Spanish airline reserves 10 Airlander airships | Hacker News Reader

Spanish airline reserves 10 Airlander airships

bbc.com

146 pointszeristor133 comments

I don't expect this to succeed because one of the biggest problems with airships a century ago still hasn't been resolved: Where do you put them when the weather turns to shit? Airplanes are smaller, faster, and denser, so they have a lot more options. Airships are big, slow, and light weight, that means hangers big enough to house them are rare and expensive and the wind has greater impact on them than an airplane.

Case in point, in 2017 HAV (the airship manufacturer the article is talking about) had their prototype airship destroyed by strong wind while it was moored outside. They haven't solved this problem, they're just ignoring it.

Is there some reason why you couldn't deflate it and temporarily store the helium in a tank next to a small hangar containing the deflated ship?

Or maybe building huge hangars is simply cheaper now that it used to be?

Seems weird if a airline would purchase 10 units of something while not having any idea where to store them when the weather gets bad, surely they must have some idea.

Maybe? Pumping the helium out and storing it could be done in principle, but in practice could you do that pumping fast enough to respond to bad weather? Controlled venting of the helium would be faster, but then you'd need new helium to fill it back up. This sort of plan would also require more infrastructure at the ports made to service the airship. I also wonder how fast they can go from deflated to operational; maybe hours but maybe longer, if they have to do inspections each time. It all seems like a lot of additional expense for an airship that already has a razor thin niche (transit that needs to be faster than a train or truck, doesn't need to be as fast as an airplane, and is less versatile than a helicopter.)

As for the airline purchasing 10 airships, they didn't. They only reserved 10 and the press release on HAV's website doesn't say how much Air Nostrum Group actually paid for that upfront. Air Nostrum Group may view this as a PR / greenwashing expense, without any real expectation of buying or operating the airships. Similar to GM signing a deal with Nikola.

Maybe not purchase:

The carrier aims to introduce the Airlander fleet over a five-year period, through operational leases, as part of a sustainable mobility project.

https://www.flightglobal.com/air-transport/spains-air-nostru...

Seems like unmooring and letting it blow around might be preferable. Wonder if it would be legally feasible to have it computer piloted during storms and then return to base after.

It would be pretty simple if they could be unmanned, fly them.

The website shows that its possible to deflate them.

According to Wikipedia, Air Nostrum "currently operates as a franchisee of Iberia as Iberia Regional [...]. Air Nostrum operates 91 domestic and international routes to 51 destinations, and charter flights. Its main base is Valencia Airport, with hubs at Barcelona Airport and Madrid-Barajas Airport".

Decarbonizing short haul flights is great, but wouldn't trains be better suited for this purpose? Especially if you consider the extra infrastructure that needs to be built at airports which will be served by these airships - concrete production also generates a lot of CO2...

> Especially if you consider the extra infrastructure that needs to be built at airports

The thing with air travel vs. trains is that with air travel you only need infrastructure at the origin and destination. This makes it fairly easy to add new routes. By contrast, for a train you need infrastructure all the way from origin to destination, necessarily crossing other types of infrastructure (e.g. roads and canals) which requires the construction of bridges and/or tunnels. The land also needs to be acquired and, depending on length, will likely require dealing with hundreds or thousands of existing land owners.

If there is an existing rail line, that may help, depending on spare capacity. Adding additional tracks may also be slightly less difficult than constructing an entirely new track, assuming the existing property is wide enough to accommodate the additional track(s).

A port for an airship is probably even easier to realise than a normal airport, as you don't need a long runway.

That might be true in Europe, but in the US most of the rail is owned by freight lines. So passenger service can use those lines, but only as a secondary measure. This means that passenger service can never be rapid or even consistent as the freight trains always take priority.

The single trip I took by rail in the US we spent most of our time just waiting on other freight trains to pass us.

A frustrating thing is that US federal law requires that passenger trains get priority over freight, even on rail owned by freight lines. But it's on the Department of Justice to enforce this, which has been severely lacking.

