Changes are about to be made in the way we transport cargo over fairly short distances. These are not your mother's blimps.

 The Aeroscraft airship will carry three times as much as the biggest military cargo planes over thousands of miles, use a third of the fuel, and it doesn’t even need a landing strip. Almost everything now laboriously transported across the planet’s surface by boat, train and lorry could within years be carried through the skies above our heads in this truck for the skies, its makers claim. (Source:  ABC News International) 

 Juliette Jowit of the Guardian writes:

Airships would be too slow for some high-speed airfreight, and would not be needed to carry the majority of cargo for which much slower ships are suitable. But with a speed of 125 kph (78 mph), and much lower fuel costs, plus a carrying capacity potentially many times that of a standard Boeing 747 plane, blimps could in future carry much of current air freight.

King reportedly cited estimates from airship developer World SkyCat that a modern-day blimp would emit 90 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions while it hauled twice the amount of strawberries between Britain and Spain.