Bruce Dickinson, de zanger van Iron Maiden, heeft geïnvesteerd in de Airlander: het grootste vliegtuig ter wereld. Dit milieuvriendelijke Hybrid Air Vehicle is in staat om drie weken achter elkaar in de lucht te blijven en zal ingezet worden om humanitaire hulp te bieden. Dit 92 meter lange luchtvoertuig zal later deze maand voor het eerst opstijgen.

In The New Yorker (via Ultimate-Guitar) legt Dickinson zijn motivatie uit:

“You want to put a hospital into Africa? You put the whole hospital in the inside of this – whoosh. Start the generator. ‘Here’s your hospital, buddy!’ Job done. You can just plunk the vehicle straight down on the farm, load it with 50 tons of green beans or whatever, and 24 hours later you land right next door to the processing plant. It’s a global conveyor belt. And water! With these vehicles, you could drop off a 20-ton slab of water that is clean, drinkable, to an African village. It’s astonishing what you can do that you just can’t do with anything else. Shit, you can do that with it? Wow, you can do that with it? Seriously fantastic!”

Voor zijn geïnvesteerde $360.000 verwacht Dickinson niet veel terug:

“I’m not expecting to get my money back anytime soon, I just want to be part of it. Being a rock person, I could put it up my nose, or buy a million Rolls Royces and drive them into swimming pools, or I could do something useful. There are very few times in your life when you’re going to be part of something big. (…) You just drop right down onto the ice cap. Or drop right down on the Atacama Desert, and you go up through the rain forest or whatever, just for shits and giggles. You know?”