It is late afternoon in the Kalahari Desert. In the distance, silhouetted against a National Geographic sunset is an airship. It is the length of a football field and it is cruising a few hundred feet above the parched soil. Below: giraffe and antelope scatter. But this is not a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. De Beers, the diamond company, is using a new generation of Zeppelins right now to prospect for diamonds in southern Africa.
It is possible to buy your own Zeppelin. The list price is €8.5 million, plus the cost of ground equipment such as mast trucks. “It’s like operating any aircraft,” says Thomas Brandt, the manufacturer’s CEO, “you need maintenance, certification, pilots but it is normal aerospace business.” Once ordered, a new airship takes about 18 months to build – plenty of time to get the pilots trained up.
This isn’t your grandparent’s airship. The Zeppelin uses three engines to reach a maximum speed of 125km/h. It can hover like a helicopter and dock and undock under its own power – no need for dozens of men with ropes anymore. The company has also dispensed with explosive hydrogen as a lifting gas in favor of inert helium. No more Hindenburgs.
The airship’s gondola can carry 12 people plus two pilots. BMW hired one to tour ten German towns. The aircraft carried the carmaker’s logo across Germany and it took nearly 2,000 VIP passengers for short flights. This is an eye-catching form of publicity.
Life for most of Zeppelin’s aircraft is a mix of pleasure flights, airborne surveillance and BMW-like charters. Brandt reckons it is possible for a well-managed
It is an ideal survey platform because it has less vibration than a light aircraft and can stay aloft for up to 24 hours. Advanced instruments, including one originally developed for the US Navy to hunt Russian submarines, scan the geology beneath the Earth’s surface for Kimberlite. These buried volcanic pipes hint at the presence of diamonds.
The De Beers Zeppelin is based in Botswana at the Jwaneng diamond mine because the best place to look for new diamonds is near an existing field and the gravimetric sensors are particularly effective in areas that are known to be promising.
It operates a few hundred feet above the ground flying up and down track lines like a grounds keeper mowing a football field. The slow speed and low vibration generate high quality data. David Hatch, a De Beers geophysicist, says: “As well as being fun – you get to fly around in an airship – it’s also been a huge technical success.”