I've never heard this before. Is it part of the US code or something like that? I'm assuming it'd be a regulation placed upon rail companies. If you have a reference for this I'd like to know more about it.

Seems to be recent:

https://specialty-freight.com/2021/06/us-requires-railroads-...

"This April, the US Senate introduced the Rail Passenger Fairness Act, legislation that requires infrastructure managers to prioritize passenger trains over freight trains. Infrastructure managers will be brought to court for not complying.

[...] the US is giving Amtrak, the nation’s main passenger carrier, the ability to take infrastructure managers to court for not providing preference to passenger rail operating on their rail lines."

It dates to Amtrak’s creation in 1971. The 2021 law just reaffirmed it.

And yet they still run freight trains that are too long to use the sidings available on the route.

http://blog.amtrak.com/2019/05/why-are-amtrak-trains-delayed...

Why would this not be in the jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation? Putting it on the DoJ seems ridiculous.

If we invested in mandatory Positive Train Control, judicious expansion of side tracks/switches for muxing, as well as automated Central Traffic Control we should be able to radically increase the ability to move passengers on rail.

Apparently the incentives are not there for that, and should be reexamined accordingly.

Probably for the best. The amount of extra energy we'd spend moving all the rail freight to trucks just so we could run good passenger service would be a net loss. Europe does have better passenger service, but is it really better for the environment?

Yes - it doesn't have to be either-or, if you're really committed you can lay extra tracks so passenger trains can overtake the freight trains. Especially in the US, where there tends to be a lot of space, this shouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle. Or run freight trains mostly during the night, as they do in Europe. However, of course we're talking of different scales here: a domestic flight in the US can be twice as long as a flight from say Rome to London.

Most of the places in the US where passenger rail would have the highest utility are the same places where there isn't a lot of space. That being said, it's still possible to make happen with high enough density (e.g. the Northeast megalopolis, which has usable, if expensive, passenger rail).

>usable, if expensive, passenger rail

Part of it is that the Northeast Corridor has to pay for basically the entire rest of the country where Amtrak almost universally loses money.

The other is that Acela specifically is priced to be more or less just competitive with air on the BOS-NYC and NYC-DC legs. (Acela doesn't really work for the most part to travel the entire length of the corridor.)

I almost never take Acela if I'm paying myself because the electrification work done for Acela made the regular regional train only about an hour slower for the BOS-NYC leg. (They used to have to switch engines in New Haven.)

Looking back at my last trip to the US with everywhere SUVs I'm not sure if that is so environment friendly compared to Europe where "normal sized" cars are more common.

The problem in Europe for freight trains is that Europe generally doesn't have as long routes as the US and on long routes in Europe you cross different countries, which have incompatible voltages and power systems, different signaling systems, etc. which makes it complicated to run trains across. Not to mention countries outside the customs union, where extra processing is needed.

On short distances a railway is simply less efficient than trucks.

Also companies have optimised their storage and logistic chain to expect for example one truck each day instead of a train each week and thus are using the road as storage facility.

Freight is also less attractive when you can't double-stack the containers because electric wires and tunnels are too low. I understand this to be the case on many European rail lines. In America where freight trains play a larger role in the economy than in Europe, most rail isn't electrified and double-stack freight trains are common.

For double height trains however go a bit slower, I think. In the denser populated Europe, with tracks shared with passenger service that is an issue as overtaking them takes even more infrastructure and regular stopping and accelerating again. Whereas in US there are large parts where they can simply go their speed for a long distance, which makes it really efficient.

Is it really an either/or situation? Is there absolutely no way to ensure both can work a bit better on the rail that they share? I genuinely don't know, but it was mentioned that the freight gets priority over passenger rail which suffers as a result. So it definitely sounds like this is by design, and that there's room for improvement that would allow both coexist in cases where they absolutely cannot use separate rail.

