Letter : How airships let me down

Sir: Christian Wolmar's article (28 August) about airships' "comeback" brought back sad memories of my only foray into shareholding, with Airship Industries in the mid-Eighties.

I still have a file of cuttings and annual reports with the same sort of optimistic pronouncements being made by the Zeppelin company now. Airship Industries did run tourist flights over London, several Australian cities and San Francisco. In 1988 the shareholders were told they had a contract with the US Navy to supply airships for surveillance, and Korea bought one for the Olympics.

I thought my 1,500 shares - 1,000 of which were bought for me at 6p by an American friend who was a blimp fanatic, and the other 500 I bought myself later at 23p, having become infected with the blimp bug - were going to make me rich. ,

I then went abroad for a couple of years and returned in late 1991 to find that airships had disappeared from the scene. I don't think I'll be rushing to buy Zeppelin shares.

LIZ MOLONEY

London SW16