2015: Regent’s Park International Airport

A line of limousines and taxis snakes its way into the Royal Park to deliver 300 well-heeled passengers and their smart luggage to the discreet air terminal. They are in no rush because the flight they are about to board to New York will take two days.

Moored on the grass outside the terminal is a 600ft long behemoth, a vast Hybrid Air Vehicle. A cross between a balloon and an aircraft wing, this new-wave blimp is filled with non-flammable helium and air. Slung beneath is a vast passenger cabin akin to a miniature first-class cruise ship with dining rooms, a ballroom, bars and a casino.

For the same price as a club-class plane ticket, these 300 discerning travellers will eat, sip cocktails and dance as they float serenely across the Atlantic.

There is no runway; there is no need. Once clearance is given for take-off, the captain disengages the hover cushions that suck the craft to the ground, directs the thrust of four 8,000hp engines down, and powers the ship up to 9,000ft.

In 48 hours they will touch down in New York harbour, having burned just a fifth of the fuel used by an aeroplane. It’s a stress-free hop from central London to the centre of Manhattan, with no lengthy airport connections at either end, and no icebergs either.

The doomed R101 in one of the hangers

Airship travel has been a distant dream ever since a catastrophic fire in 1937 ripped through the  LZ-129 Hindenburg as it neared its mooring mast in New Jersey, killing thirty-five people on board and one man on the ground.

Reporter Herbert Morrison’s vivid eye-witness testimony would become the industry’s epitaph: ‘It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It’s smoke, and it’s in flames now; and the frame is crashing to the ground… Oh the humanity!’

Could an industry dogged by tragedy and belonging to a bygone era finally have found the technology to cruise back into the mainstream?

The American Department of Defense thinks so. They have just handed a £315 million contract to design and build the world’s largest flying object to a small British company based in Bedfordshire. Having beaten aviation giants Lockheed Martin, Hybrid Air Vehicles have just four months to build the belly and bones of the craft – the payload module, the fuel tanks, the four engines, the propulsion ducts and bow thrusters (the prototype is pictured on the previous pages).

If all goes to plan these parts will leave its secure manufacturing facility in May, be loaded on a vast Antonov cargo plane, and flown to Arizona where they will join up with the ‘envelope’ (ie, the balloon).

Once assembly is complete, military technology giant Northrop Grumman will add the top-secret surveillance equipment and the vehicle will travel on its own power to a U.S. army base on the east coast of the United States. Once there the U.S. military will put the fully assembled 300ft long craft through its places, flying it with pilots and without.

When it finally completes testing and trials in January 2012, it will leave the US and fly back across the Atlantic to the UK, the first time this has happened since the heyday of Zeppelins in the Thirties.

Guided by a three-man crew, the giant ship will stay at a U.S. Army base here, ready to be deployed. It will be available for use in Afghanistan where it can be flown remotely, climbing to 20,000ft and circling for 21 days, an omniscient god perpetually surveying the battlefield and giving advance warnings of IED attacks and ambushes.

The Cardington airship hangars in Bedfordshire

A zeppelin in a war zone?

Testing has shown that bullets, even missiles pass directly through the envelope because of the incredibly low pressure. Reassuringly, the company insists it has come a long way from the technology of the Thirties.

The 60 per cent helium and 40 per cent air mix replaces flammable hydrogen. And where the classic cigar-shaped Zeppelins struggled against the wind, hybrids use it in combination with their aerodynamic shape  to get more lift. They are helped by vectored thrust, like a Harrier jet, which directs the engine output downwards to provide vertical lift and allows them to take off carrying heavy payloads, even in high winds. They also burn less fuel than a plane while hauling more cargo and, with hovercraft-style landing gear, they don’t require an airport. They can even touch down on water.

The vast 800ft-long Cardington Airship Hangars in Bedfordshire are an eerie sight, dominating the skyline for miles around. Here history looms large.

In 1916 about 800 people worked at Cardington for Shorts Brothers, producing their first airship in 1918. In hard times after the war, the station was closed and construction abandoned, reopening again in 1924 as part of the Imperial Airship Service.

