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If it's filled with helium, I guess it won't scale to replace the thousands of aircrafts in operation due to the finite amount of helium on earth. If it's fille
by karteum 4y ago
If it's filled with helium, I guess it won't scale to replace the thousands of aircrafts in operation due to the finite amount of helium on earth.
If it's filled with hydrogen, then people should remember the Hindenburg tragedy (and R101 too, glorified in Iron Maiden's "Empire of the clouds")...
- stubish 4y agoHindenburg is brought up in every single article about airships, so reminding people to remember is rather redundant. It happened 80 years ago. 30 people died. There might even have been one or two people looking into the causes over the last century in the hope of improving things. It was a PR disaster more than anything. When 1500+ people died on the Titanic, it lacked movie reels of explosions and thus we still sail the seas. And now we have TV news, where nothing of note happens unless there is a camera to catch the carnage.
- karteum 4y agoActually my point was not to emphasize on this tragedy, but rather to highlight that the "solution" (to use helium instead of hydrogen) would probably only work at low scale considering how limited helium exist on earth... If we want to scale airships (which I would be delighted to see), then I guess we have to go back to hydrogen, and then I would like to see how they would proceed to ensure safety.