Freight does better when it is slow and cheap per ton mile. They also tend to be long to save on labor costs.

Passenger rail is pretty much the direct opposite, requiring fast acceleration and speed. So the two do not mix well (freight trains will slow down passenger trains.)

The only country that operates both high speed rail and freight successfully, by China, literally built a whole separate new high speed network to reserve for passenger trains and to leave freight the freed up space on legacy lines.

When we run short of railways, we build another one.

A bit like what the US does for roads.

Interesting, I believe the order in Germany is: Highspeed (ICE) > Regional trails > Freight transport

Not anymore. Depending on the freight train and operator just in time logistics have priority over anything else since a few years. Recently there have been discussions to extend that priority inversion for things like coal, gas and similar due to our fuck-up, also in combination with temporarily dried up rivers which inhibits freight ships and barges.

While it's true that if you are connecting a completely disconnected city to a network then you'll need to lay some new track to ensure you can get there to the intended destinations. But if you're connecting it to N cities you won't need to lay N new lines, you might get away with a couple. There may be reasons to add or update infrastucture, but not every pair of connected cities needs its own dedicated track

> if you're connecting it to N cities you won't need to lay N new lines, you might get away with a couple

Trains accelerate slowly. Adding stops non-linearly increases travel time [1]. A few extra stops might thus make total travel time by train meaningfully more than by air.

[1] https://blog.bimajority.org/2018/10/20/interlude-physics-of-...

Well yeah it's not the case that one can add a single line to connect a completely new destination to an existing rail network and everything will scale perfectly, but I didn't claim that.

And as long as we're talking in abstract we can construct scenarios where one is faster or better. However my read the original comment was that that adding a new connection involves adding new infrastructure, which isn't always true. See the new European overnight routes that opened up post-Covid and which operate on the existing track

I think if people figure out carbon neutral ways to fly from A to B that are not too expensive, that would be preferable to trains. Installing rail is expensive and takes a lot of time. These air ships look like they should do the job.

Train connections in Spain are nice though.

I took a high speed train between Valencia and Madrid two weeks ago. Pretty nice experience. They have two generations of high speed trains in Spain. On the way to Madrid, the train was doing around 245 km/h between the two stops more or less consistently. It took a bit under two hours. On the way back, I had a different train that did 300 km/h over the same track. That train arrived a few minutes ahead of schedule even in about 1 hour and 40 minutes. Total distance is 360 km (give or take). Both trains did their top speed most of the time and stopped twice. The average speed over that distance is well over 200 km/h for the newer train. That's way faster than the top speed of most normal trains and about the same as a small airplane would do (like a Cessna cruising at 110 knots/hour).

And that's factoring in that getting in and out of the big cities takes some time before it can accelerate. You lose 5-10 minutes on both sides going relatively slowly. The in between stops take a few minutes as well but it gets back up to speed quickly.

That kind of speed is not possible everywhere. You need special tracks and not too many detours/stops along the way. Spain is perfect for this because it's mostly country side outside of the big cities. High speed trains in Germany are a very different game. There are only a handful of proper high speed connections where the train can actually hit its maximum speed. Mostly it never gets over 160 km/h. Still, it's alright when you have the option.

> Installing rail is expensive and takes a lot of time.

And it lasts hundreds of years and is super energy efficient. This isn't Ikea furniture.

Infrastructure cost should be calculated over years of service life.

Rails don’t last hundreds of years. They just do the regular disassembly and replacement tasks at night in a rolling fashion that they look permanent to users.

It’s expensive to be poor.

Like poor people can’t buy bulk, real countries with limited budgets can’t spend freely for a 100-year project. It will be well worth it in the end, but you have to pay it all now.

If you think 'last' means lay down the tracks once and be done with it, you're wrong. To be really usable they need constant maintenance, no matter if freight, or high speed rail.

Spain is mostly countriside but theres a lot of digging tunnels and building bridges. Maybe not outside Madrid, but it's definitely not flat.

