The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
This is the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the plane and the rigid airship – huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. John McPhee chronicles the perhaps unfathomable perseverance of the aircraft’s sucessive progenitors.
Since the explosion of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey, energy-efficient, lighter-than-air ships have given way to gas-guzzling jet aircraft. But in the 1960s, an unusual band of inventors, engineers and investors, again in New Jersey, created the Aereon, a strange, wingless hybrid airplane/dirigible. The Aereon–the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed– promised to be a safe workhorse of the skies, capable of carrying the payload of entire freight trains with minimal cost.
