Why fly when you can float - an article about airships from the The New York Times

© The NY Times

With the Guardian writing an article the New York Times now joins the pack of major newspapers that published airship articles. The article in the NY Times of course mentions the Zeppelin NT but also the Manned Cloud by French designer Jean-Marie Massaud and a new project between a company called Aerospace Adour and France’s postal service, La Poste. Definitely worth a read, the article also features some nice size comparison of airships as well as picture gallery.

The Massaud Airship - more pictures

End of last year we reported about the Massaud - Manned Cloud Hotel if you haven't read our article check back and read it here it also contains a video of the airship. De zeen a design magazine posted a nice article about the airship with a lot more background info on the airship. If the website seems familiar to you, they also published the Strato Cruiser airship concept by Tino Schaedler which we have reported on in November 2007. Check out the de zeen article Manned Cloud by Jean-Marie Massaud here.

Massaud - Manned Cloud Hotel

In November we featured a post about the Stratocruiser and that designers discover airships in this article we also mentioned a site by the designer Jean-Marie Massaud his website features the picture of a great white whale like airship. Now we have kept our eyes open and here is what we found out. It seems to be a project that is not really new. Even though it seems to get attention just in the last few months as it makes it's way through the Blogosphere. The first mentions of this project seem to be in French websites as early as January 2007. One mention is from Liberation.fr (English translation here) and Cote Masion.fr (English translation here) also containing pictures.
A little later in in February 2007 there was a post at 365questions.org which contains the most pictures of the Massaud Manned Cloud which are known to me.
We also found a video on a site that was written in Spanish and has a copyright of 2006 (English translated version here). We uploaded the video to YouTube so that you watch is easily.

Massaud - Manned Cloud Airship Hotel

As Mentioned earlier in this posts there was quite some coverage about the airship in the last few weeks. It is supposed to be a hotel for eco tourism, able to fly 280km/h and provide 60 rooms for passengers enjoying it's 3 day cruise around the world and as many project state it could be realized as soon as next year.
Considering no airship ever flew that fast it's an ambitious project. According to Modern-Airships the fastest Airship to date was the Macon with about 140 km/h this ship would have to fly twice as fast. Also having 60 rooms on 500 square meters seems like a big step, considering the Hindenburg had about that size of space. Today the largest Airship the Zeppelin NT can carry 12 passengers maximum. So this is another visionary project that we will keep looking into. But till today an airship that can match the Hindenburg, Graf Zeppelin, Akron or Macon still has to be built.
So here is the rest of the Coverage about the Massaud Manned Cloud Airship.
As always our friends at Aerocrat where a good source. check out their post about the Massaud Airship here (English page here)
But also Bornrich.org did their homework well in their Post called "Manned Cloud by Massaud Studio – The flying eco-hotel!" they linked to a some great sources:

• ecofriend: Manned Cloud: Fly high without polluting sky
• univers-decoration.com: Un hotel dans les airs (English translation)
• Diario del viajero: Viaje al futuro (English translation here)

One last source also seems to be design-italia with their post "Maned Cloud, Jean-Marie Massaud" (English translation here). We are sure that there is more but we are also wondering how much of this is actually feasible . Right now it seems to be a dream of a designer without much of an engineering background but we love to be wrong on that. If you have more information pictures, numbers, videos anything that might be of interest post a comment or send us an email.