True, passing through a tunnel at 300 km/h was interesting when I traveled from Madrid back to Valencia. Basically you feel the air pressure drop in the train. They seem short but when you are inside a tunnel for 30 seconds at that speed, you've traveled 2.5km. And there quite a few tunnels along the way. It's what makes high speed rail hard. You can't have steep turns or gradients. So most hills/mountains have to be either tunneled or designed around; valley need to be bridged, etc.

> Spain is perfect for this because it's mostly countryside

Every time there is free real estate, “let’s use it for terraforming.”

No. Let’s admit we are overpopulated and return more land to nature, before nature and wars do it naturally. It’s not because Spain is a half desert of sand that it’s not important for the Earth.

I live in France and I’m appalled that our ideology is both to be a welcome land for immigrants and “The young generation doesn’t have housing, let’s densify habitat and make fields constructible! It’s a human right!”

It’s a human right in direct contradiction with our kids’ human rights.

I am not clear where this alternative statement leads - "the young generation doesn't have housing, lets try euthanasia"?

“Let’s try not immigrating 400,000 people per year.” “Let’s try instead to raise our sons of farmers to high education levels.” One might notice it was the original values of the French Republic, you know, equal chances, climb the social ladder for everyone, solidarity in the face of changes, yadda yadda.

I am looking at this from a global perspective, housing seems to be an issue atound the world. Immigration just moves around a fixed quantity.

Our economic system demands unbound growth, and our governments seem to think that people exist to serve the economy rather than the other way around. If the economy demands more workers then the economy must be given more workers, even if that doesn't suit the desires of the populace or the needs of the environment. People who object on either ground will be called xenophobic or ecofascist.

You cannot build a train track to Balearic or Canary islands. In fact, some islands like Minorca have very little flights except during summer.

Sometimes it cheaper to fly from London to Minorca airport than from Madrid or Barcelona. I have traveled MAD-LGW-MAH (and stayed in london 1-2 days) because flight+hoter was cheaper than MAD-MAH.

It's cheaper to fly from Newcastle to London via Spain than it is to take the train: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/30/student-flies-lo...

TBH, we need to tax the hell out of short-haul airfare to stop nonsense like this. If you want people to make eco-friendly choices, the prices need to reflect externalities and real costs.

this is called market failure and its what happens when you privatise a natural monopoly

Yeah absolutely. This would be great for the Balearic islands.

> the extra infrastructure that needs to be built

A small landing spot on each end vs. tearing up the entire countryside, building tunnels and bridges, displacing thousands of people for an extra rail track?

Yeah, no.

Although it is a cliché at this point, a carbon tax would allow the market to efficiently balance these two concerns.

I'm strongly in favor of a carbon tax, but the margins on airlines are already so thin that it's possible that increasing the costs significantly can make them unviable (barring some innovation in carbon-neutral transit, such as these airships). Specifically, a carbon tax could push ticket prices up so far that few can afford them, and since costs are amortized over many passengers, sharply reducing the number of passengers would further drive up the costs per passenger, in turn pushing ticket prices out of reach of even more people. It's possible that commercial air travel becomes altogether unviable such that air travel is only available to those who can afford private jets.

Of course, we wouldn't allow that to happen, so we would subsidize the airlines, which in turn defeats the purpose of the carbon taxes.

Now, you might say, "carbon taxes will drive the industry to find economical, carbon-neutral solutions", and surely it will provide this motivation, but motivation alone doesn't guarantee that such a solution exists or that we will find it in time.

Assumedly, the price of air travel would go up, making it only available to to the middle class and above?

If air travel pollutes too much, and the goal is to reduce air travel, how else do you want to regulate it except by price? By restricting the number of flights one may take, or have a government office where one can apply for flight permits? That has not worked too well, historically.

However, come to think of it, one might want to give everyone some carbon credit or travel points, and then develop a market in it. (That would still mean that the rich will fly as much as they want, but at least they'll pay the poor that don't travel for the privilege.)

