
Airships could return to our crowded skies - clouddrover
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191107-how-airships-could-return-to-our-crowded-skies
======
weinzierl
CargoLifter[1] tried to bring airships back in the late nineties. They started
building a gigantic manufacturing building but ran out of money before they
even started to build an airship. The hangar was later turned into an aqua
park but ran into troubles because the heating expenses were too high. Not
surprising given the hangar was designed to be open at both ends. Another
commenter in a previous thread wrote that the aqua park does well nowadays[2].

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766309)

~~~
_0ffh
Well, Zeppelin NT [1] _did_ bring back the airship. At least insofar as they
have produced a number of actual airships, as opposed to Cargolifer. Also
Zeppelin NT existed before Cargolifter, and after - it is still an operating
company.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_NT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_NT)

------
zaroth
Could an airship make sense as a loading dock for drones making deliveries?

Laden drones which can drop down to their delivery point from above, and then
return empty back to the air dock seem like they could operate much more
quietly and efficiently than drones which need enough power to maintain
altitude as they travel horizontally to their target.

Of course the drone would need the capability to throttle up and climb fully
laden, possibly even minus one rotor, and the energy reserves to spare.

But the theory would be launching off the airship, and traveling horizontally
(at altitude) above the target, then a controlled descent straight down to the
drop point.

Presumably you would have two or three ships so one would be in position,
while another was moving to/from the ground warehouse, while the 3rd was being
loaded for the next batch.

The whole thing only makes sense if the energy density of the drone batteries
doesn’t allow them to simply launch from a remote warehouse and proceed
directly to their destination at altitude and return all on their own power.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> Could an airship make sense as a loading dock for drones making deliveries?

Carrier has arrived:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B5DPovWY7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B5DPovWY7o)

~~~
beenBoutIT
Imagine how quickly those things would become the modern day Wells Fargo
stagecoach to be plundered for our masses of under-employed and well-armed
poor! Not to mention the conspiracy theories that would quickly pop up around
anything like that; it's spying/vaccinating/etc.

~~~
daveFNbuck
This doesn't seem like an easier target than a delivery truck or a warehouse.
Why and how would people attack airships?

~~~
dTal
It seems like a _much_ easier target to me, if the ship passes over a secluded
area. I suspect a cargo airship is also more likely to be unmanned.

How: drone with a harpoon, or a particularly pointy model rocket. Perhaps
you'd attach a tether, so you can bring the ship to a specific spot (and reel
it in gently without having to compromize its buoyancy so much it crashes
hard).

~~~
daveFNbuck
Does that really sound easier to you than hopping into a running UPS truck
while the driver is delivering a package and driving away?

How far do you think you could drag a drone-filled zeppelin before you were
detected? How long would it take you to gently reel in a floating warehouse
while Amazon alerted authorities and private security about your multimillion-
dollar heist?

------
malandrew
Everyone keeps talking about these being slower than planes, but I'm wondering
if it is more interesting to compare these to cargo ships and trucks instead
for some routes. While the cargo capacity is a lot less, these can be point to
point over land or sea (no switch to trucks at a port) and these move through
the air and not water, so the energy requirements should be a lot lower since
air is less dense than water.

The autonomous problem is far simpler than autonomous trucking. It's probably
somewhat comparable for autonomous shipping.

That all said 4 TEUs is far from the ~20,000 TEUs that the largest cargo ships
can carry. Even if you can build something that can move 20 TEUs, that's still
three orders of magnitude difference in terms of volume.

For certain goods however, like moving wind farm blades and pillars, airships
would be ideal.

~~~
asdfadsfgfdda
The key limitation is weather. Airships are definitely not "all weather"
capable, they must avoid wind shear. So reliability will be lower than ships
or trucks.

~~~
yowlingcat
That raises an interesting question for me -- how do ships deal with inclement
weather on the open sea anyways?

~~~
Xylakant
Depending on the course and the actual weather event they’ll either try to go
around or - if they can’t - weather the storm. Large ocean going ships can
pass through most weather you’d usually encounter.

------
dgreensp
Well that's cool.

