http://www.airships.net is a great resource to learn about the airships, both the technical aspects and the life on board. It seems every article's comments is a discussion about whether and that we should ot could start building Zeppelins again. Makes one wish to be in a position like Elon Musk.
I think there's room for an airship renaissance, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, speed doesn't matter as much as it did, particularly for tourists - if I can take two days crossing the Atlantic in luxury rather than crammed into a tiny seat, at a not-huge price differential, I'm game.
Secondly, communications. Easy enough (albeit still pricey) to use the likes of iridium for internet everywhere. No longer so important to reach your destination fast.
Thirdly, technology. No longer does the thing need to be stuffed with hydrogen - rather helium. Give it a little while and we can stuff it with vacuum in spun carbon vessels. In place of the fossil driven air-screws, make the entire thing a fat flying wing, cover the top in PV, use electric propulsion.
Finally, given the ever increasing popularity of cruises, I can see people paying serious money for an inland cruise over the alps etc.
Additionally, even the Hindenburg was arguably safer than a modern airliner. If the latter catches fire or crashes, the likelihood is 100% mortality for the souls aboard - whereas an airship allows for slow ditching or even emergency parachute pods.
One advantage of getting to the destination quickly is that the vessel can get new paying customers onboard.
If the trip takes 48 rather than 6 hours, operation needs to be eight times cheaper to keep the same ticket price.
Sure - or you aim principally for the cruise market and charge a commensurately premium price. I was recently on a trip to the Antarctic that some folks had paid $30,000 a head for the experience - so the market certainly exists.
If this Quora post[1] is to be believed it takes 10 years for an airline to break even on a 747. Assuming similar costs for the blimp that 8x turns into 80 years.
Because of staff salaries and operating costs that will need to be covered with 10-20% the number of tickets sold, because the thing is many times slower. It might make 150 flights one-way per year vs ~700 for a jet. So the ticket will be much, much more expensive.
I don't know that this logic holds up if fuel costs are lower. It might work if the blimp is significantly cheaper than a plane (likely), and fuel is cheaper (or can use, eg, solar).
The cost for crew is about $100/ticket. So if you figure $500/ticket (cost from NYC to London a few months out, coach), then you have about $400/ticket to cover food, fuel, maintenance, etc.
So if fuel is cheaper, I'm not convinced it's actually (that much) more expensive.
The big cost is helium. I met the CEO of Airship Ventures, the company that used to have a big sightseeing Zeppelin II based at Moffett Field in Mountain View. The price of helium doubled, and that killed the business. Fuel cost was minor.
Not just on airships, but running transports without zero on board staff might have added benefits and efficiencies. I know that in Vancouver the Sky Trains ran without on board staff.
If the airships can be run like transit in Switzerland then the costs of traveling through airports can be removed.
<rant>
Adding six or more hours, or more days in expensive hotels if the dates and times are bad which they usually are, to air travel and all of the new hassles is less and less worth the bother. Having to arrive 3 hours early, lining up early to check-in, possibly paying for and trusting the airport with larger baggage, lining up again and going through security, lining up again to board the plane. Queuing again out to the runway. Do all of that again when you land. All of this with the possibilities of flight delay, cancellation and other changes that airlines will foist upon paying clients. I think travel should be like riding the bus, you show up, you swipe your phone / ticket / pass and go.
</rant>
If done right and at low cost, I would like to see airships displace jets.
Well, down here in Europe this works exactly like this. You arrive to the airport, scan your printed boarding pass once, go through gate and pass your bags through xray (no taking off shoes), then go to boarding and scan pass again. No arriving 3 hours early, usually no lines, no extensive security checks. It is normal to arrive 40 minutes before takeoff if i have to check in or 25 minutes if i am already checked in (i have a VIP pass at the airport so i never stand in lines, but that's cheap). About half of the time nobody even asks for my passport, at least when i fly within Schengen.
What you described is the American TSA hell, this is not normal everywhere in the world.
No lines is not true (I visited more than 5 major European airports in the last month), but they're very bearable - usually less than 5 minutes of waiting. While it's true nobody asks you for passport, I don't believe nobody asks you for any documents. It's generally recommended to arrive an hour before take off if you've checked in online.
