

Ask HN: Zeppelin/Airship for urban transportation: why is no one using them yet? - rgovind

Suppose, you are in a crowded place like SF Bay area or Brazil&#x27;s Sao Paulo or India&#x27;s Mumbai..Why are people not using blimps for tansporting people instead of everyone driving their own cars or using land based transport? Aren&#x27;t blimps safer and faster? And there won&#x27;t be any traffic snarls. Is the technology not affordable yet?
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Patrick_Devine
We had an airship here in the Bay Area until recently which (mostly) operated
out of Moffett Field. You could go on flight seeing tours around the bay for a
ridiculous amount of money. It closed down because it took a ground crew of
around 20 people and couldn't fly half the time because SF gets a lot of fog
or is overcast in the summer/winter months.

You can rent a Cessna 172 in Palo Alto with a flight instructor who can fly
you on the same trip for about 1/4 the price (even less if you take some
friends). Airships just don't make a lot of sense, even though they are pretty
awesome.

Here's a link to their defunct website:
[https://www.airshipventures.com/](https://www.airshipventures.com/)

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faruq
Zeppelin isn't safe, slow and not effective for mass passenger transport.
Zeppelin can't hold many people in big city scale and/or short hop. Did you
know how many passenger that can loaded on?

I prefer metro.

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seren
Recent article on Airship used for sightseeing :

[http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/05/travel/paris-zeppelin-
airs...](http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/05/travel/paris-zeppelin-airship)

Compare the volume of the Zeppelin vs the number of passenger. If I remember
correctly, it only take 7 passengers and it is rather slow to land and take
off. So you have a lot of wasted time.

This really does not scale well when talking about big conurbations with
millions of people.

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trodos
Archer: are you joking? What? rigid airships combine the pampering of a cruise
ship With the speed of -- some other slightly faster ship? Uh, hello.
airplanes? Yeah, it's blimps. you win.

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1337p337
I've wondered about this while tossing around the idea with an old boss. LA is
notorious for being a difficult place to build or expand a freeway, and the
congestion problems are getting worse.

It seems you have to get them pretty high before you can travel very
efficiently, so they don't work for going across cities. That's not even
worrying about the local airports' airspace and the numerous tiny municipal
airports. I don't know that these are intractable problems, though.

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workhere-io
Because they're slow (compared to helicopters and airplanes), sensitive to bad
weather, and take up a lot of space compared to the amount of passengers they
can carry.

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wikwocket
There are probably many practical concerns, but another is that hydrogen
airships are rather dangerous, and that there is a pending shortage of helium,
the main alternative. The U.S. has a National Helium Reserve that holds 30% of
the world's helium, and it is expected to run out before 2020 according to
Wikipedia.

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haspoken
Hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia and hot air are all capable of being used
for aerostatic lift.

source:
[http://airshiphangar.com/science.html](http://airshiphangar.com/science.html)

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thesmileyone
Slightly related: some super rich CEO's learn to fly helicopters and then
commute to work via MD 500 series helicopters, aka "the littlebird".

They make a lot of sense in somewhere like LA!

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dev1n
I believe Zeppelin's have gone the way of the steam engine for the same
reason. It's simply an unstable platform of transportation. Steam engines used
to blow up all the time and Helium is extremely flammable.

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bartonfink
Helium is extremely expensive, rare and likely to escape Earth's atmosphere,
but not reactive under any conditions I know of. Hydrogen, on the other hand,
is extremely flammable.

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faruq
Why you don't think about portal?