> However, come to think of it, one might want to give everyone some carbon credit or travel points, and then develop a market in it.

This already exists, but the problem is that carbon credits are nearly impossible to regulate (it's very hard to prove that some carbon-reducing initiative isn't counted toward two distinct carbon credit programs or that the carbon is even reduced as promised). It's hard to do the accounting correctly for honest participants, which pretty much guarantees fraud among less honest participants.

There are two ways to price carbon from the government point of view.

One of them is a pure carbon tax on all carbon emitting sources, which is regressive: it will affect poorer people more while affluent people can just conveniently pay more to emit the CO2 they need.

The other way is by specifically increasing taxes on income and wealth and using that money to invest in decarbonisation - for the most part by making solar, wind (and in some cases nuclear) cheaper, which eventually makes carbon more expensive in relative terms.

Governments these days tend to focus on the second way, either because it's progressive and therefore perceived as fairer, or because they see the alternative as political suicide (Macron's Gillet Jaunes appeared because of a proposed carbon tax on petrol)

Yes, the price of high carbon goods and services would go up with a carbon tax.

The lower class is more susceptible to the effects of worsening air pollution and climate change. They see the greatest benefits in those categories as each are improved by a carbon tax.

The downsides for the lower class can be further ameliorated by making the tax redistributive, e.g. increased welfare benefits, lowering other taxes, UBI, etc.

It would go up yes, but probably not as much as you think. Carbon tax proposals generally range from $50-200/ton. The ICAO has a carbon emission estimating tool (https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/CarbonOffset/P...) that says emissions from a Seattle-Orlando round trip flight are are about 1350 lbs/pp. That makes that (fairly long) trip cost $34 to $135 more per person.

That’s significant, but a ticket already generally costs $387 to $400/pp in moderate travel months if you take a bag.

I'm not sure you realize how big the middle class is. Ideally, most air travel would be out of reach for most people and wealth would be fairly redistributed. This would however devastate economies heavily reliant on tourism and have a lot of other secondary effects, making it realistically impossible to do. There are no easy solutions here.

Political suicide.

Especially considering Spain already has a serious high speed rail network.

They fly to a lot of places outside of Spain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Air_Nostrum_destinatio...

Even within Spain the Balearic islands and Canary islands are very popular destinations and probably not going to be on any high speed rail network any time soon. :-)

Hmm according to this https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/our-aircraft/faq/ the max speed is 130kph, distance from valencia to palma is about 270km so its about 2 hour flight. Its 7:40 by ferry and 55m by plane... So this seems like a very good route for this type of aircraft.

They also have good comparisons here: https://www.hybridairvehicles.com/news-and-media/overview/in...

I've flown between Tenerife and La Gomera and El Hiero a few times - I was curious if they did the inter island flights, which I don't think they do.

Edit: I suspect the idea of flying around in airships looking up a huge volcano is just reminding me of Red|Green|Blue Mars.

Yes however this network is organized in a star layout, meaning there are few connections between the outer cities. If all you want is to visit Madrid from the coast, sure. But going from one coastal city to another, that's not happening. And don't get me started on the rail network towards Portugal.

Sounds just like the TGV in France. Nice to travel between Paris and Bordeaux or Marseille for example, but travel between Bordeaux and Marseille would require going via Paris. It's hardly worth the name 'network' really.

That's not even talking about the fact that the lines don't even all connect to each other at Paris. They often terminate in different stations necessitating cumbersome travel from one station to the other.

That's a bit of a negative look. It's true that some city pairs are really poorly linked (e.g. Marseille / Bordeaux, it's just a regular slow train), however for many others the Paris-centric network is perfectly fine. Lille / Rennes / Bordeaux / Lyon / / Reims / Marseille going by Paris is not that much of an issue (direct high speed links between those wouldn't be financially worth it). The direct trains, which bypass the city of Paris itself and go on the Interconnection ring road, with its suburban (Massy, Marne la Vallée and CDG Airport) train stations, aren't frequent enough and that needs to be improved. The direct links between some cities also need improving, but there simply wouldn't be enough traffic for direct high speed rail for most city pairs.