It was in Cardington that the 777ft-long R101, the then biggest airship in the world, was built, and from here that it began its ill-fated final voyage at 6.24pm on Saturday October 4, 1930 bound for India; first planned stop Egypt.

R101 reached London by 8pm, crossed the Channel in two hours, and at midnight a final message went out: ‘15 miles SW of Abbeville speed 33 knots. Wind 243 degrees (West South West) 35 miles an hour. Altimeter height 1,500ft. Air temperature 51 Fahrenheit. Weather – intermittent rain. Cloud nimbus at 500 feet. After an excellent supper our distinguished passengers smoked a final cigar and having sighted the French coast have now gone to bed to rest after the excitement of their leave-taking. All essential services are functioning satisfactorily.’

Two hours later, R101 went into a steep dive, the nose hitting the ground at just 13.8mph. Then fire broke out, from which only eight of the 56 passengers and crew survived. Plans for more advanced and bigger airships were scrapped. After a brief resurgence during World War II when they made barrage balloons for the war effort, the Cardington sheds and the industry slid into decline.

Now, Cardington shed No 2 acts as a temporary home to Warner Brothers’ technicians. The cavernous space was just the job for a full-sized mock-up of Gotham  City for Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman series. The other largely derelict shed is out of bounds, a reminder of the industry’s capricious history.

How the new breed of Hybrid Air Vehicles would look over London’s Olympic complex

But just as cruise ships survived the Titanic disaster, so some enthusiasts never gave up hope for the airship. Among them was Roger Munk, the epitome of a charismatic British engineering visionary. The idea for the Hybrid Air Vehicle was his; he spent much of his  40-year career designing and building airships, completing a number of ‘lighter than air’ projects for the American military.

Yet his own work was haunted by the inherent danger of airships going up in flames. In 1995, a fire apparently caused accidentally during welding work set alight the Weeksville hangar in North Carolina. At half-a-mile long, it was the largest wood-construction building in the world. Supports for the 180-ton doors were being rebuilt when the fire took hold, burning the hangar to the ground and destroying his Sentinel 1000 blimp.

Munk refused to give up. He decided to begin a new project creating a vehicle that would solve some of the problems inherent in airships, especially ground handling and ballast issues. He based his 15-man team in portable huts in the shadow of the Cardington sheds, and went back to the drawing board.

With a small beer tent as a hangar, Munk created the concept of a hybrid. The first prototype was flown in 2000. Though Munk was able to oversee the final perfection of his vision, he died of a heart attack in February 2010 – before the team heard news that they had won the U.S. military contract.

The team now has 100 engineers and designers and the firm has ditched its draughty sheds for two brand new office buildings nearby. But if Hybrid Air Vehicles’ potential is taken up then the team hopes to begin manufacturing and storing the vehicles again in Cardington.

The 50ft long prototype itself seems otherworldly. Almost as wide as it is long, it is surprisingly balloon-like to the touch. Even the most cynical observer cannot disguise the thrill of childlike wonder on feeling just how light this huge craft is. The pressure inside it is just 0.1 psi – a car tyre is between 20 and 40 psi.

CEO Gary Elliott, the man largely responsible for putting together the Northrop Grumman deal, says: ‘We took existing technologies and the concept of an airship, took a step back and thought – why don’t we do this and this differently, so that it projects itself through the air?’

The Hybrid Air Vehicles’ flight simulator

In a nearby office a team of flight-control specialists occupies a meeting room. In the corner of another office sits a full-size mock-up of the cockpit, constructed entirely from cardboard. The cabinetry is the work of the team’s 70-year-old handyman.

Pilots sit here and try out all possible instrumentation combinations to find the most practical configuration. Who needs  virtual reality when you have a few old computer boxes and some photocopied instruments?

A few footsteps away, though, there is a concession to technology – a large simulator which operates using four screens linked to four networked, high-end gaming PCs. Veteran airship pilots, recruited from across the industry, with experience flying blimps and seaplanes, are teaching the computers how to react to various flying situations, so that when a remote operator issues the ship with a command, the automated system will be able to move the controls in the same way as a human pilot; in other words, they are teaching it to fly itself.

