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.
They may be slower than planes, but they were not as slow as people think. (Remember that "airship" is not the same as "blimp".) They easily did 100+kph in a strait line. That makes them faster than road travel, and very much faster than marine crossing times. They might not ever compete with 747s but there are some business cases for delivery of goods or provision of information services (airborne cell towers).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do the Caledonian Sleeper a few times a year to Inverness. Recently they've rolled out new rooms on their trains which are much better, but compared to the price of flying it's really expensive. I still travel on the sleeper though because I cannot stand the indignity of modern standard-class air travel.
We were on a longish trip and had checked luggage. I didn't want to fly a budget airline especially and my friend wanted to spend a bit of time in London. So it probably cost us a bit more but wasn't really too bad. But, especially given that I got a day room in London anyway, it certainly wasn't cheap either. The experience was fun and that's what counted anyway.
I will take train when I reasonably can though. I never fly from Boston to NYC unless it's to connect to another flight.
> 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
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.
There are some private rooms in certain airline configurations. Of course, if you're paying for the ticket--as opposed to getting upgraded--the pricing can be pretty eye-watering.
Airlines pretty much never go with all business or first class seat configurations though. The only exception I know of is BA's all lie-flat business between LCY and JFK which is just 32 seats. (There may be others in Asia.)
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.
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.
I imagine it would be pretty hard to get away with airship plundering. everyone would see it go down and law enforcement would just have to camp at the crash site to catch the perps. plus other plunderers would probably show up to fight for the loot. it would be a lot less risky to just snipe individual drones as they make their deliveries.
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).
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?
This is exactly why I'm waiting for the new airship age, so I can quit my job as a software developer and become an airship pirate, just like in Crimson Skies. "When you hit the ground, tell 'em Nathan Zachary sent you!"
US military tested airships extensively. They proved to have considerable advantages in certain naval operation roles. It all ended with the airship aircraft carriers (you read that right) crashing in separate accidents. They turned out to be extremely difficult to control (not crash) in extreme weather.
Northrop completed the first flying wing bomber in 1947, the YB-49. But flying wings are inherently unstable and there were two fatal crashes. Ultimately, criminal politics crashed it harder, but the B-2 is a direct version of it.
But now we have computer control stabilizing it in flight, making it vastly easier and safer to fly. Of course Physics hasn't changed, but advances in technology matter.
Yes, but the problem with airships isn't control - it's just that the useful mass fraction is tiny. You need something the size of a container ship to lift a few tons of net payload.
The only way that might ever change is if we develop a form of nanotubes strong enough to allow use of a vacuum rather than gas.
Nanotubes wouldn't really help much either I'm afraid. Hydrogen is 7% the mass of air, so even with a vacuum the best you can do is 7% more lifting power. Our only real hope is to terraform the Earth to have greater air density at sea level...
That's true, but vacuum has one big advantage: You can generate it in flight, whereas with lifting gas if you have to vent it you're NEVER getting it back.
Besides, even at just 7%, if the Hindenburg had been "filled" with vacuum instead of hydrogen, that would have been an additional 37,000lbs of payload capacity, which would have almost tripled it's lift capability (21,000lbs as flown).
Additionally, helium, which is probably the only gas the public will accept, is almost double the density of hydrogen, and we have a limited supply of it.
The engines on the new Zeppelin have much less volume to push around than on the USS Akron. The Zeppelin company also had the benefit of computer modeling during design to optimize the airflow.
> 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.
I've put some thought into this from time to time and I see a few alternatives. One is to use a tow line with some sort of auto-belay, and shield the rotors so that the line can't get snagged under usual circumstances. Then a drone can be reeled in if the need arises. Another option is to have drones able to adhere to each other (magnets? velcro? carabiners?) so that functional lightly-laden drones can perform an in-air rescue of a malfunctioning drone before it reaches the ground. This assumes that a malfunctioning drone would still have some mechanism to slow its descent, which isn't unreasonable.
The unimpeded path required for a tow line would restrict the number of drones an airship could operate, since it would presumably need to be nearly directly above them. This would also make it difficult to operate in cities with overhead cables.
True, a tow line is a less than ideal solution. Perhaps a tow line could be rapidly deployed by a special purpose fast moving (catapult launched?) drone and affixed to a malfunctioning drone.
Very promising, bringing agile supply chains to a global scale. Plane shipping is cost prohibitive for many goods, while using ships requires large volumes or overhead of middlemen selling sub-container capacity...
With airships, smaller businesses can directly trade over long distances. I'm personally excited by agriculture potential... shipping spoilable heirloom produce straight from farm to markets across the country would be disruptive.
