This is a million-dollar bet being made by the Swedish start-up OceanSky Cruises: relaunch air cruises in airships, almost a century after the LZ-129 Hindeburg disaster, whose apocalyptic images have left their mark.
As Bloomberg tells in an article that makes you want to pack your bags in a minute, the company already has a first route plan, which it hopes to see born in 2024.
In the extraordinary luxury of a cabin the size of two 737 Max shells, six passengers and eight crew members would fly majestically from Longyearbyen, capital of the Svalbard archipelago.
At an altitude of about 1,000 feet, low enough to observe the flora and fauna of northern Norway, they would float slowly in the air for about fifteen hours, until they reached the North Pole.
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There, chilled but pampered and happy, the company’s wealthy passengers would spend six hours walking, lounging and taking in the unique place, before returning to their starting point, at the same leisurely pace.
This is just the first of OceanSky’s plans. The company is also planning a much longer six-day trip to southern Africa, which would take passengers from Windhoek, Namibia, to Livingstone, Zambia, via the Okavango Delta and Botswana, Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwean border , or even the Skeleton Coast, again in Namibia.
absolute luxury
Ultimately, this is all “if the negotiations are successful,” Bloomberg quite rightly writes, with a touch of biting humor. Because to fly these wealthy passengers on very luxurious aircraft, OceanSky still has to…