HOAX: Hotelicopter Cruise Ship of the Sky
UPDATE: Businessweek is reporting this is indeed is a hoax as commenters suspected. What’s the world coming to when April Fool’s news can come out days early? Is nothing on the Internet sacred?
I first heard about the Hotelicopter concept a long time ago, and I figured it was one of those pie-in-the-sky ideas that would never come to pass. That turned out not to be true, as the cruise ship in the sky is set to begin operations shortly. The Hotelicopter is a converted Soviet Mil V-12 transport helicopter that is now a flying hotel. You just have to look at the photos of the inside to realize this is true mobile tech — everything is just as cool as can be.
The inaugural cruise is set for June of this year, and a good guess would have the price of admission to be pretty staggering. I’m thinking that first-hand coverage of true mobile tech like this would be a legitimate business expense. That’s what I’m thinking.
(via Gizmodo)
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I think this is an April Fool’s joke news item (I hate this stupid, stupid “holiday” for this reason)…besides the fact that their pics show an extensively modified V12 (i.e. even bigger than the already huge original prototype, something which I very much doubt they could have pulled off engineering-wise), how could anyone possibly enjoy a helicopter cruise? The noise in a helicopter (especially one with gigantic Russian engines) would not make spending all that time in it in any way fun…
Don’t even mentioned the safety reputation of these……..if it were real, I would never leave the ground in it.
I guess part of the latest tech is a new feature called ButtUgly(TM).
It is interesting that Engadget has pulled all of their posts related to this.
I don’t believe and think it’s 4/1 fodder
When I saw it over the weekend, my first thought was “why?” – why would they need such accommodations on a aircraft that can only fly 320 miles on a tank of gas?
“Is nothing on the Internet sacred?”
No… nothing. No exceptions.
Given the relative safety history of helicopters, I’ve got to say that I’d rather (Hindenberg notwithstanding)still have a lot more faith in airships.
More fuel efficient,too.
I went to the site (www.hotelicopter.com), and hotelicopter is a real company launching on Wednesday. If it’s not a flying hotelicopter, anybody know what it could be?