I know this is all weapons related (and mostly single-use weapons), but I long for the supersonic passenger jets of my childhood. Or even subsonic ones with 5% more legroom.
I also assume there's less market these days for flying NYC to London to shake hands and sign a deal over lunch and be back home for dinner.
"But Hindenburg’s potentially most innovative features were never actually implemented. Hindenburg was originally designed for helium, which was too difficult to obtain and too expensive to be vented to compensate for the weight of fuel burned during flight. To avoid the need to valve helium, several innovative solutions were proposed. One involved a set of inner hydrogen gas cells to be installed at center of 14 of the ship’s 16 helium cells. The flammable hydrogen would be protected inside the larger cell containing inert helium, and when it was necessary to valve lifting gas, hydrogen, rather than helium, could be released. When it became obvious that helium would not be made available by the Americans, and that the ship would be inflated with hydrogen, the inner cells were abandoned, but Hindenburg did retain the axial catwalk at the center of the ship that was installed to provide access to the valves for these inner cells."
Btw, they are also VERY loud.
That's fine. With the exception of routes that go from Europe to East Asia over the continent, there is no shortage of gruelingly long flights between South America and Australia, New Zealand and Europe that are done mostly over the ocean.
And that doesn't take into account the recent developments in reducing sonic booms.