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Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

Okay I don't get it. In the launch HN, they said their craft is 60 feet long and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Doesn't that basically describe a semi truck? Or an airplane?

So is the pitch here a way to eliminate the labor costs of trucking by going somewhere that doesn't have much to run into?

The typical way that companies like FedEx solve this problem is with an airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's an awesome plane, it can carry a (figurtive) ton of weight, it's fast, it's reliable, it can land on primitive fields, it has a long range, and it is incredibly well established wrt regulations, and processes.

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You'll probably get a better answer from one of the people involved in the project, but I'll take a stab at this.

The right comparison is an airplane not a semi-truck. If you can drive a semi somewhere it doesn't seem like this makes much sense.

It carries substantially less (it looks like ~1/4 the mass), but it looks like you can buy more than 4 of these for the cost of 1 Cessna Caravan (wikipedia quotes a few million dollars for one of those, and the quote in this thread is a few hundred thousand dollars for an airship). You need 0 pilots to move those 4 around instead of 1 to fly the airplane, and the claim seems to be that it's more fuel efficient per kilogram-meter so those 4 should take less fuel too. Moreover you're getting increased flexibility because if you only need a fraction of the weight, you don't need to send all 4. You also get vtol take-off and landing with the airships.

Yep, this is a pretty accurate. If you have a full truckload of stuff, small air freight cannot compete. But if you're trying to move a single pallet, the airship is the best way to do it.

The one thing I'd add is that we deliberately chose 650 lbs to go a size class lower than a Cessna Caravan, because autonomy has enormous benefits for a 650 lb payload aircraft. At that size the pilot alone takes up 1/4 of your payload capacity!

Additionally, operating costs of a semi truck that's going to remote areas are incredibly huge - not only safety equipment, driver pay, but fuel costs as well - that you might be surprised how competitive airships are. Have you looked at the numbers for that? What about building your own lightweight carbon fibre container that is filled and emptied at your location, instead of dropping off the entire package?

>airplane called the Cessna Caravan. It's an awesome plane, it can carry a (figurtive) ton of weight, it's fast, it's reliable, it can land on primitive fields, it has a long range, and it is incredibly well established wrt regulations, and processes.

that reminded - for the last 70+ years all over USSR/Russia that role has been carried out by this plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-2 . They have been trying to modernize/replace it, and any good deep modernization or replacement project of it ends up along the lines of Cessna Caravan, though no deep modernization/replacement has succeeded yet because it is very hard to beat that combination of price, simplicity, ruggedness and utility. And i have hard time imagining what can successfully replace it in general. May be a range of smaller autonomous VTOL UAVs for much smaller payloads can take a bit of market from it. For passengers though nothing comes to mind, at least until electric planes get similar range and carrying capacity. I don't see blimps taking any of such a role though.

Resupply to mountain tops that would require a helicopter.

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