3 ms·

Business travel is lucrative but only like 12% of the air travel market. It seems the market opportunity is a modern Zeppelin, not the next Concorde. An airsh

Business travel is lucrative but only like 12% of the air travel market. It seems the market opportunity is a modern Zeppelin, not the next Concorde. An airship that is environmentally efficient, fun to travel on, has plenty of passenger space, and is perceived as safe. Airships could have far more landing sites than traditional aircraft, let alone a plane with a sonic boom. Also the future may feature SpaceX rockets for super fast global transport.

NationalPark 6y ago
I'm guessing the problem with airships is that they're too slow. When they were popular (okay, 100 years ago, some things may have changed) it took multiple days to cross the Atlantic ocean. But who knows, if it's cheap and more comfortable than flying, maybe people will see the trip as part of the experience.
- iso1210 6y ago
  If they could do say 1500km at 100km/h, that would offer a great many overnight destinations - get on board, dinner on board, retire to bed, wake up, breakfast over the alps, disembark right into the resort. Certainly beats flying.
- msandford 6y ago
  Once your journey gets long enough comfort starts to trump speed for a lot of people, especially if you're taking a vacation. For me that's somewhere in the region of 10+ hours of travel. After that I'll consider it a full day and I'd be very happy to trade 10hrs for 36hrs if I got a lot more comfort. Something more akin to a recliner that I could actually sleep in, enough legroom, a place to put a laptop that wasn't hunched over and awkward and maybe enough room to get up and stretch for more than 3-5min at a time. I don't know if it would be feasible to make a really wide, fat winged lifting body dirigible that you can put a huge amount of solar cells on top of but if you could do that and also make it somehow go ~150mph you're getting pretty close to 1/3 the speed of an airliner with the added advantage that you might not need anywhere near as much fuel. I go from Texas to Florida semi-regularly There's 2-4 hours of pre and post flying travel and sitting around plus about 2-2.5 hours of travel for a total of 4-6 hours of total travel time. If the flying time went to more like 6 hours and you kept the pre and post travel flying times the same it wouldn't make a huge impact on me. I might actually ask if they could slow the "plane" down so that I could make it an overnighter and hopefully get enough sleep!
  - nopzor 6y ago
    you need to consider headwinds which could make it much slower than 1/3 the speed.
    - msandford 6y ago
      Yeah good point! I wonder if it's possible to dodge the Jetstream by being at an altitude where the Jetstream isn't blowing.
      - dingaling 6y ago
        Airships used to follow 'pressure routing' which sought out air pressure gradients to slingshot them around adverse weather. Meteorology and radio broadcast of data were just sufficient in the 1920s, today it could be automated.
rado 6y ago
But it's widely known the majority of profits are from business class?

NationalPark 6y ago

I'm guessing the problem with airships is that they're too slow. When they were popular (okay, 100 years ago, some things may have changed) it took multiple days to cross the Atlantic ocean. But who knows, if it's cheap and more comfortable than flying, maybe people will see the trip as part of the experience.

iso1210 6y ago
If they could do say 1500km at 100km/h, that would offer a great many overnight destinations - get on board, dinner on board, retire to bed, wake up, breakfast over the alps, disembark right into the resort. Certainly beats flying.
msandford 6y ago
Once your journey gets long enough comfort starts to trump speed for a lot of people, especially if you're taking a vacation. For me that's somewhere in the region of 10+ hours of travel. After that I'll consider it a full day and I'd be very happy to trade 10hrs for 36hrs if I got a lot more comfort. Something more akin to a recliner that I could actually sleep in, enough legroom, a place to put a laptop that wasn't hunched over and awkward and maybe enough room to get up and stretch for more than 3-5min at a time. I don't know if it would be feasible to make a really wide, fat winged lifting body dirigible that you can put a huge amount of solar cells on top of but if you could do that and also make it somehow go ~150mph you're getting pretty close to 1/3 the speed of an airliner with the added advantage that you might not need anywhere near as much fuel. I go from Texas to Florida semi-regularly There's 2-4 hours of pre and post flying travel and sitting around plus about 2-2.5 hours of travel for a total of 4-6 hours of total travel time. If the flying time went to more like 6 hours and you kept the pre and post travel flying times the same it wouldn't make a huge impact on me. I might actually ask if they could slow the "plane" down so that I could make it an overnighter and hopefully get enough sleep!
- nopzor 6y ago
  you need to consider headwinds which could make it much slower than 1/3 the speed.
  - msandford 6y ago
    Yeah good point! I wonder if it's possible to dodge the Jetstream by being at an altitude where the Jetstream isn't blowing.
    - dingaling 6y ago
      Airships used to follow 'pressure routing' which sought out air pressure gradients to slingshot them around adverse weather. Meteorology and radio broadcast of data were just sufficient in the 1920s, today it could be automated.

rado 6y ago

But it's widely known the majority of profits are from business class?