Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, December 19, 2011

Airships!

By BJ Bjornson

Admittedly, �Sky Whale� isn�t the most flattering of names, but I still very much much want to see these things become successful and start flying around up here.

Li-airship-unveiling-111219



A Manitoba-built airship that could transport goods to remote northern communities, which now rely on sometimes impassable winter roads, has been unveiled.

The 25-metre, single-pilot MB80 � also being dubbed the Sky Whale � was inflated with helium and put on display Monday afternoon at the University of Manitoba's engineering school.

Those working on the Sky Whale, which will be air-tested from a hangar in St. Andrews, Man., in the New Year, believe the blimp-like prototype aircraft is the future of shipping cargo to the North.


I still have a lot of questions about such a contraption, like how it will handle high winds and what kind of ground crews or facilities it would need at the northern and more remote ends of their journeys, but they still seem like they could prove a viable alternative to regular aircraft for cargo transport, and that is something we could really use.



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