5 ms·

Pathfinder 1: The Airship That Could Usher in a New Age

39 points by andrewl 2y ago

pintxo 2y ago
I seem to have missed the business reasoning for this development? Why are they investing money and time into this? I thought the consensus is that airships are just too hard to dock/land, handle in anything than low wind scenarios that they are not much use?
- bell-cot 2y ago
  Yeah. The opening paragraphs admit that Sergey Brin paid for it. And the final paragraphs finally get past the "Big!, Shiny!!, Cool!!!" gushing, to admit that there don't seem to be any use cases. Maybe Sergey is a steampunk fan?
  - pintxo 2y ago
    I can fully accept a "I like the idea and have the money" motive. But a journalist worth their money should make this clear.
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      > But a journalist worth their money... The author did...eventually. After making sure that his article had collected all the Clicks, Time on Page, and whatever other metrics he needs to keep the BBC convinced that he's worth paying a journalist's salary to.
- ReptileMan 2y ago
  If we get serious about reducing emissions - airtravel has to go in its current form. So there could be an opening for lighter than air approach.
  - pintxo 2y ago
    This would be such a big dent in humanity learning that the people on the other side of the world are just that: people. I sincerely hope we will be able to maintain current air-travel by switching to efuels and similar means. Humanity having to ditch air-travel at todays levels would be a massive social negative.
    - elictronic 2y ago
      We won’t. We still haven’t even started touching geo-engineering at scale yet. Getting humanity to give up anything without either killing or enslaving a large swath is not happening or realistic. We can’t even get rid of nuclear weapon stockpiling which has a much lower positive vibe from nearly everyone.
  - calmbonsai 2y ago
    Nah. The most likely scenarios are a switch to pure ammonia combustion and/or sourcing "all green" methane to make carbon-neutral or near-zero emissions flight. Unfortunately, ammonia combustion is inefficient and synthetic hydrocarbon fuel is far too expensive atm. We'll never get away from the brutal physics: 1. Long flights require planes to get lighter (burn fuel) as they go further so battery power doesn't work. 2. Wings are just too damn efficient at producing lift. 3. Putting enough on-board safe-station-keeping power (weight) on an airship makes it a very poor airship. 4. A very good airship is least safe to fly precisely where is has the most potential to cause damage and loss of life.
    - ReptileMan 2y ago
      >1. Long flights require planes to get lighter (burn fuel) as they go further so battery power doesn't work. Up to a critical density/weight/kwh, afterwards it doesn't matter.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    I just don't see how it's a better idea than high-speed rail. Probably cheaper to deploy, but the capacity will always be low and speed slow. I'm not one for an "either or" generally, but I really have a hard time seeing the benefit of blimps beyond "this is neat and kinda fun".
- notahacker 2y ago
  If you can handle the wind scenario and don't mind slow speed, you can run on electricity for a very long time (and have quite a large surface area to stick panels on) which makes opex look attractive compared with heavier than air flight as well as being climate friendly. There's also probably an element of "Sergey Brin believes in it and he's not short of money..."
- michaelt 2y ago
  1. A guy with $164 billion is willing to pay $250 million for it. 2. If in the future a Peak Oil type scenario arises, and electric planes aren't able to overcome issues of battery energy density, and power-to-gas doesn't come through either, some replacement form of air travel might be very useful. Low probability, but very high reward.
  - aetherson 2y ago
    #2 is fanciful.
  - sleepybrett 2y ago
    in scenario 2 people just start either digging a lot of canals or laying more train tracks.
- danbruc 2y ago
  A German company had a go at this with CargoLifter [1] in the mid 90s. They wanted - as the name says - transport oversized loads that are hard to transport on road or would otherwise require an expensive transport like long detours on waterways. Their hangar is now an indoor water park [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort
  - pintxo 2y ago
    I am well aware of their fate. Turns out, if you transport extremely heavy stuff, you'll either need to take on massive ballast when offloading or ditch much of your expensive Helium. Either is not helping with turning a profit. Let alone that fact, that any of this will only work of there is no wind at both the start and end of your journey. But I guess the swimming resort is kinda nice.
    - danbruc 2y ago
      As compared to transporting passengers, transporting cargo seems like a good choice when it comes to the weather, you probably have a lot more freedom in scheduling flights, being able to wait for good conditions. With the ballast, did they not plan to compensate the weight of the cargo with water? Certainly adds complexity and probably also risk if you have to load a hundred tons of water into an airship relatively quickly, but does not sound completely unreasonable to me.
      - pintxo 2y ago
        Part of the pitch was to be able to deliver extra heavy cargo to places without other infrastructure, but if there is no other infrastrukcture, how do they get the water(-tanks) and (big) pumps there?
        danbruc 2y ago