I'd be interested to know more about the technical details. The article
mentions something about "cells" to reduce risk of buoyancy loss from a tear,
and something about ultracapacitors. While some of the details may be
proprietary, I'm sure there are some interesting things to say about the
technology that this article somehow manages to almost completely avoid.

Also aren't we running out of helium (because it's a mostly non-renewable
resource on Earth)? I know it's not actually consumed by the airship, but
that's a lot of helium, right? Edit: According to my calculations, filling up
a Hindenburg with helium (0.2 million cubic meters) uses about 1/900 of the
annual global helium production (about 180 million cubic meters).

~~~
jeffreyrogers
You can use hydrogen instead of helium. It's flammable sure, but so are
gasoline and jet fuel. Plus it is hard to make it explode unless you inject
oxygen.

~~~
edaemon
Hydrogen fell out of favor for airships after the Hindenburg disaster. It's
much more dangerous than gasoline or jet fuel.

~~~
dmos62
I wonder if safe hydrogen designs are conceivable today.

~~~
nwah1
Even if they were, which seems unlikely, the question of economic viability
would come into play.

------
carapace
These are great, but I think the way forward is cellular design. Do an image
search for Alexander Bell's cellular kites. Build (relatively) small units
that combine to scale, rather than trying to build huge machines right off.
(Also makes your craft more resilient: say it breaks in half, both halves are
also viable vehicles.)

Also, take advantage of Magnus effect.

------
inetsee
I remember reading (a very long time ago) that one of the primary use cases
for using airships for carrying cargo was in regions that don't have an
existing highway system to support fleets of big trucks. Africa in particular
doesn't have superhighways crisscrossing the continent.

A quick search suggests that one Airlander costs about as much as 10 miles of
two lane highway.

~~~
notatoad
Yeah, there was a push a little while ago to start an airship delivery service
to remote communities in northern canada. The economics of an airship look
pretty good when you compare it to Boeing 737s.

------
Thorrez
>Last year, a blimp demeaned itself by setting two world records, including
one for the fastest text on a touch screen mobile phone while water skiing
behind a blimp.

That's misleading. The record was for "Fastest text message (SMS) on a touch
screen mobile phone while water skiing." It happened to be set behind a blimp,
but that's not a requirement for the record.

------
cagenut
for context, 60 tonnes is two fully loaded 40 foot shipping containers.

if you could make it battery-electric and autonomous, then you've solved for
global shipping emissions (cuz we don't need the ships anymore).

~~~
asdfadsfgfdda
The economics are bad. Imagine the unit cost is $10 million. This seems
realistic, the prototype cost ~$30 million and this airship is made of 40,000
pounds of light weight materials with very manual assembly processes. The cost
of capital and depreciation might be $1 million/year. If the cruise speed is
maybe 70 MPH, even if electricity and maintenance were free, this will $1.60
per mile. A container ship will be about $.01 per mile in similar cost.

Then looking at energy consumption, a container ship might need 8 HP of power
per 40 foot container sailing at 18 mph. This airship has 700 HP per container
at 70 mph.

~~~
e12e
With automated ships, and automated airships, you could do away with most
loading/unloading - have the airships load/unload in coastal waters, use ships
for the long haul across oceans?

Ideally you'd use windpower (sails) and solar (electricity) for the ships.

------
seiko988
VICE had did a show called 'Africa's cowboy capitalists' which highlighted how
hard it is to move things (vehicles for the UN in this case) across Africa due
to poor roads and corruption. An airship would have saved them a lot of
trouble.