It heavily depends on the airport. E.g. TXL is horrible (depending on the terminal) and even an hour before at peak times isn't enough. Time of the day (e.g. mornings are usually peak times) matter as well.
Luggage drop-off is usually until 45min before departure, same as in the US.
Would love to see some data that quantifies that and recommends when to be at the airport depending on which terminal/gate, status (e.g. priority or TSA Pre), checked in or not, luggage drop-off or not, etc.).
It's surprising how fast queuing for check-in disappeared in big airports in Australia too (for domestic travel at least). First it was the self check-in terminals that printed your boarding pass (and bag tag if you're checking in luggage), and then you just scan at an automated bag drop that takes your bag.
But now check-in is mostly through web/apps. Some airlines also have RFID bag tags that you get when you reach the first loyalty tier so you just check in on your phone, scan it at the bag drop and then head through security (which is still relatively reasonable - worse than I think it needs to be, but so much nicer than in the US!).
I think they're rolling out self check-in at the international terminal in my city now too.
Trains are displacing jets in China. You can go Shanghai to Beijing by train in 4 hours and 55 minutes for 550 RMB. The same transit by jet takes 2 hours and 25 minutes and costs 615 RMB (which is the cheapest ticket, the average is more like 800). The checking process for trains in China is amazing. You arrive at least 5 minutes early. Walk through a huge metal detector and luggage scanner. Then you are in a huge room. When your train is ready you board. Usually they have at least 5 ticket checking stations, and then the train will have at ten or twenty doors for fast efficient parallel boarding.
That's the sort of thinking that had me take Amtrak on a cross-country trip back in the 1990s. Never again.
We had 1st class tickets, so it was nice having a private compartment, real beds to sleep in, a shower, and decent food to eat. The dining car was nice and comfortable. But we had two mechanical breakdowns, and then had to make an emergency stop when a car was stalled on a grade crossing. After about an hour delay we then had to proceed very slowly (I'd guess 30mph) to the next station for an inspection.
We ended up being over 48 hours late to our destination. No refunds, no compensation.
> If your train had not broken down, you might have enjoyed the trip?
This is a somewhat meaningless hypothetical with Amtrak, though. I love to travel Amtrak, but it is pointless to speculate about what it would be like if your long trip arrived on time, because it won't. It might not break down—I've only once (as far as I know) been on a train that experienced significant mechanical issues—but it will be delayed by freight. 48 hours late is extreme (though not at all unprecedented), but 5–9 hours late for a 24-hour trip is just what to expect, at least in my experience.
Concur. On my one round trip with Amtrack [1] the train back was a few hours late. As my friend (who I traveled back with and is a train aficionado) said: "At best, a train is on time."
Doesn't look like it's survived into 2017 looking at its press releases, but Aeros was supposed to be building airships with the main advantage of not requiring a runway for delivering cargo:
For transit it probably wouldn't work for reasons listed in other comments. But as a cruise...
Like an air version of the Orient Express? That sounds amazing, and they could open up places existing tours find it hard to reach (go inland into countries with shitty infrastructure but nice geography).
I doubt you could put swimming pools on a craft that size and still have it be lighter than air. Look at how small of a livable space there was on hindenberg-class airship: http://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/
Materials science has improved, but not that much.
Certainly roomier than a train, and some of the train cars are gorgeous. I had a chance to ride in the Georgia 300 [1][2] and man, that's the only way to travel.
If global internet was a reality I could see working remotely on an airship as being quite attractive as well, just go wherever slowly in your flying apartment, stopping to pick up food & supplies once a week or so, and occasionally mooring in places you enjoy for more extended stays...
I think a big problem is that helium is a very scarce Resource and which we get only from fossil fuels. Much helium has been wasted in the past couple of decades and prices of it will only go up as its scarcity increases. It's really highly needed for medical equipment and other things and I can't see it being used in bulk for this purpose.
