The Atwater Plan

An airship has never been lost in the Great Lone Islands, and that will continue, if the Atwater brothers have anything to say about it.

After the near and close-together losses of two airships, one due to faulty gasvalves installed after overhaul which caused a loss of buoyancy over the ocean, which was thankfully brought under control, and a second ship being caught in a violent tempest from which she and her crew barely escaped, came a tremendous uprising in calls for an increase in safety from the aviation community. It was widely agreed that there was little to be done to improve the impeccable safety of the ships themselves, but a bold new idea came about.
The captain of the ship that was come upon by the storm, that fateful day in the year of 1208, was none other than Howard Atwater, one of the two Atwater brothers well known for being some of the best airship captains in the world, coming from a family that had previously made nothing of itself. Not only did the two brothers have skills in piloting ships, but they shared an incredible skill for mechanical and civil engineering. After learning of the narrow escape of his brother Howard, Charles Atwater flew his ship, the 1750 foot "Swift" straight to the Regency of Lawrencia, and landed in the public gardens, causing much stir. The plan he presented was bold and critisized, but could not come at a better time.

The war of nightmares had been over for six years, all that had needed rebuilding had been put right, and the world again bustled. The great builders of the world, at this time, sat mosty idle with nothing to do and no great challenges to face. This plan would put them all to the ultimate test.

The plan would take the form of a series of hangars, over two hundred in number, on the shorelines of every Island, and on the uninhabited rocks, to be extended into manmade islands of stone placed painstakingly one by one until they rose above the water, inbetween the islands, sometimes hundreds of miles from shore. Each hangar at sea would be marked with a massive fresnel lamp in a beacon tower some fifty stories high, and each hangar would be made to house, if neccesary, the largest airship extant in the world, that being the nearly completed 4000 foot liner "Sola Senari" (Cycle of the Sun). The hangars would house fully capable machine shops comparable to those on ferrouston, and be manned by several families who would volunteer to live within the spacious confines. The Hangars at sea would be open to any and all landings at any time, due to their remote location, however the hangars on the shores of islands would be regulated to only be used in the case of bad weather or other shelter-dependant emergency, otherwise of course a ship could make a landing anywhere in the countryside and be ground crewed there.


The Atwater plan was instituted in autumn of 1208, and completed with all hangars finished in the winter of 1215, and would prove, in all the time after, to rescue scores of airships from certain doom in many situations, and keep the world's impeccable record of airship service, with no losses, current.