(Faye Stewart, president of Flying Scotsman, Inc., and logging manager at Bohemia Lumber Company in Oregon, stands on ground below a balloon used for aerologging, c. 1964. Photo courtesy of the Forest History Society; used with permission. Source.)

According to the Forest History Society, aerologging is logging with the use of blimps and balloons to transport felled trees.

This practice, they explain, has economic and environmental benefits, as “[l]ifting the logs could help limit soil erosion, as logs would not be skidded along the ground. Logs also suffered less breakage moving through the air, and the use of balloons would theoretically lessen the need for additional forest road construction.”


(A 175,000-cubic-foot Vee Balloon, built by Goodyear Aerospace Corp and operated by Bohemia Lumber Company, lifts two logs across Willamette National Forest near Eugene, Oregon, c. 1966. Photo courtesy of the Forest History Society; used with permission. Source.)

Cue parallel world.

In this parallel world, the world's rainforest are off limits to logging thanks to a U.N. Security Council resolution making deforestation a war crime. It was passed as a way to combat climate change.

With the supply of precious jungle timber chocked off and the sub-par quality of wood from the still legal tree farms too offensive to the sensibilities of flooring aficionados and grain-conscious Scandinavian furniture designers, aerologgers are hired to provide them with some contraband logs. Just one or two, these smugglers and their clients reason, won't make much of a negative impact.

So floating in on their stealth blimps, they scour the forest for some nice specimens, abseilling down with their chainsaws when found. Once felled, they haul the lumber up and make a run for the border and out to sea, where their cargo is dropped and picked up by speedboats in the night, bound for clandestine sawmills.

Sometimes they find trees that, while much sought after like an Old Masters painting, aren't in the job ticket, so they mark their GPS coordinates for later retrieval. This inventory is like a map of secret ruins, whose artifacts can be selectively picked off depending on their client's wish list.


(Aerologging at Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon, c. 1972. Photo courtesy of the Forest History Society; used with permission. Source.)

In any case, these botanical pirates are careful to avoid detection not only from the forest police but from other pulp traffickers as well, all floating in their own blimps. To avoid being spotted, they dive down below the canopy, all silence on deck, and bob to the surface again when the coast is clear — like an aerial narco submarine.

If two belligerent parties meet, however, then it's a Master and Commander engagement of airborne vessels: first a cat-and-mouse chase through fog banks and tempestuous storms culminating in a proper aerial battle. There is also brief sojourn for ecological tourism.

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The Sands of Singapore
Cacti Crime
Distributed Bureau of Agricultural Crime Investigation