![]() ![]() The company sold one to HeavyLift Canada (a company in which it has a 20% stake), which intends to use it for hauling oil rigs over the tundra. In the meantime CargoLifter has a stopgap product-the CL75, a $10 million balloon meant to be dragged through the air by ropes and tractors. Von Gablenz says the company will issue up to $40 million in convertible bonds, and the German government appears poised to offer additional aid. Cargolifter Joey was a small semi-rigid experimental airship produced to test the design. In March the German press predicted the company would be out of money come April. CL160 'Cargolifter' was an unrealised design of the now liquidated German Cargolifter AG (19962003). But with no ships and the construction costs mounting, CargoLifter shares plunged 75%. Since then a team of some 260 engineers (including the cream of the world's airship designers) has puffed away. ![]() ![]() The German government provided subsidies and made available a former Soviet airfield as the hangar site, in exchange for CargoLifter's commitment to create jobs. Siemens, Mitsui and other industrial manufacturers expressed interest, a big reason CargoLifter, by May 2000, had amassed the largest private placement in German history. The German CargoLifter model CL160 was designed to have the length of the Boeing 747s (852.8 ft) and the height of a 27-story building (213.2 ft). You could pick up a turbine in Stuttgart, say, and drop it in Brazil. In recent years the development of semi-rigid airships has revived. A lawyer and professor of global logistics, Von Gablenz came up with the idea of a vehicle that could float giant industrial components right past all the railroad tunnels and highway overpasses that create nightmares for ground transport planners. The ships, the shed and the shop itself are all brainchildren of CargoLifter says the building will serve not just as a hangar but as the manufacturing site for the first of 50 giant CL160 airships, so called because each ship will lift 160 metric tons (352,800 pounds). So big, in fact, that designers had to consider the possibility of cloud formations inside. It's a heck of a hangar-the largest building in the world without internal supports-1,200 feet long, 660 feet wide, 330 feet tall. ![]()
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