It seems like it should also be usable for shipping between non-remote places, in situations where you need more speed than a boat can provide but don't want to

It seems like it should also be usable for shipping between non-remote places, in situations where you need more speed than a boat can provide but don't want to pay the full premium for air freight. For instance, I seem to recall that Apple ships their laptops by air from Asia to keep the supply lines short. Shipping by boat might be too slow, but this thing might be able to cross the Pacific quickly enough, and at a lower cost than a conventional airplane. A route like this would have warehouses on either end, so you could easily have ballast waiting for the airship whenever it needed it. (You'd probably just pump water from the Pacific at one end, then put it back in the Pacific at the other end.)