The system has been designed by another UK company, Blue Bear Systems Research. It designed the flight-control system of the Harrier jump jet and also designs UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that can be launched and fly themselves autonomously along a pre-programmed route.

Although every Hybrid Air Vehicle (HAV) will be capable of being flown remotely as a military surveillance platform, it will also be able to operate with a three-man crew – a pilot, co-pilot and load master. It takes about 100 hours of flight training to convert a pilot, though they don’t all make the switch easily, often because they aren’t used to stopping in mid-air.

Dave Burns is a pilot with thousands of hours experience flying passenger airliners for BA and Monarch. He is the company’s test pilot and chief flight training officer, and also the man who will fly the HAV 304 back across the Atlantic.

‘It doesn’t respond like a plane at all,’ says Burns. ‘You move the stick, telling the ship to move, and nothing happens for three or four seconds – and then it responds, which can be a little disconcerting. Plus, the mass underneath it acts like a pendulum, always trying to make it come level again.

‘The difficult thing is landing and take-off. In the past airships had ropes and ground crew waiting; we don’t need those so now what you have to do is present the vehicle so it comes down very slowly.’

A German Graf Zeppelin visiting Britain in 1931

Although the first 300ft version of the craft has been commissioned by the U.S. military, the real commercial potential of the vehicles could be for heavy lifting, says director of sales Gordon Taylor who has been living and breathing the things through multiple prototypes since joining his friend Roger Munk in 1997.

‘Our hybrids are based on a blend of technologies, in the same way that a Toyota Prius is a hybrid because it runs on electricity and petrol,’ he says.

‘Firstly it uses aerodynamics. The shape is like a big wing – air moves over it, lower air pressure is created across the top of the wing and it creates lift. Only if it’s fully loaded does it need a runway, and even then, with a 20 knot headwind they can land in three hull lengths.

‘Secondly we use “lighter-than-air” technology. With a normal airship you moor it on the ground to a mast. In order to fly anywhere it has to take off ballast, then it floats up. In a hybrid we push ourselves forward and that immediately generates lift.

‘Thirdly we have vectored thrust: our propulsion ducts rotate like a jump jet. Finally, we have hovercraft-style landing gear – a cushion of air that means that you can land on any reasonably flat surface, including water. This also works in reverse to secure the vehicle to the ground by suction.’

The company has calculated that it would take only 20 minutes to move a shipping container from Milton Keynes to London by HAV – a journey that presently takes hours thanks to traffic. Add a road network that grinds to a halt after a seasonal dusting of snow and you suddenly find an application for a cheaper, faster form of transport.

The Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937 which marked the end of the era of passenger-carrying airships

‘You can forget ice road truckers too in places with more extreme cold,’ he adds.

‘They can carry the same load that goes on the back of those trucks and they love the cold because you get more lift in the denser air. We have a version with a 20-ton payload, which is what a Lockheed C-130 Hercules carries. We have plans for craft to eventually carry up to 1,000 tons.’

The team is already in formal discussions with oil companies that routinely spend hundreds of millions of dollars on roads and airports every time they find a new supply of oil or gas. By using HAVs the oil companies would simply be able to touch down without need of an airport.

‘Some of these companies are paying a million dollars a day in the development of infrastructure.

‘You could run these hybrids in convoy too, of course. The price difference between air freight and shipping is huge – so what if you could move freight by air but for a similar price as a ship? It could mean a whole new market in transport.’

Later this year the full-scale version of the current prototype will become the largest flying object in the world. After its initial use in military surveillance and heavy lifting, it could be just a few years before passengers are floating around beneath them. Need to be in New York fast? Take a plane. Don’t mind being in New York a day later? Then take an HAV.

And precisely how long will it take after that  for us to see a fleet of orange easyBalloons hauling budget passengers to and from Malaga?

American officials have been holding secret talks with Russia and the United Nations in an attempt to strengthen internet security and rein in the growing threat of cyberwarfare.

The effort, first reported in the New York Times, is a virtual version of the nuclear arms talks being held between the two nations in Geneva – but rather than focusing on bombs and missiles, the discussions are aimed at curbing the increasing level of attacks taking place online.

With a rising tide of strikes by hackers on major institutions – including banks, businesses, government agencies and the military – diplomats are attempting to forge an international consensus on how to deal with cybersecurity problems.