Now using hydrogen has been mooted, using newer technologies to keep it safer. I love this idea mentioned in this thread of a vacuum glimpse as well
Hot air is also completely viable and in many ways simpler to work with, though you need very high temperature or the volume gets extreme. However the most reasonable option is probably multiple layers with hydrogen inside a nitrogen envelope which makes small leaks a non issue.
It's altitude and temperature dependent.
100 °C Which is normal hot air balloon temperature. If the outside temp is 27c that's 1-(300/370) or 19% lighter than air vs heliums 1-1/14 = 93% lighter than air. But you lift increases significantly with temperature. The downside is you end up spending fuel to add heat. But hot air balloons also have terrible insulation.
Further volume has great scaling if you save 93% with hydrogen having 4x the volume means being ~20% lighter than air provides the same lift.
Now yes scaling the airframe adds weight and drag as does the fuel to provide all that hot air. But you can also significantly past 100c before you encounter massive issues.
I'm not sure that's true. While abundant in the universe, there's a fairly finite amount of helium here on Earth, and once it escapes, it leaves into space for good. The US even has a strategic helium reserve. The shortage of helium was reported back in 2012 [1] We really need that helium for things like MRIs and chip lithography processes.
This might be true, that you don't lose much, but every day they'd need recharging a bit, and even without dirigibles, we have barely a century of supply. That is not much. The market rate is criminally low.
https://priceonomics.com/the-increasing-scarcity-of-helium/
Well, I agree Congress's elimination of the Strategic Helium Reserve was criminally stupid. I was addressing the cost point, though. Helium is still reasonably cheap, so it's lost in the noise, financially speaking.
Technology, yes, but Hydrogen has almost nothing to do with it. The Hindenburg was only one of many great airship disasters of the early 20th century, and several of those ships were filled with Helium.
Airships have two great weaknesses. One is that they are just really expensive to build and operate. Today that's a little less of a problem because of the availability of financing and improvements in technology reducing the labor and cost of materials for constructing an airship. The other major weakness is the double combo of airships being highly susceptible to weather and also fairly fragile.
An airplane can take off and land in a thunderstorm, travel at 600 mph across the country, and then turn around at the destination very rapidly and keep going. This is why airplanes, particularly jet aircraft, won the air travel competition, they have a much higher duty cycle and are much more reliable than many alternatives.
Technology has greatly improved our ability to spot and predict adverse weather and has also improved construction materials, designs, control systems, etc. all of which can make operating airships much more predictable and safer. But they will never be competitive with airplanes for travel, they serve a niche.
Also, in regards to safety it's just blatantly untrue. Airships crashed, a lot, airplanes crash almost never (it's so rare that any time it does happen it's newsworthy, often on a global scale), any other hypothetical advantage of airships is mooted by that basic fact.
I think they almost lost the Graf Zeppelin when four of the five engines failed and it could no longer fly upwind. They had to fly down wind and hook the only mooring tower between then and Atlantic.
Airships, particularly rigid airships (Zeppelins), are massive and it's the mass that becomes a problem. The airship is inflated to a state of neutral buoyancy so it floats and can hang in the sky (cool!) but the mass has to be dealt with when you want to start, stop, or change direction. I believe that the Hindenburg required a ground crew of ~200 to control the airship during landing and mooring. It's also a problem in flying in the vicinity of strong storms.
You also have to maintain the neutral buoyancy as you burn fuel. Zeppelins could use diesel but the preference was for 'blau gas' which had a density close to air, and didn't cause the airship to lighten as it was burned. Maintaining buoyancy also complicates using an airship as a freighter; an offsetting load is needed when making a delivery, otherwise you end up venting your lifting gas.
All that said, if I had the money I'd totally blow it building a Zeppelin-style (and size) airship.
If they could get the fare down to the equivalent of a business class airline ticket, I'd do it. Even if food + beverages were extra-cost.
> I believe that the Hindenburg required a ground crew of ~200 to control the airship during landing and mooring.
A solution might be to never land. Have a helipad on top of the airship, and have passengers arrive/depart via helicopter (as well as resupply via containers slung under a helicopter).
>I believe that the Hindenburg required a ground crew of ~200 to control the airship during landing and mooring. It's also a problem in flying in the vicinity of strong storms.
