Yet another ‘fakement’ is clogging the internet, this time a Hotelicopter.
All images: public nuisance domain
It began as an April Fool’s Day hoax, and was exposed as such by Wired’s Autopia blog, but like the giant Mars hoax that first circulated in 2003, it won’t die.
Instead, like the other hoaxes, whether the ‘Arab pilots who (didn’t) wreck a new Airbus’, or the pre World War II giant Soviet era flying boats, it exhibits the same characteristic of submerging and resurfacing in mass emailings in a cycle of weeks or months with minor embellishments.
Not a Singapore Airlines A380 Suite
However this time an author was unmasked by Autopia, revealed as a Silicon Valley PR firm that seemed to have lost track with the truth about large Russian helicopters just as those who uncritically published it lost touch with reality.
The Autopia report is a hoot. And some of the comments on the item are tragic.
On the technical side, consider this. The only merit in a multi story Hotelicopter having spa baths in the suites is that they might retard the fireball slightly in a crash.
Or, on the negative slide, slosh onto the floors and then down into the electrical systems rather like the problems Qantas had with some of jets last year because of leaking galley sinks.
And in terms of payload and range, even without tonnes of water in the mix, who would spend a night in one when it either had to land or takeoff every three or four hours at the most, or would be parked somewhere close to a serious range of luxury resorts where most of the suites would be maybe four times as spacious at one quarter of the room rate?