“Both sides are making positive noises,” James Lewis, a senior fellow at the centre for strategic and international studies and a cyber security expert, told the Guardian. “We’ve never seen that before.”

The potential for online warfare has become a hot topic in recent years, after a string of major incidents. Large-scale cyberattacks took place during last year’s conflict between Russia and Georgia while the Estonian government came grinding to a halt after an internet assault in 2007.

Critics have said the scale and impact of such incidents may be overstated, but experts accept there are serious dangers from criminal gangs operating online – as well as the rapid growth of state-sponsored espionage conducted over the internet.

Earlier this year, some of the plans for a new £2bn fighter aircraft being developed by the US, UK, Netherlands and Israel were stolen when hackers broke into American computers. Two years ago, it was revealed that hackers thought to be linked to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had breached computer security systems at the Pentagon and Whitehall.

The latest discussions are thought to be an attempt to broker some sort of cross-border agreement over a number of issues related to internet security. Russia is said to be seeking a disarmament treaty for cyberspace, while the US hopes to use the talks to foster greater international cooperation on cybercrime.

Lewis confirmed that a Russian delegation met with officials from the US military, state department and security agencies in Washington about five weeks ago. Two weeks later, the White House agreed to meet representatives from the UN committee on disarmament and international security, the New York Times reported.

There are numerous sticking points however, not least the fact both the US and Russia – as well as most advanced militaries around the world – have sophisticated cyber warfare capabilities they are reluctant to document. Although the dangers of virtual conflicts are recognised, neither country is keen to hinder any future deployment by revealing the technologies they have developed, Lewis said.

Despite that, the talks mark a distinct turnaround from the approach of the Bush administration, which had resisted engaging with Russia and the UN over the prospect of a treaty on cyber weapons. Instead, it focused on dealing with cyber threats by economic and commercial means, rather than through the military.

Earlier this year, however, President Barack Obama identified cyber attacks as a “national security priority” and pledged to appoint a top-level White House adviser to co-ordinate responses..

“Cyberspace is real, and so is the risk that comes with it,” he said in May. “From now on, our digital infrastructure will be treated as a strategic asset.”

However, the post remains unfilled six months after the announcement., with disagreement inside the administration over how to coordinate the appropriate level of response. While some presidential advisers want the White House to take oversight of the issue, other top Obama aides prefer to let the commercial market handle cybersecurity. The US military and intelligence officials, meanwhile, prefer to pursue their own security programmes without direction from the White House.

Many American experts are more concerned with the financial threat of cybercrime and internet-based fraud, particularly since international enforcement efforts have been weakened by an inability to track and arrest the hackers responsible, many of whom are based in Russia and China.

Online crime is now a multibillion pound business worldwide, with criminal gangs across the globe conducting sophisticated cyber attacks to steal money from banks and disrupt commercial websites.

Last year, hackers broke into the Royal Bank of Scotland, using information gathered from to create cloned bank cards that were then used to withdraw more than £5m from cash machines in dozens of cities.

This August, an American man, Albert Gonzalez, pled guilty to his role in an attack that netted millions when an international hacking ring – largely based in Russia and the Ukraine – stole 130 million credit and debit card numbers from some of America’s biggest retailers.

Despite knowing the identities of several individuals linked to Gonzalez, however, the lack of international cooperation means that the other culprits remain beyond the reach of US prosecutors.

Ari Folman asks his friend why, twenty years down the line, he is now having this surreal dream from the war in Lebanon. Why can’t he remember the occasion this vision so powerfully depicts? His friend tells him about a famous psychological test, in which people are shown ten photographs from their youth, and asked if they recall the events shown in the photos. Nine of the photographs are genuine; one however, shows the young participant surrounded by the trappings of a fair ground. Eighty per cent of participants, Folman is told, declare that they remember the day vividly: being taken round by their parents, eating candy, going on the rides. Except that they weren’t there: the figure of the child has been superimposed onto a scene they were never present in. The mind, confronted by such seemingly objective ocular proof, revises its own uncertainties: memory displays the versatile and beguiling capacity to rewrite its own contents into conformity with the evidence.