The ground handling problems have been solved. You either use directional thrust like Zeppelin NT, or you make the airship a lifting body that's slightly heavier than air, landing it on a runway like an airplane like Airlander 10. Both work.
> Please, somebody, tell me why this is a bad idea.
One of your mitigations, though I agree in principle, may not be as strong it appears in practice. When you think of comms on a airship crossing the Atlantic, you shouldn't think of having a reliable Iridium connection, you should think of: You're in a slowly-moving hotel, using their WiFi, with really "indifferent" attendance to its coverage and speed, with no possibility of using 3G or LTE as a backup. I mainly picture the scenario of crossing the sea, but I think this would apply to an airship at cruising altitude as well.
Source: my last vacation was on a cruise ship and I'm glad it was a vacation and not a business trip where I had to be in touch the whole time.
You're right about everything except the Hindenburg being safer - hydrogen can never be made that safe because of the way it migrates through just about anything. We'd have to use helium.
The real problem is planes benefit from a huge existing market plus military utility. The first passenger airplanes were essentially WW II bombers with seats where the bomb bays had been. When Boeing or Airbus builds a new jet, they amortize the cost over hundreds of civilian air frames, plus potentially hundreds more military tanker and transport versions.
If you were to build an airship the size of Hindenburg, you'd build, what, three or four at the most? The unit cost would be about a billion dollars by the time everything was done and you had passenger certification. You'd need a lot of high-priced tourists to fill the gap.
You can go to Friedrichshafen and ride an existing airship. It costs about $250 for a half hour, and I'm not convinced they actually make money.
There's a chance we could see the return of airships, but the only way it's going to happen is an enormous increase in the price of fossil fuels. Even then, though, they'll never be as efficient as ocean or rail travel, so it's likely airships would be the mode of transport for the rich and politically connected. The rest of use would be back in steerage.
> No longer does the thing need to be stuffed with hydrogen.
It didn't need to be then - the helium constraint was artificial due to the US not allowing Germany to import the gas. Link at bottom. Nowadays it's a rather rare and precious gas though.
I think staffing costs would make this difficult if it's even possible.
How many staff run a modern airline on a cross-Atlantic trip, maybe 10?
With an 8 hour trip time, that's 80 hours of staff time for about 300 passengers. Or about 1/4 hour per passenger.
The Hindenburg had 61 staff and a 60 hour journey for around 3600 hours of staff time for 36 passengers. Or about 100 hours per passenger.
400x staffing costs is a yawning gap and it seems like you couldn't bridge it without selling an entirely different service. Which is too bad because it sounds awesome!
Meh, we could use hydrogen if we really wanted to. If you separate the lift from the people/propulsion there is little chance of a strongly rising gas leak causing a fire. Heck, you can even do electronics in an explosive hydrogen atmosphere (I've personally done it). It just takes a lot of care and as a result is expensive to design.
What you can't do is have random people inside the outer envelope that also contains the gas bags. Anything that is going to be light enough to fly is going to leak a lot of hydrogen.
All you need is basic weapons to bring a fully laden ship down. Security of the airspace the whole way is very hard to guarantee as those same countries are often places of severe civil unrest.
Going by the press that's the case, but actually most people in Africa live pretty peaceful lives. And nobody's bringing down aircraft with missiles, so an airship would be pretty safe.
A gunshot would not take an airship down. It would be like a pinhole compared to the overall volume, and the gas envelope is compartmentalized so at most you would lose the gas in one compartment. At the very worst it would have to make an unplanned landing but could likely stay aloft for hours even with multiple bullet holes.
Airships were used during WWI, and they evidently can withstand quite a few gunshots. Winds pushing crafts into the ocean were a bigger problem than gunshots.
Tell that to the RAF. When Zeppelins came to bomb London in WWI the RAF went up to meet them. Other than the fact that it's a daunting prospect to take a single little biplane up against a hulking sky mountain armed with maybe a dozen individually manned machine guns the biggest problem is that shooting a dirigible basically does very little.
