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Comment by jp57 | Hacker News Reader

The airship renaissance is the fusion of transportation world. It's always ten years away. Seriously, I've been hearing about the great promise of modern airships for twenty years. Where are they? Are there any airships operating commercially now outside of niche applications?

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Of course it's niche applications, but it is the Zeppelin NTs which is the biggest success story. They're used for tourism in Germany and advertising in the US (the Goodyear Blimps, which as the article points out are no longer blimps at all, but much larger Zeppelins).

Zeppelin Luftschiffstechnik have survived by being _very_ careful about the scale of their ambitions (i.e, it's very modest). They did deliver the three ships in the Goodyear fleet, though, as far as I know completely on schedule, which is rare in any project of that scale, let alone an airship project.

I still haven't written off Sergey Brin's project entirely, although it keeps getting delayed. Airlander I'm less optimistic about, but they did fly (and crash) their prototype and they're still around, so who knows.

The Sergey Brin airship project is Lighter Than Air (LTA), in case any one was wondering.

https://www.ft.com/content/ae625a25-d2ac-4bca-9508-a5f0d3c7d...

How much do you want to bet the employees working on this were apart of the anointed 12k that just got laid off

LTA is not google/alphabet affiliated

I wonder why, why was this not, and Loon was?

Brin is toxic to the Alphabet brand. Too much using the staff as a sexual smorgasbord.

Given that i cannot find anything to suggest it is a subsidiary, I would stake a healthy sum that they did not particiapte in the Google layoffs

one does not lay of the team of a pet project of the confounder/board member with controlling interest in your company lightly.

Pet projects often get replaced with new pet projects...

No, the airship renaissance was over a decade ago. Cargolifter tried, and failed. From what I heard so, the water and holiday park they built in the ex Cargolifter hangars has to be quite good so.

Are you talking about Tropical Islands Resort outside Berlin, Germany?

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort

They mostly had trouble with landings and takeoffs. Cargo ships could have specialized cranes load and unload cargo while airborne.

That would be very tricky with conventional airships (and even trickier with hybrid ones). You would need to keep the system rougly at the density of air as you are tensioning the crane hoists. Probably by shedding ballast at the same rate you are appying tension on the lifting ropes. While the ship is blown about. And any cable failure would result in the airship violently jolting into the sky.

With hybrid airship this is even trickier, since they relly on airspeed to generate some portion of their full lift.

Could they use a circular lift that loads ballast at the same rate as they unload cargo, the way usually proposed for a space elevator? That would at least solve the ballast problem and lift problem (while still needing a solution to keep the airship in place horizontally AND needing tough materials for the lift).

Or one could stick with the existing transport solutions: sea, air, rivers, truck and rail. Those work just fine to get basically everything anywhere on the planet.

One thing they struggled with was ballast. If you plan on carrying 100+ metric tons, what do you do once you're done? Suck up the nearest lake maybe and dump it back at base when you load your next cargo? Now this restricts your use cases. Not that many lakes people wanna part with in Africa...

Can't you compress the helium and let in some normal air?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballonet

100 metric tons of water isn't very much water. A medium sized swimming pool will have way more than 100 metric tons of water.

I know some of the Canadian provincial governments were looking at using airships to provide a means of supplying some of the more remote northern towns - because of weather/terrain conditions, you can't build a rail head that far north, and the roads aren't reliable, so light cargo planes are the only reliable means of getting goods around. Airships, even of the good year variety, would be far cheaper for the weight/volume transported, but initial costs were prohibitive, if I recall correctly

How do airships fare in bad weather?

Not very well. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Akron

An extreme example. One extraordinary event is not very good evidence.

The safety record of the Zepplin company in Germany is very impressive

They had many failures, no fatalities. Until the Hindenburg

The USS Akron, USS Shenandoah, and USS Macon all failed due to bad weather. That's 3 of the US's 4 operational airships. (Another airship was constructed for the US, but was destroyed by poor handling before it was delivered to the US.)

Of the British experience with airships, R101 outright failed due to bad weather, and three more were scrapped after suffering accidents during bad weather, out of a total of 16 completed.

