Now They Want to Clip Pods to Airplanes
You’re already picturing the action thriller where this goes horribly wrong, right?
Look, I know I’m kind of obsessed with POD NEWS, but I don’t care, I’m sharing this story anyway:
How pod planes could change travel forever
So last month we had a story about “using drone technology to make pods fly,” which, I mean, these pods don’t exist yet, but there are people trying to give us the capacity to fly our pod bedrooms from place to place. This is a thing that might happen.
A thing that has ALREADY happened is the SleepBus, aka the “stack tiny sleep pods into a trailer and drive all night” bus.
But what if there was a way to combine the discomfort of long-haul travel with the fear of flight?
It’s in the works, and it’s called Clip-Air.
Clip-Air is a Swiss innovation that allows specially-designed planes to clip on pods before taking off. They’re already thinking of how this could revolutionize the shipping industry—no need to unload cargo, just clip the pod from the trailer and and fly—and, of course, the travel industry.
As CNN explains, “for passengers the boarding process could become a lot faster and less stressful as they’ll be able to board capsules well before the flight — goodbye to aisle jams.”
Which, you know, nobody enjoys aisle jams, but I’m pretty sure the last thing we want is to sit in our tiny plane seat well before the flight.
I’m also pretty sure that the idea of potentially boarding a pod on land, riding in that pod for several hours (maybe overnight!) and then continuing the “trapped in a capsule” experience as you are clipped onto a plane and flown into the air sounds like nothing anyone wants to do ever, the best part of buses and planes are GETTING OFF THE BUSES AND PLANES.
I mean, they’d probably give you a break between the land and air legs to stand up, disembark from the pod, and buy stuff at the airport. Right? Maybe? I have no idea.
Lastly: if a pod can be clipped to a plane then it can also be unclipped from a plane, and I know they’re going to be super-careful about the safety thing but I’m also imagining the James Bond movie where the villain unclips the pod and James Bond has to, like, rappel off the plane with a giant metal hook so he can catch the falling pod before it plummets to the ground.
Our pod future, everybody.
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