When you shoot a Hydrogen filled Zeppelin nothing happens. The Hydrogen slowly leaks out, decreasing lift, but that can be compensated for with dropping ballast. Remember that fire requires those three key ingredients: fuel, oxygen, and an ignition source. An ordinary bullet does not provide an ignition source, and it only just barely helps fuel and oxygen mix.
The RAF developed incendiary rounds and, far more importantly, explosive rounds to take down Zeppelins. Having a round explode on the surface of the gas envelope opens up a large hole, causes prompt mixing of hydrogen and oxygen, and provides an ignition source. Most folks aren't going to have such weapons, it would be just as easy for them to acquire an RPG or MANPAD which could take down any aircraft, so the threat isn't exactly increased.
More importantly, Africa is a huge place, and at any given time most of it does not experience ongoing warfare.
I feel like the one thing that probably does make it much easier to hit than an airplane is it's larger size and slower speed (though I'll admit I have no idea what altitudes dirigibles are able to fly at)
Dirigibles can fly at many thousands of feet. At even a thousand feet it's a lot more difficult to hit something in the air with small arms than across an equivalent distance over land (due to bullet drop) unless you have specialized anti-aircraft guns.
At 1000 feet, the drop of a rifle bullet is pretty trivial (a few yards) compared with the size of an airship. Considering how slow they move, I don't think a moderately competent rifleman would have much trouble hitting them.
The higher the angle you shoot, the more energy loss due to gravity. Shooting at 60 degrees is considerably different than 0 degrees, for the same range. That's why AA guns need to be so big, just to get that bullet up there with enough energy left to do some damage.
Are they actually competitive with freight aircraft? Something like an older DC-3 or C-47 can land and takeoff on short, rough airstrips and are used extensively for shipping goods in remote areas of Alaska. They only need a few crew and are very durable. Don't know how the operating costs compare though.
I think the idea for using airships is that you could basically attach any old container underneath it, effectively using it as a flying container crane.
So the airship puts down a container. Now it needs ballast for not launching in the stratosphere with the reduced weight. You could use water because it can be easily pumped into the airship, but water is not everywhere. Now you need a truck to drive enough water to the destination …
I'm not saying it's impossible but its a big hindrance.
Fun Fact: In the late 90s a german startup named Cargolifter tried this idea. They build a small prototype and one the biggest airship hangar in the world. Then they ran out of money. The hangar today is a tropical indoor water park.
I for one would love to live on an Airship. It's the one fantasy/sci-fi thing I don't think I've seen any work on but that I personally want more than anything else.
I read, somewhere, about theoretical floating cities being possible on Venus I believe due to the denser atmosphere and I thought it was brilliant. I just wish we could do it somewhere, where the surface was hospitable instead of instant death (not that either is much closer to being reality right now than the other).
The fear of hydrogen lifting gas is overblown. The Hindenburg burned largely because the canvas was painted with highly flammable paint that was chemically similar to rocket fuel.
We regularly fly in airplanes full of fuel, and if they catch fire in flight the odds of any survivors is extremely poor.
Hot air balloons, with no hydrogen, catch fire now and then and everyone dies.
The incendiary paint hypothesis is a debated alternative to the more widely-accepted hydrogen hypothesis [1]. This bears mentioning since the issue is far from settled.
Planes have big engines and can generate a great deal of lift. That means their fuel can be housed inside safe tanks of metal.
An airship needs to have thin lining around its lifting gas in order to fly. One can make the argument that recent progress in materials engineering makes it possible to have material that is thin but strong -- and I know next to nothing about the state of materials engineering -- but that does not change the fact that for the past few decades, a hydrogen airship would have introduced a great deal of risk for no good reason.
Fuel burns. That's why so much effort is expended in airplanes to try and stop that from happening. The designers learn from experience.
A helium Zeppelin isn't safe from fire, either. Once the canvas catches fire, it's going down in flames. Frankly I doubt whether having hydrogen in it or not makes any real difference. I've seen the clips on the news where hot air balloons, with no hydrogen, catch fire and what happens (everybody dies).
There's no reason to believe that hydrogen Zeppelins could not go through a similar learning process as aircraft that would make them just as safe as airliners are today.
