by Liz Grzyb
The problem was, I’d been called in at the last moment, when the senior travel writer had broken his hand on an assignment in Sri Lanka. An elephant had trodden on it. I’d had to pick up what notes I could as fast as I could, but I still felt utterly unprepared.
I saw a tall woman in the gold and grey uniform of the ship walking across the lawn, her brunette hair tied back with a matching scarf, and waved to her. She waved back and I grabbed Mike and Denise, who still had her eye glued to her camera, and dragged them over to the crewperson.
“Mr Clark?” she said, and I showed her my press pass. “Great. Follow me and I’ll take you to the crew entrance. It’s around the front.”
The passengers were struggling on at the back, and a thought occurred to me. “Miss . . . ?”
“Julia. Julia Weber.”
“Hi; I’m David. You said ‘the front.’ Shouldn’t that be the bow, or the nose, or something?”
She laughed. “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. I come from the catering industry, and all this is so new that I don’t think they’ve come up with special terms yet. You can ask the captain later; she’ll be a bit more definite.”
We skirted the mob and went a couple of hundred metres downstream, to where a small floating jetty led out to the ship. It loomed over us, huge twin propellers at the front turning idly in the morning breeze. The top was a glittering, coppery colour in thin stripes that formed a pattern of squares. Below that spread the dull grey skin of the main gasbag, and under that were the three levels of accommodation and crew deck, painted a deep blue. All in all, it was over sixty metres high. They’d painted AAS 1 on the bag, and below that, in fluid lettering, Skylark 1.
The jetty led to a plain metal ladder up to the top level, where we entered through a large hatchway. That was my first strong impression of the Skylark: spaciousness. I was used to flying, and I’d been up in the cockpit of many planes, but never in one that was longer than an A380. Whereas plane cockpits are crowded with electronics and controls, this was comparatively bare, with several stations spaced along its length. There were even couches and seats on the back wall. I mean, an airliner looks gigantic from the outside, but inside it seems pokey and cramped, even in first class. This command cabin was bigger than the whole cabin space of an A380 or 747.
And this was only part of one of three decks.
A short woman with dark, curly hair spoke quickly into a microphone. Julia went over to her and said something into her ear. She nodded, finished her conversation and came over to us. Stocky and middle-aged, she had clear green eyes, and was dressed in a white shirt and grey slacks.
“I’m Captain O’Halloran,” she said, without offering her hand, “and you’re the newspaper crew.” Her expression was slightly disapproving. “I thought everyone got their news electronically these days.”
“We put out an on-line version, as well, but some people just like to have a paper they can hold in their hands.”
“Good. I’m one of them. You’ll have to excuse me, but that mess at the entry port is causing me to lose time, and I want to use as much daylight as I can. You can catch up with me later for any questions you may have, but only half the passengers have managed to board so far, and I have to sort that out before the easterly wind gets any stronger.”
With that, she turned away and went back to her control station. Julia led us down to the passenger deck to get some more photographs and do interviews.
We finally lifted off about an hour after our scheduled departure. By that time I had overdosed on sound bites and Mike had used up an entire memory card and started on a second. Denise had squealed greetings at some of the passengers and fluttered about what they were wearing. The departure was halfway between a ship leaving port and an aircraft take-off. First all the lines were dropped, and then the ship made a tentative movement away from the shore while some people threw streamers that gradually stretched out as the Skylark moved both out into midstream and up into the air. The PA gave no announcement to buckle in to your seat, and if I’d had my eyes closed I would have hardly known we’d left. When the shore was about a hundred metres away, the propellers revved up without a sound and we rose smoothly into the sky after a short take-off run. The whole thing was accomplished in three hundred metres and hardly left a ripple in the water.
I called in some copy to the travel desk and went to my assigned berth in the middle deck, where most of the cabins were. I had hardly opened the door when my phone rang demurely and Denise shrilled in my ear, “Dave, it’s a stateroom. There’s a wardrobe and a double bed and . . . ” I knew exactly what she meant, because I was gazing into one that was exactly the same.