The photographer, thrust into the heart of such carnage, allows his eyes to replicate the hardened, unblinking gaze of the camera, the artificial eye…War, as the Italian futurist Marinetti declared 50 years earlier, has become an aesthetic triumph of technology over man, a proliferation of images – an abdication of human response

The falsified photograph is a controlling image through out the fragmentary and fractured narrative of discovery in Waltz with Bashir. Folman’s film becomes a troubling reflection of the way in which technology has alienated man from his own humanity. A psychiatrist Folman later meets relates to him the story of a young amateur photographer called into action in the Israeli-Lebanese war. Wondering how the man maintained a steady head despite the brutality, he tells her that it was easy – the whole war become one long day trip – the bodies, the bombs, the devastation, all were composed in his mind as striking pictures, vivid snapshots. The photographer, thrust into the heart of such carnage, allows his eyes to replicate the hardened, unblinking gaze of the camera, the artificial eye. He merely sees the horror; he is not there in person, he is detached. War, as the Italian futurist Marinetti declared 50 years earlier, has become an aesthetic triumph of technology over man, a proliferation of images – an abdication of human response.

As we stare into the glazed-over eye of the dead horse, we see that the young soldier no longer sees what is around him, but feels it. Denied the mediation of his psychological ‘camera’ vision, he is sickened by a horror that is all too primal

Folman’s friend Boaz looks through the crosshairs of the sniper rifle at his target as if watching a television screen. Photographically framed, the dogs he aims at cease to be living beings. Pulling the trigger, Boaz shoots the image, not the dog. The sniper’s sight enables him to distance himself from the act of killing; the shooter is able to evacuate his own agency, to transform his own situation into a simulation. This is why the photographer the psychiatrist talks about finds that his defence mechanism – appropriating the cool and unaffected vision of the camera lens – breaks down when faced with the agonizing scene of the maimed horses slowly dying. The horses represent the intrusion of the organic into the sterilized detachment of the mechanical. As we stare into the glazed-over eye of the dead horse, we see that the young soldier no longer sees what is around him, but feels it. Denied the mediation of his psychological ‘camera’ vision, he is sickened by a horror that is all too primal.

The very same technological advancements that provide us with more efficient ways of killing each other have, thoughtfully, given us new means of distancing ourselves from the depersonalized destruction they cause. Armed with machine guns and MAGs that rip the fabric of the air with interminable rounds of bullets, the Israeli recruits can remove themselves from the scene by imagining their trigger fingers are clicking a camera rather than unleashing deadly fire. Technology becomes a medium of disengagement. War demands human sacrifice in more ways than one. The technology of war dehumanizes the battlefield; soldiers, consequently, are compelled, not only to dehumanize their opponent, but to void themselves of their own humanity. Ari and his fellow soldiers ride around firing blindly into the enveloping darkness of night; when he is asked what they are shooting at, he replies, “I don’t know. Anything. Everything.”

The very same technological advancements that provide us with more efficient ways of killing each other have, thoughtfully, given us new means of distancing ourselves from the depersonalized destruction they cause

Waltz with Bashir tracks the director’s efforts to find someone who can bear witness to the massacre. Every individual he talks to has at best a partial recollection of where they were, what they were doing, who they were with. Ari initially thinks of memory as a store-house of extinguished experiences, a lasting record of the lives we have lived. He soon discovers that memory is a survival mechanism, relying on the censorship of self-erasure for efficient operation. Memory, like a digital camera, can delete its files. This is why the choric response of all the veterans he interviews adopts the same computerized jargon for describing their self-enforced amnesia: “it’s not stored in my system.” In a technological age, memory must assimilate itself to the machine to ensure its survival. That technical, mechanized response betrays the inhumanity of their experiences of war. Forced to act like a killing machine, and not a human, the brain responds by refiguring itself as a hard-drive: trauma is translated into data-loss.