However, a single container ship carrying upward 10,000 containers still offers value at larger scales.
Ships are ridiculously efficient and much easier to police for safe arrival than having only two containers (effectively a truckload) on a device costing a large multiple to operate compared to a truck. I don't think (pun intended) this will fly unless it is high value goods that are not yet high value enough to be flown with a jet.
hi jacquesm,
if you don't mind, i'd like to try an experiment with you. I've seen your name enough times here on HN that I recognize you as a 'regular'. the point-score in your profile indicates people here either love you or you post 100 times a day (or some combination thereof).
Here is the experiment:
Stare very hard at this graph. memorize the trajectory and timeframe.
Keep it open in a tab and come back to later, maybe even several times over the course of a week or month.
For those reading along I mean specifically a few points:
* emissions peak in 2020 (<2 months!)
* emissions are approximately 50% reduced by 2030 (a mere decade!)
* emissions achieve net-zero around 2050 (-5 to -10Gt/yr)
* the entire back half of the century we run -5 to -15Gt/year
The experiment here is simple: try, just try, assuming we will achieve these goals (aka 1.5C). or for arguments sake 80-ish-% of them (2C, just slide everything to the right 5 - 10 years).
What I mean is, assume we succeed in avoiding the worst of the catastrophes. Assume success. Try optimism. Not in a blind way, but in a quantitative mental framing way.
From that place of quantitative optimism, "solve for zero". That is, in all of your thoughts, opinions, comments, actions, causes, votes, etc, ask yourself "is this consistent with solving for zero?"
The point of this experiment is that, in my opinion, the number one hold-up to making meaningful progress on this challenge is people who are trapped in "analysis and debate" mode where they assume the time-horizon is much longer than it is, or they assume the goal is marginal reduction of emissions, rather than zero (and then negative!).
I believe that we, as both a community here on HN and as a global civilization, are in desperate need of quantitative-optimism, rather than dismissive pessimism.
Now after all that typing to tie it back to your post here. We both know airships flying containers are not going to be as cost-efficient as a diesel powered truck or a kerosene fueled jet. That's basically just stating the obvious. But that's also accepting failure.
Please stop accepting failure as the default mental framework with which you engage the topic. For any one person it can seem like reasonable skepticism. But when the majority of a community does it, especially its most vocal members, then the cultural result is one of inaction and delay. Analysis paralysis. Stalling. Stalling on climate change is effectively denial, even if that's not your intent.
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.
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.
Not with the current airships since they are all 'swimming' with helium and we there is by far not enough helium for that on this planet. Hydrogen based would be different story but thats how the first era of the airship ended.
Edit: Also, if there is one type of ship that is going to be replaced by airships, its going to be the cruise ship.
>Also, if there is one type of ship that is going to be replaced by airships, its going to be the cruise ship.
But modern cruise ships are huge and are largely oriented around providing tons of activities. In fact, as far as I know, there's only one ship that is more oriented around providing trans-Atlantic transportation (among other things and only for part of the year).
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).
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.
And helium is getting expensive. I worked on an airship project in the early 2000's and it cost $100,000 to fill it. And there is always leakage from diffusion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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].
Interesting... Based on what I've read about airships, their biggest weakness is inability to deal with inclement weather. Conventional aircraft spend very little time in the clouds and usually fly above most storms (and they're fast/maneuverable enough to fly around with little time loss), and even when they're in, they fare quite well with de-icing equipment and automation to deal with cross-winds. Neither the original article or CargoLifter wiki page mention this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Likely a better plan than self-flying cars or taxis.
Mostly because self-driving cars are so much of an absurd, retarded joke, that 100% autonomous flight, totally devoid of human pilots or remote control, management or tasking, is essentially a delusional fantasy of autistic ultra-nerds gripped by social anxiety, pining for a society of near zero human interaction, filled with nothing but cartoons, breakfast cereal, real doll sex bots, video games, VR/AR live action genderless cosplay in furry suits and robot prepared fast food and factory automated frozen TV dinners, drone-delivered by prepared meal services.
Such an imagined future just might almost make sense on a space station, but here on earth, a curious desire for popular chicken sandwiches can put you in the hospital, and leave you with life-long debilitating chronic pain, or chicken-sandwich-related homicide.
>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.
77 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadThat 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.
Not in Germany.
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.
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.
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.
I will take train when I reasonably can though. I never fly from Boston to NYC unless it's to connect to another flight.
Nice thing is they're cheap as well, although probably about comparable in price as a budget airline.
For trips around 12 hours though it does make sense, go to sleep in one city, wake up in another.
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
We could easily fit 50+ small private rooms in an airplane.