It was about four metres by five, with a porthole in the narrow side opposite the door, through which I could see that we were still rising, the landscape slowly dropping away. There was a bed near the porthole, with a sliding door opposite that must be the wardrobe that had Denise so excited. I opened another sliding door beside it that led to a small bathroom. My bag sat beside the bed, and a chair and a small table stood near the window. A selection of magazines lay spread on the table, and a small vase with a single orchid in it. A flat screen monitor sat on the wall. It was better than many hotel rooms I’d had in London, by far.
“Holy Christ,” I said to Denise. “Listen, I’ll get unpacked and meet you on the lower deck.”
“Oh, yes! There’s a cocktail bar!”
Denise tended to both speak and write in italics, something her readers devoured. She never lacked for enthusiasm, nor for invitations to all the best parties.
“Okay,” I said. “Fifteen minutes.” It wouldn’t take me fifteen minutes to unpack, but I wanted to explore a little. I took my dinner suit from my bag and hung it up, put my toiletries in the bathroom and took my shirts out to put in the wardrobe, and then I looked through the porthole, a big one about half a metre in diameter, and the unreality of the whole thing struck me. We were more than a thousand metres in the air, moving along at a fair clip in total silence, and I unpacked as if I was on a cruise ship or in a hotel on the ground. I shook my head. If this is the start, what other surprises does this trip have in store for us?
The cocktail bar, for one thing. It occupied the whole front of the ship, about forty metres wide, with a view forward and down through glass panels set in the floor. The bar was made of some trendy enamelled metal or plastic, and bartenders worked it even at this hour of the morning. Denise lounged in one of the leather chairs scattered around, wearing a black cocktail dress that set off both her figure and her rich brown hair. Mike sat with her, without his ever-present Nikon for once, but I would have bet there was a compact camera in one of the pockets of his jacket.
I strolled over. “It’s a little early for a cocktail dress, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I know,” Denise responded, “but I couldn’t help myself when I saw that all my luggage was in the room. I was saving this for the reception in Sydney, but I’ll just have to rush out and buy something after we get in.” She waved her blood-red fingernails at the bar. “Isn’t this divine? It’s like something from the 1930s.”
I looked around. She was right, it was like something from any number of thirties movies, very art deco. Then I remembered that the Hindenburg had crashed and burned in 1937, and didn’t feel quite so comforted by the retro styling.
Mike had a beer on the table before him, and Denise had something clear and fizzy with a celery stick in it. I felt like a drink myself, but I still had to get interviews with Captain O’Halloran and any of the notables I could find. I had to get my notes together and post something to the newspaper blog for the people who were following us online and send the images from Mike back so the editor could start sorting them. Denise could lounge around and socialise until the ball tonight, and Mike could relax until I found out when he could take pictures in the control room, but I had to be on the job.
People were beginning to drift in to the bar. I spotted Julia Weber ushering what looked like the
State Governor and his party into the room and caught her eye. She came over and I asked, “When can I talk to the Captain or someone who can give me the ins and outs of this thing?”
She laughed and pressed the centre of a brooch on her collar and spoke into it, like something out of Star Trek. She had a tiny plastic bud in her ear. She nodded a couple of times and then said to me, “We can go up now. We’re clear of the suburbs, heading out into the countryside, and the Captain can give you some time.”
I followed her up a circular staircase over at one side of the bar and caught a glimpse of a large room with tables set and people eating. When I asked her about it, she said, “That’s the restaurant. We’re serving breakfast until ten, then brunch until twelve, lunch to three, afternoon tea until six, and then we start serving dinner.”
“You must have an enormous staff.”
“Not really. Two chefs, two sous-chefs, five kitchen-hands and twenty service staff, plus a maitre de and a sommelier.”
“That sounds pretty big to me.”
