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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

"Cruise speed: 148 km/h (92 mph; 80 kn)"

What's the market for this thing? Maybe short, over water trips?

It would seem hard to compete with cars or trains once you factor in security screening time, etc.

Looks like it's not focused on traditional passenger routes. Their Q&A (linked elsewhere in this thread) talks a lot about bringing cargo directly to where it's needed, with little/no infrastructure. So if you want to unload 10 tonnes in the middle of a primitive area, they can do that. Also 20-40% of airplane fuel consumption.

Seems fairly niche, but potentially very useful when you need it.

> Seems fairly niche

It's basically a container ship for land that doesn't need any crew

If they bring it to market, it's not going to stay niche

Edit: the smallest 10ft containers hold ~10 tons, so each ship is basically a flying small container. Still though. Also reasonable to assume bigger ships would come next

20-40% of the fuel consumption of a similar cargo plane.... what does that work out to in comparison to, say, a container hauling truck? Are we likely to see vehicles like this (or larger) taking trucks off the road? If it's entirely autonomous, and thus able to operate 24x7 there's some strong advantages there, but fuel efficiency could seriously ding in to that.

> what does that work out to in comparison to, say, a container hauling truck?

A truck doesn't have a cruise speed of 160km/h, doesn't provide point-to-point delivery services (i.e., is bound to the available roads) and doesn't provide lifting services.

I do believe that these airships won't replace standard trucking services but they are indeed capable of providing specialized high-value services in time-critical scenarios.

They did mention a planned model with a 50 ton capacity.

It's a flying truck for places without roads, large airports or ports. It's hoped that it will be cheaper per km-tonne than planes for these use-cases.

Basically cargo hauling into destroyed warzones and the arctic.

> Basically cargo hauling into destroyed warzones and the arctic.

There are quite a few civil engineering projects, bot mid- and large-scale, which require specialized transport to locations that are hard to reach. Do note that in practice this airship also provides lifting services, so it gets the cargo where it is needed and also drops it off where it is supposed to be.

It could be a water bomber for forest fires with its load capacity but slow moving balloons and external flames are not a good combo.

I read that these were going to be used for cargo in hard to reach places. However, if there is a need for alot of cargo then an airport usually already exists, and drones would probabally be more economical for smaller packages. Other than that? I think niche cruises like in that one episode of Archer.

> However, if there is a need for alot of cargo then an airport usually already exists, and drones would probabally be more economical for smaller packages.

Airship plans are for heavy hauling, not delivering amazon packages. TFA's airship lifts 10 tonnes. Lockheed Martin's LMH1 is planned for 20. The goal is large / bulk cargo in low-infrastructure or hard-to-access locations.

I'd want to turn it into a drone swarm staging ship and see if it could do last mile delivery.

Didn't Amazon recently patent something of the sort?

Traditionally, airships have required large ground crews to managing mooring/unmooring operations. Have they solved that problem? Delivery to low infrastructure areas by definition means it would be hard to assemble a trained ground crew. I suppose you could drop cargo without mooring and go home again.

That'd be why the new generations of airships are not lighter than air but mix buoyancy with a lifting body: hybrid airships retain some of the low operating costs and long range of an LTA airship, but because they're not actually lighter than air they can be landed on the actual ground and secured more conventionally.

Trains (etc) require a lot of infrastructure, especially if you've forgotten to plan for them for a century or so.

In Australia, the Sydney - Canberra - Melbourne route would be a potentially interesting one for this, as road travel averages 100km/hr, but has obvious downsides. These are short leg trips, though I don't expect this tech would alleviate most of the land-based delays, and (traditional) incumbents would not be happy if they did.

Either way, a less painful than jet, cheaper than jet, (slightly) faster than car, less attention demanding than car, travel option would certainly be relevant to quite a few people's interests around the world.

I'd assume everywhere in Oz is serviced by roads that normal trucking could handle.

That kinda only makes sense if you define "everywhere" as "everywhere people currently want to go".

There are _huge_ swathes of Australia that probably don't have a single passable road within 100km. Once you get much more that a couple of hundred km from the coast, Australia is effectively empty. Any population is way down in measurement noise.

Not to mention safer than a car or jet. Airships are quite safe, contrary to what people think after what happened to the Hindenburg. I wonder how this hibrid airship behaves in high winds.

>I wonder how this hibrid airship behaves in high winds.

Worse than an aircraft of similiar capability and better than an airship of similar capability. So somewhere between "tolerable" and "don't even try"

I'm not sure I'd classify modern passenger jets as "unsafe".

They aren't unsafe but hybrid airships with the current air passenger transport procedures in place could be even safer. If a HAV goes down with 150 kmh speed and 60% buoyancy there's a better chance the passengers would survive provided there is no pressure loss.

Here's a video of the Airlander 10 prototype crashing:

https://youtu.be/Mg-RPTiVa_Q

'In July, it revealed it planned to offer "luxury expeditions" once all tests were successfully completed.'

Perhaps transporting specialty equipment/parts into remote oil and gas exploration sites.

Cargo exports from landlocked places with poor rail links, such as sub Saharan Africa. I don’t imagine you’d ship grain or oil this way from Africa all the way to Europe but you might ship it to a port.

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