I don't think it's reasonable to compare the risk profile of a hydrogen airship to an airliner that uses kerosene in metal tanks (that are now filled with nitrogen as they empty, just in case) and has fire suppression systems in the engines.
Most airline accidents are eventually traced back to something innocuous. Then we learn from that, and fix the design, process, and training to prevent it from happening again.
99 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadFirstly, speed doesn't matter as much as it did, particularly for tourists - if I can take two days crossing the Atlantic in luxury rather than crammed into a tiny seat, at a not-huge price differential, I'm game.
Secondly, communications. Easy enough (albeit still pricey) to use the likes of iridium for internet everywhere. No longer so important to reach your destination fast.
Thirdly, technology. No longer does the thing need to be stuffed with hydrogen - rather helium. Give it a little while and we can stuff it with vacuum in spun carbon vessels. In place of the fossil driven air-screws, make the entire thing a fat flying wing, cover the top in PV, use electric propulsion.
Finally, given the ever increasing popularity of cruises, I can see people paying serious money for an inland cruise over the alps etc.
Additionally, even the Hindenburg was arguably safer than a modern airliner. If the latter catches fire or crashes, the likelihood is 100% mortality for the souls aboard - whereas an airship allows for slow ditching or even emergency parachute pods.
Please, somebody, tell me why this is a bad idea.
1. https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-an-airline-t...
The cost for crew is about $100/ticket. So if you figure $500/ticket (cost from NYC to London a few months out, coach), then you have about $400/ticket to cover food, fuel, maintenance, etc.
So if fuel is cheaper, I'm not convinced it's actually (that much) more expensive.
If the airships can be run like transit in Switzerland then the costs of traveling through airports can be removed.
<rant> Adding six or more hours, or more days in expensive hotels if the dates and times are bad which they usually are, to air travel and all of the new hassles is less and less worth the bother. Having to arrive 3 hours early, lining up early to check-in, possibly paying for and trusting the airport with larger baggage, lining up again and going through security, lining up again to board the plane. Queuing again out to the runway. Do all of that again when you land. All of this with the possibilities of flight delay, cancellation and other changes that airlines will foist upon paying clients. I think travel should be like riding the bus, you show up, you swipe your phone / ticket / pass and go. </rant>
If done right and at low cost, I would like to see airships displace jets.
What you described is the American TSA hell, this is not normal everywhere in the world.
Luggage drop-off is usually until 45min before departure, same as in the US.
Would love to see some data that quantifies that and recommends when to be at the airport depending on which terminal/gate, status (e.g. priority or TSA Pre), checked in or not, luggage drop-off or not, etc.).
But now check-in is mostly through web/apps. Some airlines also have RFID bag tags that you get when you reach the first loyalty tier so you just check in on your phone, scan it at the bag drop and then head through security (which is still relatively reasonable - worse than I think it needs to be, but so much nicer than in the US!).
I think they're rolling out self check-in at the international terminal in my city now too.
Anyway, I love traveling by train.
We had 1st class tickets, so it was nice having a private compartment, real beds to sleep in, a shower, and decent food to eat. The dining car was nice and comfortable. But we had two mechanical breakdowns, and then had to make an emergency stop when a car was stalled on a grade crossing. After about an hour delay we then had to proceed very slowly (I'd guess 30mph) to the next station for an inspection.
We ended up being over 48 hours late to our destination. No refunds, no compensation.
Never again. I'd rather drive.
This is a somewhat meaningless hypothetical with Amtrak, though. I love to travel Amtrak, but it is pointless to speculate about what it would be like if your long trip arrived on time, because it won't. It might not break down—I've only once (as far as I know) been on a train that experienced significant mechanical issues—but it will be delayed by freight. 48 hours late is extreme (though not at all unprecedented), but 5–9 hours late for a 24-hour trip is just what to expect, at least in my experience.
[1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05.1
http://aeroscraft.com/press-releases/4591577189
Like an air version of the Orient Express? That sounds amazing, and they could open up places existing tours find it hard to reach (go inland into countries with shitty infrastructure but nice geography).
https://twitter.com/jetsettersflyin/status/59614209824131072...