It is almost ridiculous that there's no easy rail connection between Madrid and Lisbon. I assume it's because, when push comes to shove, the governments never come to agree on who pays for what

There was a plan that got derailed due to the European financial crisis which affected both countries.

It isn't serious for the very simple and immediately nullifying fact that it doesn't run the coast.

If you check the population centers in Spain, it clearly should have the form of a bike wheel (full circle and radials), but it is an asterisk.

Yes, with a serious ticket price also. For most destinations inside the country, flights are cheaper (and faster, obviously).

Considering the time you spend in airport, for < 500Km is usually faster and more convenient to use the train if you can. That is my experience in Spain, at least.

The airships will probably be used to fly between islands in the Balearic and Canary archipelagos. Those routes are currently served by small propeller planes. One big advantage of the airships is that there's no need to have them land at standard airports, which will allow to serve multiple destinations in any given island.

> Decarbonizing short haul flights is great, but wouldn't trains be better suited for this purpose? Especially if you consider the extra infrastructure that needs to be built at airports which will be served by these airships - concrete production also generates a lot of CO2...

In terms of infrastructure wouldn't building railways, rail stations, and trains use a lot more resources and time?

I would be interested in an answer to your question because I suspect it may be less obvious than you think. It could go either way, especially given how rare airship handling equipment/staff is, not to mention helium gas & associated supply chain.

Short term vs long term. Trains will always be more energy efficient than planes. Once everything become electrified, we'll need to be smarter with what we use our energy for. Does it make sense to waste it on lifting something into the air or sailing it across metal?

Term length matters since we have only a few decades to decarbonize. Moreover, bouyancy doesn't require energy to generate lift, so you can't make a naive "is it more efficient to sail across metal or lift into the air" comparison.

But these are not really planes?

Yes, and Spain has the largest high speed train network after China. Too bad our power plants run mostly on natural gas...

Trains require infra which is prohibitively expensive nowadays. Also trains don't just go anywhere, while airships can fly to Ibiza.

We arent gonna survive the next century if we cannot sort out our inability to build infrastructure.

Sometimes people want to go where infrastructure isn't, and shouldn't be necessary either.

We aren't going to survive the next century if every time someone wants to go from A to B, someone suggests that what we actually need is to spend years, billions of dollars and tonnes of carbon building infrastructure suitable for regular journeys between those points

Will people use the trains? Trains already exist between European cities and people still choose to fly

You can't go everywhere by train. I can't do Santiago -> Barcelona for example, I have to go through Madrid.

Trains don't serve islands.

Japan want's to have a word with you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

This is slightly odd. As far as I know, the company has only made the prototype, which was damaged on its first flight, and not long after damaged beyond repair.

The only airship company that I know of that has actually been able to fulfill a "big" order like this is Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH, which produced the three "Wingfoot" airships for Goodyear. That took 7 years. And they already had a ton of experience, and a fleet of three airships already.

I don't think it was damaged beyond repair by flights - I think it automatically deflated after slipping its moorings in high winds.

The rip-away panels were meant to prevent the airship from getting blown god knows where by the wind. But the airship was wrecked in the process and was subsequently written off.

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/11/18/19/467A5009000005...

This reminds me of the CargoLifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

They wanted to create a fleet of LTA vessels some 20 years ago, but never made it beyond a reduced-scale prototype and eventually had to file bancruptcy after using up all their investors' money.

The only thing that remains is an impressively huge hangar in the middle of nowhere near Berlin, which is used as an indoor resort today.

I believe the best use for this Airships is for cargo. Cargo routes from Valencia to Palma are beyond full capacity during peak vacation season (summer holidays, christmas, semana santa). If you plan to board a Ferry to Palma, you must be ready to suffer from delays in departure (arrivals are usually on time).