        Portable pumps used by fire fighters can deliver up to 2 m³/min at 10 bar weighing somewhere in the range of 150-200 kg. With five of those you could load 100 tons in 10 minutes which seems quick enough to me but I have no idea how quick one has to be, I am just comparing to the time scale I would assume dropping off the cargo would take. And I would just place the pumps on the airship and lower them to the ground, maybe together with the cargo. And for tanks, 100 m³ are five of the larger above ground pools worth of water weighing about 100 kg a piece. Or look at those water inflated flood barriers. You could probably carry 100 m³ worth of water storage into the middle of nowhere without too much trouble in a bunch of back bags if you really had to. What you still need is a water source. If you only have a normal tap, it will take a hand full of days to fill 100 m³, but completely feasible. Or a diesel generator, a small pump, and enough hoses to reach a nearby lake or stream. Nothing you could not deliver with a helicopter. But what actually is the imagined use case here, under what circumstances would you want to drop off some heavy and probably expensive equipment in the inaccessible middle of nowhere? As soon as you can get there with (off-road) vehicles, it seems pretty simple to get the necessary materials there.
- vasco 2y ago
  Might be a billionaire yacht alternative. Think super yacht but on the sky.
  - evan_ 2y ago
    That's basically the plot of Bioshock Infinite
- flaque 2y ago
  they're a replacement for cargoships. If done right, they're faster than a cargoship, but could (maybe) carry lots of capacity for cheap, while also not requiring them to take the same routes as a ship.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  A few of these hovering over cities at all times would make good police watch towers with aimable spotlights and docking hubs for police drones.
  - nwatson 2y ago
    They'll also be prime targets for drones.
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
previous discussion ~1.5 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013919
6stringmerc 2y ago
Helium of all things basically leads me to believe this is wishful thinking only a billionaire could love. Granted, he wasn’t a rich man, but Weigert’s Vector W8 seems a reasonable comparison. Making something impressive is, frankly, asking for the free market to slap one in the face more often than change the world in the long run. Bonus points if their ad campaign uses the slogan “The Segway of the Skies”
endominus 2y ago
>A century after terrifying disasters, is it a safe-enough bet? In the Hindenberg disaster, 35 of the airship's 97 occupants died. Meanwhile, every time I browse the front page of HN, there seems to be another story of an aircraft crashing or being shot down and everyone on board being killed instantly.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  Something like half of all rigid airships ended their lives in crashes. That's an airframe loss rate far in excess of anything you see with regular aircraft.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Yeah in the end it's not about the risk, but about it taking a week to get across the Atlantic in one. Ain't nobody got time for that.
  - phreeza 2y ago
    People cross the Atlantic in cruise ships all the time. I would be much more interested in an airship Cruise.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Why other than the novelty? I’ve taken an ocean liner with great food, lectures, shows, multiple places you could eat, a promenade walk, etc.
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        I like the airship idea over ocean ships because land doesn't get in the way. I imagine a ring of airships encircling the globe based on the prevailing winds. Except bigger, like a handful of sky cities (hydrogen being abundant, the square-cube law being what it is). So instead of shipping something from the other side of the planet, you can just wait a few weeks until the warehouse is overhead, and burn a lot less fuel overall. Or maybe you're having a conference in one. Either take a plane there and have your conference in the sky, taking the slow way back. Or get on when it's overhead and take a plane back (or if you're really patient, take the long way around the planet). The change of scenery would be much better than just flying to Vegas all the time.
aetherson 2y ago
I am old enough to have seen now 30 years of, "Maybe airships are coming back" articles.
- card_zero 2y ago
  I liked the one that looked like a bum, that was the best one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlander_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlander_... First flight was 2012, production starts in 2028? Maybe?
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Kind of like VR then. Promising tech, that is always just a few more iterations away from being incredible.
  - stickfigure 2y ago
    I play VR games on a $500 device. It's pretty incredible already.
- sleepybrett 2y ago
  I mean we haven't really used airships for anything except war since the turn of the century. And even in war their usecases were very specialized. It seems like a solution looking for problems.
- timbit42 2y ago
  My dad's uncle is 94 and he remembers seeing the Hindenburg flying over Atlantic Canada toward New Jersey the day before it crashed and burned. He was born in 1930 so was 6 and 3/4 years old at the time. Obviously he also lived through WW2. It's crazy how much he has lived through and seen.
sleepybrett 2y ago
More and more the present moment seems like a shitty echo of the gilded age.
breakitmakeit 2y ago
[dead]
jakedata 2y ago
"Helium is less flammable than hydrogen" uh-huh

