James May's Caravan Airship: Top Gear's Flying Caravan
To get caravans off Britain's roads, James May put one under a 125ft hot-air envelope. Top speed: about 17mph, and nothing at all into a stiff breeze.
Top Gear spent years destroying caravans for fun. The problem, as James May put it in series 14, was that caravans were being built faster than the show could destroy them. So he proposed a scientific solution: if caravans were the problem on the roads, take them off the roads. Upwards.
The build
The result was billed as the world's first caravan airship. A small caravan hung beneath a hot-air envelope that May said was 125 feet long and held 110,000 cubic feet of hot air. Its museum display identified the caravan as a Polish Niewiadów N126.
May's favourite part was that it was still a caravan. The caravan fittings were kept: the flight instruments flipped up out of the table, the gas burners went where the cooker would be (and could still be used for cooking), and the beds folded out where the pilot sat. In his words, it was "just a flying caravan".
The trip
A caravan holiday needs a car at the other end, so Richard Hammond drove to the campsite separately in a Lamborghini Gallardo LP550-2 Valentino Balboni, which he noted would never be asked to tow a caravan. The plan was to meet at a caravan site May had booked.
The airship had other ideas. May first admitted it wasn't the fastest aircraft in the world: top speed was "about 17". Hammond assumed he meant 70. He didn't. Then came a bigger problem. If May tried to fly into a headwind of more than about 13 knots, he started going backwards. The wind was blowing at around 12.
Rather than fight the wind to the planned site, May turned around and headed the other way, towards Suffolk. Hammond kept getting new campsite addresses by phone. By the end of the clip May was on the radio announcing that he was about to enter Norwich's airspace.
What went wrong
An aircraft that can't go upwind can only go where the weather takes it. That's a problem for any holiday with a booking.
The weirdest bit
May didn't just strap a caravan to a balloon. He kept it working as a caravan, cooker and beds included, so in theory you could make a cup of tea in the cockpit while being blown sideways across East Anglia.
Where it ended up
The airship was later displayed at the World of Top Gear exhibition at Beaulieu. That exhibition closed in November 2024, and in early 2025 reports said the airship was one of the vehicles scrapped afterwards.
Where is it now?
The caravan airship
Reported scrappedAs of January 2025Reported scrapped after World of Top Gear at Beaulieu closed (3 November 2024). GB News, citing The Sun, reported that 'James May's iconic caravan airship' was among the exhibition vehicles that were scrapped. We haven't seen an official statement naming it.
Seen one of these somewhere, or know where it went? Send us a tip through the tip line, ideally with a link we can check. We never publish a location we can't verify.
Related cars in the Quirk Database: Toyota WiLL Vi, Amphicar 770.
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