It could totally work for that market. Heck, just attach a blimp to a cruise ship for multi-day inland outings.
Materials science has improved, but not that much.
Talk about "places existing tours find it hard to reach"!
[1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05.4
[2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/14589121@N00/sets/721576128280...
https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/aircraft/airlander-10
How much of a while? This is nowhere near being a reality. Helium is expensive and getting more and more scarce.
Airliners are pretty safe. Safer even than walking, when measured by passenger miles.
I'm sure therr is a market for airships (similar to train travel), but I don't see how it would be arguably better than fossil-driven air screws.
Now using hydrogen has been mooted, using newer technologies to keep it safer. I love this idea mentioned in this thread of a vacuum glimpse as well
Further volume has great scaling if you save 93% with hydrogen having 4x the volume means being ~20% lighter than air provides the same lift.
Now yes scaling the airframe adds weight and drag as does the fuel to provide all that hot air. But you can also significantly past 100c before you encounter massive issues.
[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a4046/why-is-...
Do you count business class as being crammed into a tiny seat?
Airships have two great weaknesses. One is that they are just really expensive to build and operate. Today that's a little less of a problem because of the availability of financing and improvements in technology reducing the labor and cost of materials for constructing an airship. The other major weakness is the double combo of airships being highly susceptible to weather and also fairly fragile.
An airplane can take off and land in a thunderstorm, travel at 600 mph across the country, and then turn around at the destination very rapidly and keep going. This is why airplanes, particularly jet aircraft, won the air travel competition, they have a much higher duty cycle and are much more reliable than many alternatives.
Technology has greatly improved our ability to spot and predict adverse weather and has also improved construction materials, designs, control systems, etc. all of which can make operating airships much more predictable and safer. But they will never be competitive with airplanes for travel, they serve a niche.
Also, in regards to safety it's just blatantly untrue. Airships crashed, a lot, airplanes crash almost never (it's so rare that any time it does happen it's newsworthy, often on a global scale), any other hypothetical advantage of airships is mooted by that basic fact.
You also have to maintain the neutral buoyancy as you burn fuel. Zeppelins could use diesel but the preference was for 'blau gas' which had a density close to air, and didn't cause the airship to lighten as it was burned. Maintaining buoyancy also complicates using an airship as a freighter; an offsetting load is needed when making a delivery, otherwise you end up venting your lifting gas.
All that said, if I had the money I'd totally blow it building a Zeppelin-style (and size) airship.
> I believe that the Hindenburg required a ground crew of ~200 to control the airship during landing and mooring.
A solution might be to never land. Have a helipad on top of the airship, and have passengers arrive/depart via helicopter (as well as resupply via containers slung under a helicopter).
The ground handling problems have been solved. You either use directional thrust like Zeppelin NT, or you make the airship a lifting body that's slightly heavier than air, landing it on a runway like an airplane like Airlander 10. Both work.
One of your mitigations, though I agree in principle, may not be as strong it appears in practice. When you think of comms on a airship crossing the Atlantic, you shouldn't think of having a reliable Iridium connection, you should think of: You're in a slowly-moving hotel, using their WiFi, with really "indifferent" attendance to its coverage and speed, with no possibility of using 3G or LTE as a backup. I mainly picture the scenario of crossing the sea, but I think this would apply to an airship at cruising altitude as well.
Source: my last vacation was on a cruise ship and I'm glad it was a vacation and not a business trip where I had to be in touch the whole time.
The real problem is planes benefit from a huge existing market plus military utility. The first passenger airplanes were essentially WW II bombers with seats where the bomb bays had been. When Boeing or Airbus builds a new jet, they amortize the cost over hundreds of civilian air frames, plus potentially hundreds more military tanker and transport versions.
If you were to build an airship the size of Hindenburg, you'd build, what, three or four at the most? The unit cost would be about a billion dollars by the time everything was done and you had passenger certification. You'd need a lot of high-priced tourists to fill the gap.
You can go to Friedrichshafen and ride an existing airship. It costs about $250 for a half hour, and I'm not convinced they actually make money.