The modern era has come to see technology as an objective guarantor of truth. Technology, unlike the inconsistent, emotional, illogical human subject, carries with it the self-assured air of empirical certainty. The tapes we use can remember with fidelity conversations we have long forgot; the films we watch can immortalize scenes that have slipped into oblivion; the cameras we click can capture infinitesimal details the naked eye overlooks. Technology embodies the perfect objectivity that Western science has long aspired towards – the objectivity that our frail, physical limitations have long prevented us from attaining. Yet if technology is objective, it is also an objectifier, turning subjects into objects, people into things. The camera lens treats all things, animate or inanimate, within its range as objects alike. Frozen on film, the camera refuses to distinguish between the smiling baby, the birthday cake and the table it sits on. The camera transforms everything in its scope to petrified stillness – just like the guns that turn humans into corpses, subjects into lifeless lumps of flesh.

Mediated through the cartoon, war becomes just as unreal and unreachable as it does to those young Israeli soldiers called up to fight. Animation exquisitely captures the dissolving images and hallucinations that haunt the minds of those involved, decades later

Folman’s choice of graphic animation is fundamental to the film’s presentation of modern war. Animation enables the audience to experience a corresponding feeling of detachment from the horrors of war so explicitly visualized in the film. Presented with the callous execution of innocent women and children, animation makes the senseless and bloody violence that much easier to stomach. Mediated through the cartoon, war becomes just as unreal and unreachable as it does to those young Israeli soldiers called up to fight. Animation exquisitely captures the dissolving images and hallucinations that haunt the minds of those involved, decades later. Several soldiers attest that they are unsure of whether these phantasmal visions are subconscious, suppressed projections of real events, or whether they are memories simulated by a troubled mind. One solider Folman meets invokes a nightmarish scene of a wasted battlefield. “It was like a trip, like LSD, but it was real”: for the soldier, struggling to articulate in words the image inscribed on his memory, the ‘reality’ he recalls can only be explained as a hallucination, as a chemical imbalance of the brain’s synapses. Perhaps this is why Carmi anaesthetizes himself with steady pulls on endlessly rotating joints. Forced into the unwelcome act of remembrance by Folman, he seeks to dull his senses in the pacifying haze of marijuana smoke, to make things less real by means of chemical assistance.

Andy Warhol declared that “once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again”. Technology supplies that angle, and takes away an inconvenient reality. This is the experience that J.G. Ballard call de-cerebration. Driving cars, watching screens, firing guns – the individual finds himself no longer prompted by personal needs and desires. He feels his brain to be a motor, issuing directions to a body that resembles an apparatus. This is the disconcerting anxiety that the characters in Waltz with Bashir experience, that the psychological test exposes: it is not only our bodies but our sentimental lives that can be mechanically programmed. Warhol stated that he could not imagine being in love – surely it would resemble a made-for-TV movie, with faked rapture and flimsy scenery. The same dissociating numbness affects the Israeli soldiers. They cannot imagine being at war: instead, it resembles a photograph, a film, a cartoon.

Technology equates itself to truth. But it is a truth that has been voided of human significance, a truth that depersonalizes and dehumanizes. In Folman’s film, the sole person who can bear witness to the submerged horrors of the massacre, crucially, is not a soldier but Roni, the war reporter for Israeli television. It seems fitting that is only from behind the artificial eye of the camera, through the mitigating mediation of the television screen, that the full savagery of the atrocity can be felt. It is significant that the end of Folman’s road towards remembrance and revelation comes not in the animation that has provided the medium for the film’s hazy, hallucinatory fragments of memory, but in real, documentary footage. The film’s stark and sickening conclusion – images of piles of dead bodies filling doorways, limbs of suffocated infants poking through the rubble, overlaid with a cacophonous soundtrack of howling widows – has a visceral immediacy that the rest of the film studiously avoids. Confronted with this horrific reality, we are denied the ameliorating strokes of the cartoonist’s pen that have, to that point, provided a surreal glaze to the film’s phantasmagoric recollections. “What if I don’t want to know these things about myself?”, Folman asks a friend. The film’s final scene shows the camera refusing to baulk at sights the human eye instinctively shirks away from. It is a mortifying token of war’s inhuman capacity to disregard human life. It is also a shocking reminder of technology’s inhuman incapacity for emotional response. Faced with this final picture of desolate horror, we are more forgiving of the convenient amnesia of Folman and his comrades.

© Adam Gyngell, 2009