Zeppelins! Video plus article in English and gap-fill exercise

Zeppelins! The inexpensive, eco-friendly future transport of goods could be solved by using ‘blimps’ — zeppelins.

Zeppelins could replace aircraft in freight transport, say scientists

Helium-powered ships could be carrying freight – and even passengers – in as little as a decade.

The government’s former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, told a conference that ……………… helium balloons – or blimps – would replace aircraft as a ………………. of the global trade network as a way of cutting global warming emissions.

Despite languishing (to languish – lâncezi) in science-fiction movies for the last 70 years, King said several major air and defence companies, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin were working on …………………., and the US defence department had recently made a large grant to help develop the technology.

As a result, the helium-powered ships could be carrying …………… – and even passengers – in as little as a decade’s time, King told ‘The Guardian’.

“There are an awful lot of people we talk to who say this is going to happen,” said King. “This is something I …………………. is going to happen.”

King was speaking this week at the World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, which has made transport a major focus of ………………….. about global efforts to cut the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels (combustibililor fosili), which are a major contributor to global warming and climate change. In Europe 22% of greenhouse gases are from transport, ……………….. 28% from heat and electricity, 21% from industry and construction and 9% each from agriculture and homes, according to the European Environment Agency.

Support for blimps is one development in a more general trend towards looking beyond the most obvious solutions for reducing ………………………as major economies, such as the UK, struggle to meet pledges to de-carbonise their economies over the next few decades.

Airships would be too slow for some high-speed airfreight, and would not be needed to carry the majority of cargo for which much slower ships are suitable. But with a speed of 125kph (78mph), and much lower fuel costs, plus a carrying capacity …………………….. many times that of a standard Boeing 747 plane, blimps could in future carry much of current air freight.

A recent report on mobility by the Smith School, for example, quoted an estimate by one developer, UK-owned Sky Cat, that it could carry twice the ………….. of strawberries from Spain to the UK of a standard cargo plane, with a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, much of which is from avoiding the huge fuel consumption a jet engine uses to take off. (de decolare)

Other benefits included the possibility that airships would not need to use airports if they were fitted with “lifts” to pick up and land cargo. This in turn would reduce the need for trucking goods to and from transport hubs (centres), and allow less well-connected areas, perhaps in inland Africa, to take part in ………………………….., said King. For the same reasons the blimps could also be used to reach devastated areas in need of humanitarian aid, he said.

The technology began to come of age when the Frenchmen Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes made the first flight in a balloon in 1783. By the 1920s airships were making regular trips across the Atlantic, and in 1929 a Graf Zeppelin ………………………….. the planet in just over 21 days.

The craze for blimps came to an abrupt halt after the death of many people when the Hindenburg caught fire in New Jersey, US. However research and development has “languished but never halted”, said the Smith School report.

Gap fill

global revolution / circumnavigated / potentially / designs / believe / pollution  / compared with / weight  / international trade / freight / debate / key part / massive