se, be considerably increased, but the provision of an enormous
handling party will not be necessary. At present large numbers of men
are only required to take a large airship in or out of a shed when the
wind is blowing in a direction across the shed; when these conditions
prevail the airship will, unless compelled by accident or other
unforeseen circumstances, remain moored out in the open until the
direction of the wind has changed.

Mechanical traction will also help effectually in handling airships on
the ground, and the difficulty of taking them in and out of sheds has
always been unduly magnified. The provision of track rails and
travellers to which the guys of the ship can be attached, as is the
practice in Germany, will tend to eliminate the source of trouble.

We must now consider the effect that weather will have on the big
airship. In the past it has been a great handicap owing to the short
hours of endurance, with the resulting probability of the ship having
to land before the wind dropped and being wrecked in consequence. Bad
weather will not endanger the big airship in flight, and its endurance
will be such that, should it encounter bad weather, it will be able to
wait for a lull to land. Meteorological forecasts have now reached a
high state of efficiency, and it should be possible for ample warnings
to be received of depressions to be met with during a voyage, and these
will be avoided by the airship flying round them. In the northern
hemisphere, depressions generally travel from west to east and
invariably rotate in a counter-clockwise direction with the wind on the
south side blowing from the west and on the north side blowing from the
east. Going west, the airship would fly to the north of a depression
to take advantage of the wind circulating round the edge, and going
east the southern course would be taken.

Lastly, the vulnerability of the airship must be taken into account.
Hydrogen is, as everyone knows, most highly inflammable when mixed with
air. The public still feels uncomfortable misgivings at the close
proximity of an immense volume of gas to a number of running engines.
It may be said that the danger of disaster due to the gas catching fire
is for peace flying to all intents and purposes negligible. At the
risk of being thought hackneyed we must point out a fact which has
appeared in every discussion of the kind, namely, that British airships
flew during the war some 21 million