If they can use their airlanders with just 20-30% cargo, they have a sound busines case since ferrys are a huge bottleneck to get cargo into Balearic islands.

Apparently the problem with lifting heavy cargo is that all weight that gets released must be replaced in some way when it's not being used. Otherwise the airship won't be able to land or maintain a lower altitude.

Helium, unlike Hydrogen, is too expensive to simply release into the atmosphere when you need to go lower, so it needs:

a) gas compression

b) exchanging the cargo with water or weights at the transfer point

https://youtu.be/h0hpcpnWAsQ?t=796

Airlander makes an appearance too^

Transporting people is easier simply because they are lighter. The video projects it's still a 5-10yr R&D project to solve the weight exchange issues via gas compression (which usually means 10-20yrs in practice).

Transporting people in airship has never been made safe, and I don't think it can ever be. Anybody with a rifle can deflate an airship, where as planes can resist these low skill attacks.

The only business case to be made for airships is cargo.

> Anybody with a rifle can deflate an airship, where as planes can resist these low skill attacks.

This is a complete fabrication

Airhsips bombed London with impunity in WW1, Machinegun fire was useless, they would take many days to deflate through bulletholes. Only after intruduction of incendiary ammunition they became vulnerable.

Modern airships use helium and inflamable materials, so your guy with a rifle is useless.

>Anybody with a rifle can deflate an airship

But in fact:

>If the vehicle does find itself in a flashpoint, Metzger’s confident that the its skin – a blend of Vectran, Kevlar and Mylar – will be able to cope with a reasonable amount of small arms fire. ‘It’s a woven fabric and has a lot of redundancy in it to mitigate tears, if one was to experience a bullet hole it’s not going to propagate the length of the hole. You may lose a little bit of helium but the pressure between the inside of the hull and the outside is not very great so a small anomaly like that is not going to cause any significant damage.’[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190415183800/https://www.theen...

> You may lose a little bit of helium but the pressure between the inside of the hull and the outside is not very great so a small anomaly like that is not going to cause any significant damage.’

The key bit of the quote

I don't think air transport can ever compete with sea transport on costs and efficiency if you need to move a lot of volume.

I agree. What is the advantage of using an airship in this scenario? It's no faster than the ship, can't carry as much cargo, is no more fuel efficient, has more difficult load/unload procedures, and the ships/ports already exist. The only advantage of the airship is that its port can be inland if you are are over capacity and the ports are already full and there is no free coastline to build more, but that's a pretty minor benefit.

Airships for passenger transport makes a little bit of sense for a vacation destination. The airship can fly around the island providing a sightseeing tour as well as transport for the tourists. It becomes more than just a mode of transport, it is an attraction. Kind of like one of those old timey scenic railroads.

Worth noting: Airships are far more weather-sensitive than pretty much any other form of long-distance transportation. Heavy bursts of rain, cross-winds, downdrafts, etc. that a train would never notice and a commercial airplane easily compensate for can easily crash an airship.

Also worth noting: weather doesn't appear out of nowhere usually, airplanes can see the weather around them on radars and other instruments, airships would probably be equipped with similar instruments in order to avoid bad weather.

It's nice if you can pay close attention to the weather, play it safe, and never actually crash. But it's also nice if you don't lose too many potential customers, due to "they always seem to be delaying or canceling flights, due to the weather...".

> Airlander generates up to 40% of its lift from aerodynamics by the passage of air over the hull

At a max speed of 130kph that does surprise me - they don’t look very aerodynamic.

Remember that the MCAS system had to be built into the 737 Max because the jet engine nacelles developed too much lift... so maybe the lift generating capacity is not that easy to judge from aerodynamic look.

That's true - I guess if the length of the airship frame on the top is greater than the bottom (which from the photos it looks like) it will create lift no matter how blunt it is and how much drag it also produces.