39 points by andrewl 2y ago

I seem to have missed the business reasoning for this development? Why are they investing money and time into this? I thought the consensus is that airships are just too hard to dock/land, handle in anything than low wind scenarios that they are not much use?

bell-cot 2y ago
Yeah. The opening paragraphs admit that Sergey Brin paid for it. And the final paragraphs finally get past the "Big!, Shiny!!, Cool!!!" gushing, to admit that there don't seem to be any use cases. Maybe Sergey is a steampunk fan?
- pintxo 2y ago
  I can fully accept a "I like the idea and have the money" motive. But a journalist worth their money should make this clear.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    > But a journalist worth their money... The author did...eventually. After making sure that his article had collected all the Clicks, Time on Page, and whatever other metrics he needs to keep the BBC convinced that he's worth paying a journalist's salary to.
ReptileMan 2y ago
If we get serious about reducing emissions - airtravel has to go in its current form. So there could be an opening for lighter than air approach.
- pintxo 2y ago
  This would be such a big dent in humanity learning that the people on the other side of the world are just that: people. I sincerely hope we will be able to maintain current air-travel by switching to efuels and similar means. Humanity having to ditch air-travel at todays levels would be a massive social negative.
  - elictronic 2y ago
    We won’t. We still haven’t even started touching geo-engineering at scale yet. Getting humanity to give up anything without either killing or enslaving a large swath is not happening or realistic. We can’t even get rid of nuclear weapon stockpiling which has a much lower positive vibe from nearly everyone.
- calmbonsai 2y ago
  Nah. The most likely scenarios are a switch to pure ammonia combustion and/or sourcing "all green" methane to make carbon-neutral or near-zero emissions flight. Unfortunately, ammonia combustion is inefficient and synthetic hydrocarbon fuel is far too expensive atm. We'll never get away from the brutal physics: 1. Long flights require planes to get lighter (burn fuel) as they go further so battery power doesn't work. 2. Wings are just too damn efficient at producing lift. 3. Putting enough on-board safe-station-keeping power (weight) on an airship makes it a very poor airship. 4. A very good airship is least safe to fly precisely where is has the most potential to cause damage and loss of life.
  - ReptileMan 2y ago
    >1. Long flights require planes to get lighter (burn fuel) as they go further so battery power doesn't work. Up to a critical density/weight/kwh, afterwards it doesn't matter.
- cogman10 2y ago
  I just don't see how it's a better idea than high-speed rail. Probably cheaper to deploy, but the capacity will always be low and speed slow. I'm not one for an "either or" generally, but I really have a hard time seeing the benefit of blimps beyond "this is neat and kinda fun".
notahacker 2y ago
If you can handle the wind scenario and don't mind slow speed, you can run on electricity for a very long time (and have quite a large surface area to stick panels on) which makes opex look attractive compared with heavier than air flight as well as being climate friendly. There's also probably an element of "Sergey Brin believes in it and he's not short of money..."
michaelt 2y ago
1. A guy with $164 billion is willing to pay $250 million for it. 2. If in the future a Peak Oil type scenario arises, and electric planes aren't able to overcome issues of battery energy density, and power-to-gas doesn't come through either, some replacement form of air travel might be very useful. Low probability, but very high reward.
- aetherson 2y ago
  #2 is fanciful.
- sleepybrett 2y ago
  in scenario 2 people just start either digging a lot of canals or laying more train tracks.
danbruc 2y ago
A German company had a go at this with CargoLifter [1] in the mid 90s. They wanted - as the name says - transport oversized loads that are hard to transport on road or would otherwise require an expensive transport like long detours on waterways. Their hangar is now an indoor water park [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort
- pintxo 2y ago
  I am well aware of their fate. Turns out, if you transport extremely heavy stuff, you'll either need to take on massive ballast when offloading or ditch much of your expensive Helium. Either is not helping with turning a profit. Let alone that fact, that any of this will only work of there is no wind at both the start and end of your journey. But I guess the swimming resort is kinda nice.
  - danbruc 2y ago
    As compared to transporting passengers, transporting cargo seems like a good choice when it comes to the weather, you probably have a lot more freedom in scheduling flights, being able to wait for good conditions. With the ballast, did they not plan to compensate the weight of the cargo with water? Certainly adds complexity and probably also risk if you have to load a hundred tons of water into an airship relatively quickly, but does not sound completely unreasonable to me.
    - pintxo 2y ago
      Part of the pitch was to be able to deliver extra heavy cargo to places without other infrastructure, but if there is no other infrastrukcture, how do they get the water(-tanks) and (big) pumps there?
      - danbruc 2y ago
        Portable pumps used by fire fighters can deliver up to 2 m³/min at 10 bar weighing somewhere in the range of 150-200 kg. With five of those you could load 100 tons in 10 minutes which seems quick enough to me but I have no idea how quick one has to be, I am just comparing to the time scale I would assume dropping off the cargo would take. And I would just place the pumps on the airship and lower them to the ground, maybe together with the cargo. And for tanks, 100 m³ are five of the larger above ground pools worth of water weighing about 100 kg a piece. Or look at those water inflated flood barriers. You could probably carry 100 m³ worth of water storage into the middle of nowhere without too much trouble in a bunch of back bags if you really had to. What you still need is a water source. If you only have a normal tap, it will take a hand full of days to fill 100 m³, but completely feasible. Or a diesel generator, a small pump, and enough hoses to reach a nearby lake or stream. Nothing you could not deliver with a helicopter. But what actually is the imagined use case here, under what circumstances would you want to drop off some heavy and probably expensive equipment in the inaccessible middle of nowhere? As soon as you can get there with (off-road) vehicles, it seems pretty simple to get the necessary materials there.
vasco 2y ago
Might be a billionaire yacht alternative. Think super yacht but on the sky.
- evan_ 2y ago
  That's basically the plot of Bioshock Infinite
flaque 2y ago
they're a replacement for cargoships. If done right, they're faster than a cargoship, but could (maybe) carry lots of capacity for cheap, while also not requiring them to take the same routes as a ship.
deadbabe 2y ago
A few of these hovering over cities at all times would make good police watch towers with aimable spotlights and docking hubs for police drones.
- nwatson 2y ago
  They'll also be prime targets for drones.

