Hacker News Reader

Comment by hguant | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

> 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.

How do airships fare in bad weather?

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.

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.

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

Airships aren't aircraft?

> 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.

You wrote:

    you can't build a rail head that far north

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

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com