Airship-List is back up and running - for now

It has been a while since our last update on the status of the Colorado Airship-list but today there are some news. The list seems to be working again. There has not been an official announcement but we hope to hear more from John soon. But don't forget our own Forum & Mailinglist over this. We have a great online Forum which has a searchable archive so you can dig thought what has been said and if a topic has been addressed before.

The Airshipworld Mailings has an archive and webinterface

On Tuesday we announced the new Airshipworld Mailinglist and today we are happy to announce that we went a step further, we teamed up with Nabble to host our mailinglist archive there. You now can click the new link in the menu on the Blog which will take you directly to the Nabble web interface to the mailinglist. You don't have to be a subscriber to read it and you don't have to subscribe to use the search there. This will give us a powerful forum that you as our reader can use to exchange thoughts with other readers or to discuss topics that have been started here on the Blog. I want to thank the first 9 subscribers and want to invite everyone who reads the Blog to participate. Spread the word about this new list, invite other airship enthusiasts. Unfortunately the Colorado Airship-list is still defunct, please correct me on this if I am wrong but I haven't received any mails. So if the list will not recover, which is something that I do not hope will happen, we can accompany all the old subscribers with ease if they want to join us. So spread the word, because without a list the broadcasting of news is relatively slow since the number of airship blogs and news sites is still very low.

[Update:] I just saw that John Dziadecki has posted an update on his website, check out the news about the Airship-list in the Announcements of his Airship website. He also has instructions how you should be able to get back on the list, but it had not worked for me unfortunately.

The Airship-List is down, Number 200 and we have a List

The Colorado Airship-list has been a trusty place to exchange Ideas and thoughts about Airships. The list has been around since 1996 and can easily be called the mother of all Airship Mailing Lists. Unfortunately there are currently some issues with the servers. They started February 19th 2008 and have not been solved to date. The Airship-list is currently not running but technicians are working on it according to list owner John Dziadecki. Since we at Airshipworld also have our own server with lots of bandwidth I offered to help, but got reassured that the Airship-list will be back up and running soon.
Never the less I did not want my efforts in setting up a mailinglist go to waste, and so I have decided in honor of our 200th post that Airshipworld should get it's own mailinglist, for you the reader to exchange thoughts and ideas, to join in to conversations. We will have a full public archive of the list, and have a web interface from which you will be able to post to, you will be able to search for posts and much more. But to search for posts and answer them through the web we first need a few subscribers. So hop over and sign up to The-List. Post a hello, a news item or a question, I will try to answer or at least reply to each post on the list if I can. Also tell your friends and colleagues. If you have been a subscriber of the Airship-list and want to have a little backup why don't you subscribe to the Airshipworld list that way there is a backup list for the future.

You might wonder why there is a need for yet another list, and I would like to give a simple answer to this. The Airshipworld Blog is our editorial platform where we can share news with you. The list should be more like a discussion forum to discuss the news and other topics and a place where our readers can exchange thoughts and get to know each other.

Navy MZ3A Airship #167811 continues operations amidst "tight" funding. [by Rick Zitarosa]

Navy MZ3A airship #167811 was up all day Saturday, providing a surprise visit to crowds on the boardwalks and "early bird" sunbathers at nearby beaches who were enjoying the first real "hot" day of Spring.

About ready to mark one full year since the first flight, the airship is undergoing mandatory Annual Maintenance Revue this week and is expected to return to the air early next week.

Meanwhile, funding for the airship to continue operating beyond June is a mounting concern. As little as the MZ3A project costs (about $5million per year for the entire operation) there is very little money to go around.

With $250million a day being spent on Iraq, every nook and cranny of the armed forces is being stripped of anything beyond bare funding. The MZ3A's role as a test, training and proof-of-concept vehicle for various promising airborne systems and operations notwithstanding, it remains to be seen whether the proponents of LTA can win continued funding.

One thing the airship has got going for it is a good operating record, the fact that it is already established inventory and the fact that from scratch the Navy people have created the only operational, fully-compliant current-military-standard LTA operation anywhere in the world with everything from tool/hardware inventory to Operational Risk Matrix appropriately documented, codified, quantified, etc.

The next few months should be interesting.

Rick

Thanks to Rick Zitarosa for this news item from the colorado Airship-list