svilen_dobrev 2y ago

previous discussion ~1.5 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013919

6stringmerc 2y ago

Helium of all things basically leads me to believe this is wishful thinking only a billionaire could love. Granted, he wasn’t a rich man, but Weigert’s Vector W8 seems a reasonable comparison. Making something impressive is, frankly, asking for the free market to slap one in the face more often than change the world in the long run. Bonus points if their ad campaign uses the slogan “The Segway of the Skies”

endominus 2y ago

>A century after terrifying disasters, is it a safe-enough bet? In the Hindenberg disaster, 35 of the airship's 97 occupants died. Meanwhile, every time I browse the front page of HN, there seems to be another story of an aircraft crashing or being shot down and everyone on board being killed instantly.

jcranmer 2y ago
Something like half of all rigid airships ended their lives in crashes. That's an airframe loss rate far in excess of anything you see with regular aircraft.
moffkalast 2y ago
Yeah in the end it's not about the risk, but about it taking a week to get across the Atlantic in one. Ain't nobody got time for that.
- phreeza 2y ago
  People cross the Atlantic in cruise ships all the time. I would be much more interested in an airship Cruise.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Why other than the novelty? I’ve taken an ocean liner with great food, lectures, shows, multiple places you could eat, a promenade walk, etc.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I like the airship idea over ocean ships because land doesn't get in the way. I imagine a ring of airships encircling the globe based on the prevailing winds. Except bigger, like a handful of sky cities (hydrogen being abundant, the square-cube law being what it is). So instead of shipping something from the other side of the planet, you can just wait a few weeks until the warehouse is overhead, and burn a lot less fuel overall. Or maybe you're having a conference in one. Either take a plane there and have your conference in the sky, taking the slow way back. Or get on when it's overhead and take a plane back (or if you're really patient, take the long way around the planet). The change of scenery would be much better than just flying to Vegas all the time.

aetherson 2y ago

I am old enough to have seen now 30 years of, "Maybe airships are coming back" articles.

card_zero 2y ago
I liked the one that looked like a bum, that was the best one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlander_10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlander_... First flight was 2012, production starts in 2028? Maybe?
deadbabe 2y ago
Kind of like VR then. Promising tech, that is always just a few more iterations away from being incredible.
- stickfigure 2y ago
  I play VR games on a $500 device. It's pretty incredible already.
sleepybrett 2y ago
I mean we haven't really used airships for anything except war since the turn of the century. And even in war their usecases were very specialized. It seems like a solution looking for problems.
timbit42 2y ago
My dad's uncle is 94 and he remembers seeing the Hindenburg flying over Atlantic Canada toward New Jersey the day before it crashed and burned. He was born in 1930 so was 6 and 3/4 years old at the time. Obviously he also lived through WW2. It's crazy how much he has lived through and seen.

sleepybrett 2y ago

More and more the present moment seems like a shitty echo of the gilded age.

breakitmakeit 2y ago

[dead]

jakedata 2y ago

"Helium is less flammable than hydrogen" uh-huh