An elevator, for passengers and goods, runs up the tower from the ground to the platform adjoining the nose of the airship. The passengers reach their quarters along a passage through the vessel, and the goods are taken down a runway. An airship moored to this mast can remain unharmed in even the worst weather, and need be taken into a shed only when overhaul and repairs are necessary.
In discussing the future of transatlantic flight I have confined myself to the projected service between London and New York. There is likely to be another route over the Atlantic—London to Rio de Janeiro, via Lisbon and Sierra Leone. Already in London tickets are on sale at $5,000 apiece for the first flight from London to Rio. This, of course, is a freak price, which covers the distinction of being in the first airship to travel from England to Brazil. If and when a regular London-Rio service is established, the ordinary passenger rate should be little more than the $240 estimated as the air fare on the London-New York route.
It may be that the London-New York air service will not arrive for many years. Sooner or later, however, it must arrive; for science, allied to human enterprise, never neglects a big idea. It may be that, when it does arrive, the structure of the craft and the methods of navigation applied to them will differ in important details from what I have indicated. I make no pretense at prophecy, but have merely tried to show how, with the means already at hand, moderately priced air journeys from Europe to America can be made in two to two and a half days, with comfort, safety and a high degree of reliability. Meanwhile, much depends on the funds available for the erection of stations for directional wireless messages, on research into the air currents at various levels above the Atlantic Ocean, on the courage of capitalists in promoting what seems to be a very speculative enterprise, and on new adaptations of old mechanical inventions.
Already hundreds of aëroplanes, as time-saving vehicles, are used regularly in many countries for commercial traffic over comparatively short distances—the carriage of mails, passengers, valuable freight and urgent special journeys. When, but not until, the hundreds become thousands, and the longer distances are as well served by airships as are the shorter distances by aëroplanes, the world's air age will be in sight.
[1] For airships with gross gas capacity of 3,500,000 cubic feet and total load of 105 tons.
[2] For machines with total load of 40 tons.