Von Gablenz, who now runs his company from an office in Berlin, is still optimistic about the future of airships as cargo haulers. “This makes natural tanning possible.” Some 900,000 visitors, mostly from northern and eastern Europe, come each year.
#Cargolifter heute skin#
To open the hangar to light, “we exchanged the skin of the hall with 20,000 square yards of translucent film,” says Tanjong spokesman Patrick Kastner. So workers welded shut the two steel doors, which weigh 600 tons each. Tanjong soon found that keeping the hangar at 78 degrees Fahrenheit year-round was a challenge. A German court ordered the giant hangar sold to a Malaysian company, Tanjong, which bought it for 17 million euros (about $24 million) as a site for its Tropical Islands Resort. CargoLifter used it to store a prototype of an airship (later destroyed in a storm) capable of hoisting 60 tons.īut the end of the bull market spelled the end of von Gablenz’s dream: By 2002 his company was insolvent. Ten years ago, his plan seemed to be progressing at an abandoned Soviet military airfield 40 miles south of Berlin, his investor-backed company, CargoLifter AG, erected a $110 million airship hangar measuring 1,181 feet long by 688 feet wide by 351 feet high. German Entrepreneur Carl von Gablenz had an unusual vision: a fleet of giant helium airships that would haul outsize industrial loads, such as oil rigs or wind turbine blades, to remote areas of the globe.
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