I don't feel like totting up the record of the Zeppelins, but the Wikipedia page does indicate that several of them failed due to weather incidents. One of the big lessons from the most notable airship failures is that airships don't really work in poor weather, and safety in such conditions means "don't even attempt to fly," which is a pretty different rule than the one for airplanes or other modes of transportation.

I mean if the alternative transports also don't work in bad weather I'm not sure you can use some failures to disqualify airships.

So long as they work "more" days of the year it's a better solution. Weather doesn't really sneak up on us anymore.

Aircraft are substantially more resistant to bad weather: you can fly an airplane into a hurricane.

Aircraft are also a lot faster -- it's unlikely that a thunderstorm will catch up with you (max speed of a storm is something like 50-80 mph) and trips are a lot shorter.

Airships are much closer to the storm speed and may need to stay aloft for several days. That makes it more likely that they'll hit unexpected weather and give them fewer options to avoid anything.

It's true that someone could do some shipping with airships and just eat the downtime due to weather. So far nobody has done that. And not for lack of trying: CargoLifter (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) went bankrupt on this idea.

Airships aren't aircraft?

Its not unexpected that a california resident, one accustomed to fairly temperate weather, would invest heavily into airships.

> I mean if the alternative transports also don't work in bad weather

But they do.

Imagine the kind of storm that can stop a freight train. Or the kind that would give the captain of a large container ship pause.

Now imagine airships facing the same storm.

This thread started because somebody was talking about towns where the weather prohibited rails from being built [1].

Let me know what freight train can run without rails ... All I have to find is 1 day the airship can travel and its better than your trail.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34579915

R101 failed because it was a dreadful design.

They are more wind sensitive then car, train, plain, etc.

AFIK in combination with modern drone tech they are less wind sensitive then in the past making them much more viable for many but not all areas.

They could be snow sensitive in the sense that a unlucky combination of wind/weather change and stronger snow could make snow stack on them somewhat, especially on larger ones. But we are speaking about blizzard like snowing here, so not really a problem.

It should be possible to make them operable even under very cold weather, but additional care must be taken to make sure the used materials do not get brittle due to the cold or electronics/mechanics stop working.

So technically it likely is reasonable viable for the Canada case.

The question is if it's good enough above other solutions and not to pricey to the right kind of airships, especially given that they are not mass produced.

Being wind sensitive isn't that bad if you can ride the jet stream for better economics. I see google has a patent for adding sails to airships.

To that end, being able to go to a higher altitude makes things more uniform, doesn't it? I guess I'm not a pilot so I don't know what altitudes make things easier, I know they can't do airliner service ceilings, but can they do 5000 ft? Probably depends on the buoyancy.

While air unmanned ballons are operating higher any airship I'm aware of had much _lower_ altitude limits then many aircrafts as far as I remember. But I don't know weather it where piratical or technical limitations.

And it it's sensitive to wind you probably don't want to get it anywhere near to either of the jetstreams (which in some areas are rather turbulent as far as I remember).

The google patent probably is from when they operatted unmanned balloon and drone mounted radio stations for special purpose usage. I think they stopped it even through it worked okayish because it wasn't profitable enough but I don't remember for sure.

You wrote:

    you can't build a rail head that far north

The Trans-Siberian Rail can do it... but Canada cannot?

It's not really under consideration to build a railway to Attawapiskat or other remote areas. It's a question of cost mostly.

Railways (I imagine especially in permafrost) require a lot more maintenance than a basic airstrip

Beside the point, I know, but the Trans-Siberian goes through southern Siberia.

Virtually all of the Trans-Siberian railroad (except for the Amur-Yakutsk spur) is below the Canadian North. There are railways to northern places in Russia (such as Murmansk), but Murmansk has 200k people (down from 500k in 1989), where the largest settlement in the Canadian North is Yellowknife, with 10% that number.

So it's not that you _can't_, but it's a PITA, and it's very far from value for money for so few people.

Russia is also hard up for ports, hence Murmansk, whereas Canada has always had Halifax.

> because of weather/terrain conditions, you can't build a rail head that far north

Can't or it costs too much for the benefit? Norway (with extreme weather and horrible terrain) has an extensive rail network, including in the Arctic, so i doubt there's anything in Canada making railways impossible. Too expensive to service 0.02 people per km2 maybe.