Airlines pretty much never go with all business or first class seat configurations though. The only exception I know of is BA's all lie-flat business between LCY and JFK which is just 32 seats. (There may be others in Asia.)
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.
Carrier has arrived: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B5DPovWY7o
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).
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?
But now we have computer control stabilizing it in flight, making it vastly easier and safer to fly. Of course Physics hasn't changed, but advances in technology matter.
The only way that might ever change is if we develop a form of nanotubes strong enough to allow use of a vacuum rather than gas.
Besides, even at just 7%, if the Hindenburg had been "filled" with vacuum instead of hydrogen, that would have been an additional 37,000lbs of payload capacity, which would have almost tripled it's lift capability (21,000lbs as flown).
Additionally, helium, which is probably the only gas the public will accept, is almost double the density of hydrogen, and we have a limited supply of it.
Basically allowing an efficient way to create potential energy for a flying machine.
I've put some thought into this from time to time and I see a few alternatives. One is to use a tow line with some sort of auto-belay, and shield the rotors so that the line can't get snagged under usual circumstances. Then a drone can be reeled in if the need arises. Another option is to have drones able to adhere to each other (magnets? velcro? carabiners?) so that functional lightly-laden drones can perform an in-air rescue of a malfunctioning drone before it reaches the ground. This assumes that a malfunctioning drone would still have some mechanism to slow its descent, which isn't unreasonable.
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).
With airships, smaller businesses can directly trade over long distances. I'm personally excited by agriculture potential... shipping spoilable heirloom produce straight from farm to markets across the country would be disruptive.
However, a single container ship carrying upward 10,000 containers still offers value at larger scales.
Here is the experiment: Stare very hard at this graph. memorize the trajectory and timeframe.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...
Keep it open in a tab and come back to later, maybe even several times over the course of a week or month.
For those reading along I mean specifically a few points:
The experiment here is simple: try, just try, assuming we will achieve these goals (aka 1.5C). or for arguments sake 80-ish-% of them (2C, just slide everything to the right 5 - 10 years).What I mean is, assume we succeed in avoiding the worst of the catastrophes. Assume success. Try optimism. Not in a blind way, but in a quantitative mental framing way.
From that place of quantitative optimism, "solve for zero". That is, in all of your thoughts, opinions, comments, actions, causes, votes, etc, ask yourself "is this consistent with solving for zero?"
The point of this experiment is that, in my opinion, the number one hold-up to making meaningful progress on this challenge is people who are trapped in "analysis and debate" mode where they assume the time-horizon is much longer than it is, or they assume the goal is marginal reduction of emissions, rather than zero (and then negative!).
I believe that we, as both a community here on HN and as a global civilization, are in desperate need of quantitative-optimism, rather than dismissive pessimism.
Now after all that typing to tie it back to your post here. We both know airships flying containers are not going to be as cost-efficient as a diesel powered truck or a kerosene fueled jet. That's basically just stating the obvious. But that's also accepting failure.
Please stop accepting failure as the default mental framework with which you engage the topic. For any one person it can seem like reasonable skepticism. But when the majority of a community does it, especially its most vocal members, then the cultural result is one of inaction and delay. Analysis paralysis. Stalling. Stalling on climate change is effectively denial, even if that's not your intent.
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.
Ideally you'd use windpower (sails) and solar (electricity) for the ships.
Edit: Also, if there is one type of ship that is going to be replaced by airships, its going to be the cruise ship.
But modern cruise ships are huge and are largely oriented around providing tons of activities. In fact, as far as I know, there's only one ship that is more oriented around providing trans-Atlantic transportation (among other things and only for part of the year).
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).
https://www.airships.net/hindenburg-paint/
A quick search suggests that one Airlander costs about as much as 10 miles of two lane highway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdpgGryELA
This is what you were referring to right?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc4HbvjE5OQ
Would be some serious road rash if things went wrong on that thing!
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'.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766309
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_NT
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.
Also, take advantage of Magnus effect.
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.
Mostly because self-driving cars are so much of an absurd, retarded joke, that 100% autonomous flight, totally devoid of human pilots or remote control, management or tasking, is essentially a delusional fantasy of autistic ultra-nerds gripped by social anxiety, pining for a society of near zero human interaction, filled with nothing but cartoons, breakfast cereal, real doll sex bots, video games, VR/AR live action genderless cosplay in furry suits and robot prepared fast food and factory automated frozen TV dinners, drone-delivered by prepared meal services.
Such an imagined future just might almost make sense on a space station, but here on earth, a curious desire for popular chicken sandwiches can put you in the hospital, and leave you with life-long debilitating chronic pain, or chicken-sandwich-related homicide.
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.