Hello and welcome to Business Daily Meets from the BBC World Service. I'm Russell Padmore,

and today my guest is Spencer Horn, South African entrepreneur and founder of Cloudline,

a company that's building mini airships. Airships were once considered obsolete, but they're

returning to the skies in some parts of the world,

and one of their main operations will be delivering cargo to rural communities.

In Africa, drones are already transporting goods to remote places, but airships can carry heavier loads.

An aircraft with this capability with this sort of range is really, really well suited to

getting out to areas with very little infrastructure. We'll hear why modern airships are

considered safer than the ones that flew in the last century. And on a personal note, Spencer

Horn says he owes his career to the tenacity of his mother, who shrugged off the restrictions

of apartheid in South Africa.

Teachers at the time, because they were women or people of colour, earned less money.

That's what her profession was.

And in spite of that, she made many sacrifices to give me some of the opportunities that she wasn't able to have.

And the South African entrepreneur also reveals how he learned some unusual lessons

at Harvard University in the US. The two most important things I learned at Harvard were how to tie a bow

and that we are good enough anywhere and everywhere. That's Spencer Horn coming up on today's

Business Daily. Call them lighter than air balloons or derogigible, but how big are these airships?

They are quite small relative to the airships people are used to, but they are quite large

in the domain that we deal with, which is a lot of drone substitution.

Our largest model is 18 metres in length.

I often tell folks to visualize a shipping container,

...