She laughed: a very pleasant sound. “I managed the restaurant of a very big and snobby hotel before I took this job. I had twice the staff and they got in each other’s way. A lot of this is automated, and a great deal of preparation is done on the ground. It’s not like working an ocean liner, although I’ve done that, too. The longest trip we’ll ever do is less than six days. Most of the time we’ll be going backwards and forwards across Australia. When the other ships begin we’ll probably extend to New Zealand and the Pacific. Singapore’s interested, too.”
“This seems to have come out of nowhere.”
She smiled at me. “I just answered an ad in the paper six months ago. Since then, I’ve been organising the restaurant and bar. The Captain knows more than I do.”
O’Halloran stood at an array of controls, talking to a very tall man with bright red hair. He was in full uniform with epaulettes on the shoulders. She saw us, said a few final words to him and walked over. “I can give you twenty minutes now, Mr Clark. We can do a follow-up later this afternoon or tomorrow morning, if you’ve any more questions after you’ve looked around a little more.”
“Captain, I’ve got a million questions already.”
“Well, we can have some coffee while we talk. Can you arrange that please, Julia?”
She nodded and left us with a final smile to me. We settled in a couple of the chairs.
“Well, what would you like to know first, Mr Clark?”
“Dave, please.”
“And you can call me Amanda. But time’s a-wasting, and I’ve got to get back to the controls for when we go over the Stirling Ranges.”
“Why is that?” I had my recorder out and turned on, resting on the table between us.
“This is a very big piece of machinery, Dave. There can be some tricky updrafts over the Ranges. And we have an immense sail area.”
“Just how big is this ship? Do you call it a ship?”
She leaned back and relaxed a little, as if she’d given this talk before. “Technically, this is a Hybrid Air Vehicle, an HAV 808, which has some of the characteristics of a powered aircraft, some of a regular airship and, since we land and take off on water at the moment, some of the characteristics of a ship. There’s a bit of hovercraft in there for a bonus. We call it the Skylark.”
A waiter arrived with coffee on a silver tray and poured it for us. O’Halloran added milk and three sugars. I took some milk and waved at the departing waiter.
“But how do you have the room for all this? It must all weigh a great deal, as well.”
“The Skylark is over 250 metres long, 100 metres wide and a fraction over 50 metres deep. We can carry over 1,000 tonnes. At the moment, we’re set up to carry 500 passengers plus some cargo, but we’ve only got around 200 passengers on board for this trip. There are about fifty staff in the restaurant and bar, and another thirty on general duties, such as cleaning and attending the rooms, and there’s the control, navigating and engineering crew; that adds up to twenty-six.” She took a sip of her coffee. “If we reconfigured for cargo, we could carry 900 tonnes. The configuration we’ve got now weighs 300 tonnes, so we’ve got the capacity to carry a lot of stores and supplies. If we had a full complement of passengers and crew that would weigh less than 100 tonnes.”
“How is that possible? I mean, you have staterooms. And a restaurant, a bar and a ballroom.”
“With so few passengers, you’re all travelling business or first class. None of the economy class is being used.”
“So they just have seats?”
“Oh, no; they have inside rooms, but theirs are a bit smaller.” She leaned forward and tapped the table. “You have to realise that the Skylark is made from very light, very strong materials. Even this table is a very hard, very rigid foam plastic. The deck panels are foamed titanium, as are the external walls. The walls between rooms are that same foamed plastic. Everything is braced with titanium; the bag is made from carbon fibre and Kevlar.”
“But the engines and fuel . . . ”
“You saw that glittering stuff on the balloon surface?”
I nodded.
“That’s a coating of thin-film solar cells. With our sail area, we generate enough current to power the propeller motors and the passenger and crew decks. It means we’re flying for free while the sun’s up.”
“What about at night?”
“We carry twenty tonnes of lithium-ion polymer batteries for internal backup power, and we have alcohol-fuelled turbines that drive the props and generators.”
