Plans Air Cruiser To Cross Atlantic.

New York Times 100 years ago today, December 8, 1912:
German Inventor Has Drawn Specifications for 1,000-Foot Craft on New Lines.
ENGINEERS PRAISE DESIGN
Projectors Say It Would Bring 300 Persons Across the Ocean in Two and a Half Days.
By Marconi Transatlantic Wireless Telegraph to The New York Times.
    PARIS, Dec. 7.— Crossing the Atlantic by airship is now only a matter of a very short time, according to a group of German capitalists, which recently formed a company to exploit, as a means of long-distance traveling, a new type of dirigible balloon devised by Herr Börner, a well-known German engineer, which is proudly called the aerial ocean cruiser.
    Plans for the realization of this scheme are now well under way, and have already advanced to the point of choosing the site of a hangar on the European side of the Atlantic, the exact location of which, however, is kept a secret for the moment.
    In the near future New York will be visited by Ernest Günther Hensel, the representative of the company, who was in Paris this week, with the object of ascertaining where would be the most suitable landing place for aerial cruisers bringing their load of passengers from Europe.
    The inventor, and those backing him, assert that not only will the new balloon carry more than three hundred persons, and make the 4,000 mile journey in two and one-half days, but they also maintain that safety and comfort will be the chief features of the journey.
    The specifications of the new dirigible have already been drawn up in thirty-six different sizes for various purposes. The type destined for transatlantic passage will be constructed to navigate on the water, if necessary, as well as to fly. It will have a length of about 300 meters (or about 975 feet) by thirty meters wide, and fitted with thirty-four benzine motors, seventeen on each side, on an entirely new system, capable of developing more than 5,000 horse power. The airship will have its own power for rising or descending, which will permit the doing away with ballast and take no account of loss of gas.
    The average speed is estimated at 67 miles an hour. The airship will have a lifting force of 210 tons, which will enable it to carry 216 passengers with a crew of 102. The total cost is calculated at $465,000.
    A feature on which great stress is laid by the inventor is the immunity of the airship from explosion, even if struck by lightning. The lifting force will be supplied by 55 separate small balloons, which are covered by a large envelope and insulated from the outer air by a compartment, filled with non-explosive azote gas, which also protects the motors and their reservoirs.
    A model airship has already been constructed down to the smallest detail, and aerial experts who have been allowed to examine its special features are convinced of the practicability of the scheme, Count George von Der Goltz, President of the German Airship Association and Vice President of the International Aeronautic federation, is reported to have said in an interview the other day that he wouldn't hesitate to be among the first passengers to cross the Atlantic in it. He thought that it would help Germany to obtain the supremacy of the air.
    After a careful examination of the new invention he stated that it appeared to him as if the element of danger, hitherto inseparable from long air journeys, had at last been eliminated.
    E. Umbeck, another well known German engineer, who has hitherto given preference to the aeroplane over the dirigible for series of flights, states in a judicially worded report after an exhaustive examination of all the details that he is of the opinion that the inventor has based his ideas on sound principles, and that his experiments and those of others, made with the new airship, have opened fresh ground in aeronautics. He also says he has carefully checked the calculations and found them faultless, and concludes:
    "We are on the eve of seeing for the first time a really practical and profitable dirigible."
    Raoul Pictet, a Brussels authority, prefaces a long report by saying:
    "I have the pleasure of expressing my enthusiastic appreciation of your new system of dirigible. With real joy I hail in your splendid work new ideas which will lead aeronautic science in an unexpected direction."