FWIW, it is not necessary for a surface to be asymmetric (“longer” above than below) to create lift. This can be seen from the fact that (some) aircraft can be flown upside down.

On the other hand, I have up to 100% confidence in the accuracy of their claim.

https://xkcd.com/870/

Up to 15% - OR MORE!

Airspeed is a blistering 92 mph[1]. I'd also like to see how this bad boy operates in high winds.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlande...

I wish they had some details on routes, cost, time and etc where they plan to use them.

This reads like a press release and it's not clear they know exactly what they're going to do with these things.

Will flights be cancelled in cases of moderate/heavy wrong-direction winds?

Cruse speed is 148 km/h so they should be fine outside of extreme wind conditions.

I suspect turbulence to be a significantly larger issue vs fixed wing aircraft.

One would think the incredible bulk of the vessel would dampen turbulence, especially as it operates at a much lower speed.

Large low density objects are more susceptible to the wind.

A large enough airship could overcome it, but this is a surface area to weight issue.

Some mention of how dwindling Helium supplies play in to this would be helpful.

IIRC, the price of helium was artificially suppressed for a long time because the US was getting rid of its strategic helium reserve.

Now that they've stopped liquidating the reserve, price signals are starting to work again and helium is again being captured.

I believe its mostly a myth that helium supplies are dwindling. Its a byproduct of natural gas production which is something the USA should be using more of anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_Unite...

It's a dwindling resource in the sense that it's not renewable (on human timescales, anyway) or reusable: once it's in the atmosphere, it's effectively gone.

Same goes for fossil fuels, but that doesn't stop us from burning billions of tons of them per year like we have an infinite supply.

And unlike fossil fuels that are (likely) only found on Earth, Helium is the second most common element in the universe and can be found literally everywhere once you're off planet. Plus we can technically manufacture it from radioactive decay.

> can be found literally everywhere once you're off planet

In the vacuum of space, not enough to be harvested. Presumably the same for asteroids, moons and planets.

Stars have lots and lots of helium, but good luck mining it.

Would expanded civilian nuclear power provide some kind of sustainable helium production as a side effect or do the numbers not work out?

Even nuclear fusion doesn't produce helium in large amounts; a large fusion plant would produce about 2000 liters / day, meaning you'd need 136 years worth of output from one station to fill a single airlander airship.

Only if we change to fusion power, which is just fifty years away.

Agreed. This doesn't seem to be a long-term solution, unless they're relying on continually discovering new helium wells.

There are no "helium wells". Helium is extracted as a byproduct of natural gas extraction. Meaning it comes up mixed with natural gas and if the production facilities have the right equipment can be separated from it.

I mean a hole in the ground that has helium in it is kind of a helium well, even if it's polluted with natural gas.

Yes, sorry, short-hand. Natural gas comes out of wells, and with it helium. Since we're focussing on the helium, I called it a helium well. Indeed, sometimes helium itself is the target, not the natural gas: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-found-h...

Not all natural gas wells have the same percentage of helium in them[1]. "Helium wells" generally refer to wells that have a high amount of Helium relative to others. Those are the ones you would extract Helium from first.

[1] https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/609e8fe1d34ea221ce3...

From four months ago, it would be interesting what there plans are for it.

Does anyone know of a lighter than air project that uses evacuated or at least partially evacuated containers for lift? The use of helium always seems so wasteful at this scale.

i guess its not easy to build a container like that. it has to be strong enough to withstand the air pressure trying to buckle it in, but light enough for the vacuum to actually lift it off the ground. maybe there is no such material

Top speed of "up to 80mph" (assuming that's very dependant on the wind).

Compared to a passenger jet at ~500.

So a 1h journey by jet is now a 6h journey?

Maybe that works for low-weight cargo?

Or it is used for island hopping and replacing small turboprop aircraft? Turning what is 15 minute flights on the light aircraft into 30 minute trips by airship.

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