There's a chance we could see the return of airships, but the only way it's going to happen is an enormous increase in the price of fossil fuels. Even then, though, they'll never be as efficient as ocean or rail travel, so it's likely airships would be the mode of transport for the rich and politically connected. The rest of use would be back in steerage.
It didn't need to be then - the helium constraint was artificial due to the US not allowing Germany to import the gas. Link at bottom. Nowadays it's a rather rare and precious gas though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg-class_airship
How many staff run a modern airline on a cross-Atlantic trip, maybe 10?
With an 8 hour trip time, that's 80 hours of staff time for about 300 passengers. Or about 1/4 hour per passenger.
The Hindenburg had 61 staff and a 60 hour journey for around 3600 hours of staff time for 36 passengers. Or about 100 hours per passenger.
400x staffing costs is a yawning gap and it seems like you couldn't bridge it without selling an entirely different service. Which is too bad because it sounds awesome!
What you can't do is have random people inside the outer envelope that also contains the gas bags. Anything that is going to be light enough to fly is going to leak a lot of hydrogen.
When you shoot a Hydrogen filled Zeppelin nothing happens. The Hydrogen slowly leaks out, decreasing lift, but that can be compensated for with dropping ballast. Remember that fire requires those three key ingredients: fuel, oxygen, and an ignition source. An ordinary bullet does not provide an ignition source, and it only just barely helps fuel and oxygen mix.
The RAF developed incendiary rounds and, far more importantly, explosive rounds to take down Zeppelins. Having a round explode on the surface of the gas envelope opens up a large hole, causes prompt mixing of hydrogen and oxygen, and provides an ignition source. Most folks aren't going to have such weapons, it would be just as easy for them to acquire an RPG or MANPAD which could take down any aircraft, so the threat isn't exactly increased.
More importantly, Africa is a huge place, and at any given time most of it does not experience ongoing warfare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzW4258oIyg
It turns out the airship gasbags were made of cow-guts. Lots and lots of cow-guts.
(Or if we don't phase out oil, Africa has much bigger problems)
I'm not saying it's impossible but its a big hindrance.
Fun Fact: In the late 90s a german startup named Cargolifter tried this idea. They build a small prototype and one the biggest airship hangar in the world. Then they ran out of money. The hangar today is a tropical indoor water park.
And David Brin (no relation) talks about using them in his books Earth (1989) and Existence (2012)
I read, somewhere, about theoretical floating cities being possible on Venus I believe due to the denser atmosphere and I thought it was brilliant. I just wish we could do it somewhere, where the surface was hospitable instead of instant death (not that either is much closer to being reality right now than the other).
We regularly fly in airplanes full of fuel, and if they catch fire in flight the odds of any survivors is extremely poor.
Hot air balloons, with no hydrogen, catch fire now and then and everyone dies.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg_disaster
Planes have big engines and can generate a great deal of lift. That means their fuel can be housed inside safe tanks of metal.
An airship needs to have thin lining around its lifting gas in order to fly. One can make the argument that recent progress in materials engineering makes it possible to have material that is thin but strong -- and I know next to nothing about the state of materials engineering -- but that does not change the fact that for the past few decades, a hydrogen airship would have introduced a great deal of risk for no good reason.
I think the point is moot: at a typical speed where airline accidents happen, these metal tanks will be punctured and catch fire.
TWA800 likely exploded due to a short circuit that ignited fuel-air vapor inside the fuel tank.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800
Fuel burns. That's why so much effort is expended in airplanes to try and stop that from happening. The designers learn from experience.
A helium Zeppelin isn't safe from fire, either. Once the canvas catches fire, it's going down in flames. Frankly I doubt whether having hydrogen in it or not makes any real difference. I've seen the clips on the news where hot air balloons, with no hydrogen, catch fire and what happens (everybody dies).
There's no reason to believe that hydrogen Zeppelins could not go through a similar learning process as aircraft that would make them just as safe as airliners are today.
There's no reason this cannot apply to Zeppelins.
Their conclusion: combination of the doping (paint) and hydrogen.
The reasoning: the burn without hydrogen took twice as long, indicating that it wasn't solely the doping's "fault".