HN Explorer

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

5 points by rgovind ↗ HN
Suppose, you are in a crowded place like SF Bay area or Brazil's Sao Paulo or India's Mumbai..Why are people not using blimps for tansporting people instead of everyone driving their own cars or using land based transport? Aren't blimps safer and faster? And there won't be any traffic snarls. Is the technology not affordable yet?

13 comments

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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.

seren
Recent article on Airship used for sightseeing :

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/05/travel/paris-zeppelin-airs...

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.

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.

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.
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.
faruq
Why you don't think about portal?
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.
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.
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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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!

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/