6 ms·

I've been seeing some variant of this article for as long as I remember. The return of the airship feels like aviation's fusion at this point.

pydry 4y ago
That was my first thought. Every 10 years we seem to forget how little weight these things can actually carry and start dreaming again of cruise ships in the sky.
- arise 4y ago
  They have a romantic element to be sure. I think that's what keeps pulling entrepreneurial talent and private equity into these projects. There's an old essay I can no longer find showing that airships are way too costly for their speed and payload capacities. There's a curve and they are simply way off it. About the only use case that makes sense is picking up a moderately heavy payload in a remote location that severely lacks infrastructure, assuming you can (1) wait several days and (2) the weather is nice and predictable. Very niche.
  - zizee 4y ago
    I'm not sure the economic term, but one of the economic problems with airships vs winged aircraft is their slowness. Let's say they take five times as long to arrive at their destination. In a simplified model, this means a winged aircraft can make five times the trips. That's five times the utility, and five times the ability to recoup your initial investment. I saw this argument made for how SpaceX's StarShip could start to become cost competitive with regular air travel. StarShip could travel halfway around the world in a fraction of the time that a regular jet takes. In theory it could complete multiple trips in the same time as a jet, allowing you to spread the initial purchase price of the craft across more flights.
    - pwdisswordfish0 4y ago
      Airships would seem to excel, then, for short trips where you need lots of lift. Within the same city, for example.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Airplanes, helicopters ... they seem to fight gravity, somehow not meant to fly, but succeeding nonetheless by overwhelming gravity almost violently with sheer horsepower. Hot air balloons, gliders, airships seem much more casual. Not so much fighting with gravity as making a kind of gentleman's agreement with it. I think that's why we might romanticize them. It is certainly a big reason I do.
- isamuel 4y ago
  I don't know enough about the economics of freight shipping to have an opinion on whether airships make economic sense for that. But for passenger travel, I can imagine a high-end market for the wealthy. Don't think "cruise ships" — think "yachts."
  - nradov 4y ago
    Wealthy people don't want a "yacht" that can only fly in good weather. It's hard to see how this could ever compete with private jets. Maybe in a few tourist areas it could work for sightseeing tours as an alternative to helicopters?
6stringmerc 4y ago
There’s a contract for 25 of them to go into service in Europe within a decade I think.
tomcam 4y ago
I've observed this for the last 75 years (I used to buy garage sale collections of old Popular Science/Popular Mechanics magazines as a kid 50 years ago). There seems to be some fascinating men have for dirigibles, just like they love planes, trains, and automobiles. Correct title should be "Airships Rise Again, Again".
dghlsakjg 4y ago
It’s gonna have to duke it out with the flying car for the title of aviations fusion…
GuB-42 4y ago
Unlike fusion, we know we can build airships, in fact, we already did. It is just that economically, it doesn't work. And even less so if you are using a scarce resource like helium as a lifting gas. In a sense, it is even worse. At least, fusion is a hard engineering and physics problem with many unknowns, we know we can make progress, and we do, slowly. Airships are well understood, the physics has been known since Archimedes (ok, with a little bit of fluid dynamics), and on the engineering side of things, we already know how to make every single part, we might get some improvement: lighter envelopes, more efficient engines, etc... but no amount of engineering will change the fact that we will need a huge bag of gas to lift a comparatively small payload, slowly.

pydry 4y ago

That was my first thought. Every 10 years we seem to forget how little weight these things can actually carry and start dreaming again of cruise ships in the sky.

arise 4y ago
They have a romantic element to be sure. I think that's what keeps pulling entrepreneurial talent and private equity into these projects. There's an old essay I can no longer find showing that airships are way too costly for their speed and payload capacities. There's a curve and they are simply way off it. About the only use case that makes sense is picking up a moderately heavy payload in a remote location that severely lacks infrastructure, assuming you can (1) wait several days and (2) the weather is nice and predictable. Very niche.
- zizee 4y ago
  I'm not sure the economic term, but one of the economic problems with airships vs winged aircraft is their slowness. Let's say they take five times as long to arrive at their destination. In a simplified model, this means a winged aircraft can make five times the trips. That's five times the utility, and five times the ability to recoup your initial investment. I saw this argument made for how SpaceX's StarShip could start to become cost competitive with regular air travel. StarShip could travel halfway around the world in a fraction of the time that a regular jet takes. In theory it could complete multiple trips in the same time as a jet, allowing you to spread the initial purchase price of the craft across more flights.
  - pwdisswordfish0 4y ago
    Airships would seem to excel, then, for short trips where you need lots of lift. Within the same city, for example.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Airplanes, helicopters ... they seem to fight gravity, somehow not meant to fly, but succeeding nonetheless by overwhelming gravity almost violently with sheer horsepower. Hot air balloons, gliders, airships seem much more casual. Not so much fighting with gravity as making a kind of gentleman's agreement with it. I think that's why we might romanticize them. It is certainly a big reason I do.
isamuel 4y ago
I don't know enough about the economics of freight shipping to have an opinion on whether airships make economic sense for that. But for passenger travel, I can imagine a high-end market for the wealthy. Don't think "cruise ships" — think "yachts."
- nradov 4y ago
  Wealthy people don't want a "yacht" that can only fly in good weather. It's hard to see how this could ever compete with private jets. Maybe in a few tourist areas it could work for sightseeing tours as an alternative to helicopters?

6stringmerc 4y ago

There’s a contract for 25 of them to go into service in Europe within a decade I think.

tomcam 4y ago

I've observed this for the last 75 years (I used to buy garage sale collections of old Popular Science/Popular Mechanics magazines as a kid 50 years ago). There seems to be some fascinating men have for dirigibles, just like they love planes, trains, and automobiles. Correct title should be "Airships Rise Again, Again".

dghlsakjg 4y ago

It’s gonna have to duke it out with the flying car for the title of aviations fusion…

GuB-42 4y ago

Unlike fusion, we know we can build airships, in fact, we already did. It is just that economically, it doesn't work. And even less so if you are using a scarce resource like helium as a lifting gas. In a sense, it is even worse. At least, fusion is a hard engineering and physics problem with many unknowns, we know we can make progress, and we do, slowly. Airships are well understood, the physics has been known since Archimedes (ok, with a little bit of fluid dynamics), and on the engineering side of things, we already know how to make every single part, we might get some improvement: lighter envelopes, more efficient engines, etc... but no amount of engineering will change the fact that we will need a huge bag of gas to lift a comparatively small payload, slowly.