~~~
jacquesm
Or get shot down in one of many local wars. Friend of mine flew a homebrew
plane across Africa and got shot at multiple times but a plane is quite a bit
quicker than an airship. He also got 'arrested' several times after landing
because they suspected he was a spy. Typically after they found out he was
just a crazy Dutch person on a cross-Africa trip in a device of questionable
airworthiness he was let go again.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdpgGryELA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdpgGryELA)

~~~
aldoushuxley001
Your friend is awesome. I can't help but be reminded of Antoine de Saint-
Exupery

~~~
jacquesm
Check out 'Auto op dak' if you like this, it is hilarious.

~~~
aldoushuxley001
haha, a thing of beauty. He's a madman.

This is what you were referring to right?:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc4HbvjE5OQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc4HbvjE5OQ)

Would be some serious road rash if things went wrong on that thing!

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, that's it. I didn't want to give anything away about what it is about in
the text. You really have to see it. And yes, he's a bit mad but not in a bad
way.

He gave this talk in front of a bunch of VCs and LPs, it was really funny.
Worlds colliding. So he's up there at the start of the talk, looks over the
people there and says 'we probably won't get along well'.

------
Jaruzel
The opening preamble of this article is clearly a shill for the BBCs
adaptation of His Dark Materials.

That said, the reason we don't have a return to airships, is that they cannot
carry the sheer numbers that planes can, need a much larger 'docking' area
compared to planes, and take 100 times as long to get anywhere compare to
modern air travel.

~~~
patall
I agree that airships will never directly replace with airplanes. However,
historically airships reached 100 - 160 km per hour which is gets you to about
2 days for a transatlantic flight. Thats about a day more than a flight today
but given the reduced effect of jetlag, I would assume quite a few people
would go for it (not the buisness travellers, obviously). However, for that
airships would need to have as much space as a cruise ship and therefore
become really big again. You would start on in a small plane, land on the
airship, travel long distance with it and exit again why another plane.

~~~
1996
I disagree. They could replace planes for me.

Give me a real bed in a room that can be locked (even if shared with a few
other people), and a restaurant to socialize like in a train. For comfortable
travel I would pay extra, business or not. I must not be the only consumer
wanting that.

And no, regardless of "class", airplane travel is miserable. I do not want to
seat in a open space with people walking around, eating on my lap or from a
folding table food served on a tray.

~~~
dageshi
You're basically describing a sleeper train but those are increasingly rare
because they are that much more expensive than flying that people don't
consider them worth it.

Not enough people will pay the extra for regular point to point travel. I
could see something like that taking off in terms of an experience, like an
air version of the orient express.

~~~
ghaff
I took the Caledonian Sleeper from London to Edinburgh recently. For two
people, the pricing wasn't bad and I don't regret doing it. But it was a very
small room and the common cafe space was very cramped as well. We're
definitely not talking Agatha Christie Orient Express experience.

But, yeah, in general sleeper trains don't work other than for the experience.
Just for kicks, I looked at traveling to Chicago from Boston by sleeper a
couple years back instead of flying. Made absolutely no sense for me in terms
of time and I couldn't have justified the expense to my company.

The concept of airship travel as presented in fiction looks really appealing.
But it would probably cost $10K for a trans-Atlantic ticket. And if you have
that kind of money to spend, and especially aren't really in a hurry, there
are other attractive options.

~~~
mschuster91
> But, yeah, in general sleeper trains don't work other than for the
> experience. Just for kicks, I looked at traveling to Chicago from Boston by
> sleeper a couple years back instead of flying. Made absolutely no sense for
> me in terms of time and I couldn't have justified the expense to my company.

I regularly travel Munich-Hamburg via sleeper train. It has many advantages:

\- at short term booking it's way cheaper than a flight

\- I arrive well rested, showered and fed in Hamburg, compared to being
essentially a wreck the whole day after having to get up at 0330 (this alone
is well worth the extra cost compared to a flight)

\- I don't waste time travelling to and from the airports, or security crap,
or have to expense taxis

\- I don't have any contact with police

~~~
ghaff
Fair enough. I'm just not aware of any overnight routes in the US that are a
good alternative to a morning (or even an evening) flight. I do take trains
when they're a good option, especially Boston to NYC, but that's rarely the
case either with respect to money or convenience.

------
starpilot
This comes up every 5 years.

------
droithomme
We "could" also all receive ponies.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
It is still flying way. Too. HIGH.

Can't we just go everywhere by train and boat, by land and sea? Humans were
not meant to soar up in the sky, thousands of meters high. We're not birds.

I hate flying.

