today, they have a chance to make a spectacular return.

For decades, die-hard fans of airships have had to accept the fact that their beloved airborne vessels had no chance of making their way back to air travel routes. The ever more technologically advanced aeroplanes are more comfortable and practical than these sluggish giants. Yet the situation changed over a year ago when people in Sweden started talking about ‘flight shame’. Along with the heightened fear of global warming, calculations were being made that, for example, a Boeing 747 emits as much carbon dioxide into the air during 24 hours of flight as 250 passenger cars riding uninterruptedly for a year. Although aeroplanes are responsible for only 4% of the CO2 that goes into the atmosphere in the territory of the European Union, ‘flight shame’ became a hit. The Green parties, especially in Germany, started to bang the alarm that in Europe 45% of all flights are operated on routes shorter than 500 kilometres. The first airlines have just embraced this new trend; at the end of 2019, Dutch airline KLM announced that as of March they will replace flight connections from Amsterdam to Brussels with train routes, together with railway operator Thalys. Likewise, Air France – part of the same holding company as KLM – announced a New Year’s resolution that by 2021, the French air carrier will reduce its domestic flights by 15%.

This trend brings with it the unique opportunity for the much more environmentally-friendly passenger airships to make a triumphant comeback. Much like they did 100 years ago, today’s airships move with the help of propeller-type turbines powered by petrol or diesel engines. However, they emit considerably less CO2 than jet engines. On shorter distances, their speed, on average nine times lower than passenger jets, does not make that much of a difference. Especially since an airship

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Illustration by Igor Kubik
Dreams and Visions

A Political Weather Forecast

The Domino Effect of Climate
Andrzej Krajewski

Large temperature swings, droughts, and freezes changed the course of Europe’s history, even when they happened on the other side of the world, because that’s just how our climate is.

The long-term weather forecast is never completely reliable. In spite of this, each inhabitant of Europe ought to be interested in what is expected in the future—particularly in the south of the Old Continent, because, just on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, Africa is stretching away. Every African country can currently boast record-beating natural population growth. Of the top ten countries in the world with the largest surplus of births over deaths, eight of them are from Africa. And when researchers from Gallup World Poll interviewed 453,000 people in 152 countries between 2015 and 2017, the responses showed that the majority of potential migrants live in Africa. More than half of those questioned from Congo, Ghana, and Nigeria dream of moving to the other side of the Mediterranean Sea. The statistical summary of the Gallup World Poll study shows that an estimated 200 million young Africans are thinking about emigrating to Europe.

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