The project I am pitching currently, which has a good chunk of financing secured, envisages passenger operations in seven years.

The piece is almost spooky in its similarity to the piece I circulated to investors a month ago.

We aren’t, however, going after the cargo market.

Will it get off the ground? Who knows. But if you see kilometre-scale airships emerging from the backwaters of Europe where subsidies abound and land is cheap and regulations are… interpretable, you read about it here first.

Hey, do you have some way to contact yourself? I'm from a "backwater" of Europe myself and would love to hear more about your project.

Direct weather control is the prerequisite technology for at scale operation of commercially viable airships. So once we crack that I'm sure we will see them!

We have very good weather prediction these days. After the Titanic sank and people argued about mandating lifeboats on ships, one of the arguments against was that global shipping had already settled into the least stormy most safe sea routes and accidents where lifeboats might help had reduced year on year because it was already in everyone's interests - cargo sellers, shipping industry, passengers, insurance industry - to make that happen.

We have very good weather prediction for tomorrow. For longer airship trips like spending a few days crossing the Pacific Ocean the exact tracks of storms are harder to predict, and dangerous squalls can brew up with little notice during certain seasons.

They are waiting for Diamond foil encased vacuum, thats kept apart by statically charged graphene strands. The ultimate in air-buyoncy.

But diamond foil is brittle, and if it cracked, all of your vacuum would leak out.

If US, China and Taiwan situation escalates and US imposes a naval blockade, this can be used to effectively circumvent it. Perhaps China should invest in this.

Massive airships flying 90/km an hours are LESS susceptible to blockades than cargo ships? I think I'll need a little more explanation than that. Seems like a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher would be more than enough to bring one down.

Or a single tracer bullet, if it's filled with hydrogen.

Surely you could design some redundancy into the hull? It's not like the ship needs to be one giant gas bubble. It can be a mesh of a few hundred bubbles that could each pop without bringing the whole thing down.

So… 100 tracer bullets instead?

So several hundred times the weight of the pressure envelope? Tracer bullets was only an example. Airships would be spectacularly vulnerable to all sorts of modes of attack.

Surely you could design your tracer bullet launcher around repeatable processes, so that you could send a few more shortly after?

Don't even need to pop all the bubbles. Just enough for lift < weight. Gravity automates the rest.

Apparently that's not actually the case. The Brits and French had a hell of a time shooting down German Zeppelins in WWI with standard tracer ammo.

Standard tracer ammo, yes. As was the case with most weapon systems in WWI, innovation ran rampant and the various armed forces tried out any number of solutions such as explosive-filled bullets[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomeroy_bullet

Airships were routinely used and shot at in WWI, but very few were lost due to being hit.

If you think about it, it makes sense: they are massive, so the loss of pressure from a bullet hole isn't a real concern. And while the right hydrogen-oxygen mix is explosive, hydrogen needs oxygen to even burn. But there isn't any oxygen in the tank bladder. The escaping hydrogen can burn as it mixes with air if it finds an ignition source, but as long as your hull is from fire resistant material the flame can't do much, and is probably extinguished by the next wind gust.

Of course the "make your hull from fire resistant material" is where the Hindenburg went wrong. Her hull material could have been used at rocket fuel, the engineers just didn't realize that.

A quick scan of the Zeppelin list on wikipedia shows that significant proportion were lost after being hit by enemy fire. For example: LZ 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34...

China has been investing in (non-sea) logistics routes for over a decade. It's called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

To be clear, developing sea routes is also an aspect of it.

Now you've got me wondering if composite frame airships could be made transparent to radar.

Imposing a blockade is an act of war, in the unlikely (and horrifying!) event that it came to that, they’d probably be better served with overland shipping. Also airships would seem to be a pretty bad pick against America, we’re primarily an air superpower.

Not to mention the whole mutual massive nuclear strikes thing, so who would NATO or China be trading with in any case? Waiting for aid from Indonesia or Brazil would be a more likely outcome.

But hey, on the up side, at least no one would have to worry about a blockade!

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