Thing is you're never going to beat the lift/drag ratio of a cargo ship doing that. Cargo ships already play the slow but chonky game. The only limits to their

Thing is you're never going to beat the lift/drag ratio of a cargo ship doing that. Cargo ships already play the slow but chonky game. The only limits to their size is space at the ports and the number containers that can be loaded/off-loaded per day. Technically you could build an airship that only uses power to get into a jet stream then floats across the Atlantic on the wind saving tons of fuel, but then you've reinvented a sailboat in the sky and the buoyant force of water always beats that of air. So you might as well put your cargo in an actual sailboat and get there faster (see ocean currents v wind above them) without needing to "fuel" the thing with hydrogen or helium. This is just one example of the cross-section we can't escape. It is as tyrannical as the rocket equation is to space travel. For anything to be a viable transport, it needs to go faster, use less fuel, or carry more cargo than other modes of transport.