“Isn’t that dangerous? I mean, the Hindenburg just exploded when it caught fire, didn’t it?”
She laughed. “No, the Hindenburg didn’t explode; it burned, very rapidly, and that’s because it used hydrogen as a lifting gas. We use helium, and that doesn’t burn. In fact, it extinguishes fires.”
“What about just plain crashing? How safe is the Skylark?”
“Safer than just about any other aircraft. Oh, we could crash, but every landing, for every aircraft, is a controlled crash. We’d just come down a little more heavily than we normally do. The only conceivable way we could have a catastrophic crash is if every single cell in the bag ruptured simultaneously, and there is no conceivable way that could happen.”
“What about explosive decompression? A window blows out, or something.”
She laughed again, for longer, this time. Finally, she wiped a tear away and said, “You’ve been watching too many disaster movies. We only fly at a little over 1,500 metres, although we can head up to 3,000 to get over weather, if we have to. If you’ve ever driven up Kosciusko you’ve wound up at over 2,000 metres, and your eyes haven’t popped out of your head. The short answer is that we can’t decompress because the pressure inside and out is almost the same at normal cruising height. If you broke a window, we’d just send someone along to fix it.”
“We’re getting a free ride. How much is all this luxury going to cost the ordinary punter?”
“It will be cheaper than a discounted economy fare on an airliner,” she said flatly.
“How come?”
“You have to consider, Dave, that we have tiny fuel costs, don’t need a huge infrastructure, don’t pay airport fees and that this ship costs less than a third of a modern airliner, and lasts just as long with fewer maintenance costs. We could pretty well fly long runs for a quarter of an air ticket.”
I was gobsmacked. “But where did this all come from? Who came up with all these new ideas at once?”
She shook her head. “Not one of them is a new idea. The basic concepts have been around since the 1980s, and the hover-cushion landing system has been around since the very end of the 20th century. That’s why we’re sure it will work. It already does in other applications. Canada’s been using smaller versions as flying trucks in difficult areas, they’ve been sent up as high-level surveillance vehicles by the USA. Last year Russia bought ten to outfit as heavy lift vehicles across Siberia. Imagine,” she sa
id earnestly, “what it means to have cheap transport for supplies in remote areas. A couple of years ago one of these skylifted an entire hospital into China after that huge earthquake struck. They can get in and out where even a helicopter would have trouble, and they can carry more than any helicopter.”
“Why hasn’t anybody done this before now?”
She shook her head again. “That I can’t tell you. I just drive the beast. I used to fly search and rescue helicopters for the Royal Navy, and then I applied for this, and now I’m a very happy Captain.” She checked her watch. “And now I’d better take over before Tom rams us into Bluff Knoll. Oh, don’t worry,” she said when my mouth gaped open. “We’d bounce, but it might scratch all that brand-new paintwork.”
By the time I’d looked around the entire ship, it was nearly one. I’d picked up Mike and we shot some pictures of us leaving the coast behind us, the spectacular contrast between the arid desert around Cocklebiddy and the thin strip of green between it and the coast, and the deep blue of the Bight. It felt like being on a moving mountain, and yet we had little sense that we were moving at all, just the landscape rolling out below us.
“If this isn’t the most comfortable mode of travel ever invented,” Mike grunted as he fired off a few more shots of the receding coastline, “I don’t know what is.”
I left him to send the shots back to the paper via a satellite link, and headed up to my room to get a nap before dinner and the ball. I’d looked in on a couple of the economy rooms, and they were, as Amanda had said, smaller, but still luxurious in comparison to an aeroplane. I headed up to the front to see if I could get a look inside one of the first-class cabins, and I was in luck; a tall, grey-haired man in a dark suit was just opening his door.
“Hey,” I called. “I know this is an imposition, but is there any chance I could see what your cabin is like?” I fumbled out my press pass. “I’m with the paper.”
