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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Not enough people know that a hundred years ago there were genuine airship aircraft carriers flying around, launching biplanes and then having them land back on the airship while it was still flying!

How do you land a biplane on a Zeppelin? You fly up underneath it, match your speed with that of the airship, then hook onto a landing frame lowered beneath the aircraft and let it lift you back onboard.

I gave a talk about Zeppelin history back in 2008, and recently rediscovered the slides and audio and turned them into a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU

It has images of the biplane landing mechanism at 3m57s.

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Around 2000 I played a game named Crimson Skies. Set in an alternate reality where the US broke up into pieces and freelancers with their airships and planes ruled the skies. This game could use a sequel.

It got a couple sequels but they were Xbox only and from what I hear not as good. But I agree it could do with a reboot. And a setting so I can actually hook the plane onto the airship rather than just getting close enough.

It is based on a tabletop RPG. (1)

1. https://www.aerodex.org/

I'd pay an AAA price for a sequel to that. I used to play it so much that I still regularly hum the orchestral theme.

Not really the same, but a game in kinda similar style is in development by this studio:

https://www.wateredplants.com/

I loved this game growing up! Perfectly ripe for a modern remake.

Yeah, I was surprised they forgot to cite it in the article.

I came here to post this. Incredible game!

> Not enough people know that a hundred years ago there were genuine airship aircraft carriers flying around, launching biplanes and then having them land back on the airship while it was still flying!

Featured in Indiana Jones the Last crusade, game and movie: https://youtu.be/s0vNsH81YeA?t=119

Almost a jinx.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27AAlYlyvZs has the plane leaving the Zeppelin.

Tried to find that scene but failed. Thanks.

I wonder what's preventing us from having airships now offering cruise like experiences in the sky. The only company I found doing them is OceanSky[1] though it seems like they are still in the early stages. My guess is they can't carry enough people to make the unit economics work without charging $10k/ticket.

[1]: https://oceanskycruises.com/

Mustard did an awesome analysis of this exactly this: Flying Cruise Ships, why we don’t have giant air ships

https://youtu.be/LyaYaFzSPac?si=hZ6HV0YuCOg-WUYT

Basically, the economics no longer work. Airships really can’t carry that much weight relative to their operational costs. They’re loud and they’re slow which isn’t a great customer experience. The amount of money you would have to pay for a ticket to make it economical would be more than a first class ticket on a modern jet, which would also get you there much faster.

(BTW all of Mustard’s videos are great. They have super high production value and are primarily about transportation technologies of the 50s 60s 70s and 80s. I recommend watching it on Nebula if you can.)

Cruise ships are a terrible way to get quickly to a destination, but they're not a bad way to travel.

Comparing airships to first class air travel isn't the right basis. You want to compare to trains and ships at least. You take a ship or train when speed isn't the objective, rather experience. An airship experience with a few dozen passengers taking tours of beautiful scenery over the course of a coastal trip, or like a group hot air balloon, or something like that.

`You take a ship or train when speed isn't the objective, rather experience`

not sure if that's the case with HSR

Airships tend to have a problem with poor weather. Of the 5 airships the US Navy used, only one of them lived long enough to be decommissioned, and the other 4 all ended in total structural failure in bad weather. I don't have handy stats for other countries, but I believe it's well in excess of 50% of all airships ending their lives in crashes.

All 5 of them operated at a time without weather radar, satellite and internet.

I'd bet they'd all be safe today by simply not moving into weather systems.

Or, rather, before carbon fiber, kevlar, very strong plastic films, etc.

A modern airship can be made much lighter while also being sturdier and somehow structurally redundant. But its sheer size still makes it expensive. The only relatively operational development I'm aware of is Airlander, and it's still a prototype, since the US Army rejected it.

The size is part of the problem. An airship's huge size means it has a gigantic sail area. Weather that can't be avoided becomes super dangerous. Even a gentle crosswind during take off or landing could be disastrous.

The flipside is they may not be fast enough to dodge quick moving weather systems.

Or capable of climbing above them.

Airships have pretty surprisingly low service ceilings, and experience a huge trade-off in payload capacity (by weight) vs. operating altitude.

> I'd bet they'd all be safe today by simply not moving into weather systems.

It will be safe but of less use than other aircraft/transport that can work in bad weather, or can wait out in a hangar or get in and out of a bad weather system quickly.

A precipitous amount of older airships went down due to bad weather. I suspect the risks are too high for modern sensibilities - they just seem too vulnerable.

Indiana Jones launches a plane from a Zeppelin in The Last Crusade.

It never occurred to me to question whether that was historically accurate (it looks very straightforward in the movie).

It isn't too far off from launching biplanes from the Akron / Macon airships. The biplanes had a big hook on top to latch into the trapeze mechanism, which isn't shown in the movie.

The other nitpick is that the airship should really run up to its highest airspeed to allow the biplane to recover quickly when launched. So that requires coordination with the airship crew.

Depends on the aircraft, some small planes are basically stall-free, as long as they have sufficient height they can recover using the speed gained by falling.

> highest airspeed

Which means on the wind, and modern hydro aircraft carriers do the same.

I'm curious - how fast can a Zeppelin go? How slow can a bi-plane fly?

"Match speed" seems like a thing that's really easy to write and much harder to actually do :)

Two random samples I just happened to pick: the graf Zeppelin had a top speed of 80 mph and a Sopwith camel (biplane) had a stall speed of 48 mph.

As far as I have read this was not an easy process generally, however aborting and trying again would be fairly easy as you're nowhere near the ground and have plenty of time to recover.

Stall speed for a biplane can be quite low. A AN-2 about 35 knots which means with a stiff headwind you can appear to be flying backwards

That is fascinating, I have found myself learning more about these as I dive through the background works on Ace Combat contents.

While by no means a proper simulator, it certainly makes a fun arcade and sci-fi shooter experience.

There was a super arcadey flight… I don’t even want to call it a simulator… game, Crimson Skies, that IIRC featured a Zeppelin carrier as your home base. I think it was fun, although I must have been around 10 when I played.

I remember playing it. It was a Microsoft property that they still own.

Airships were so cool... and unfortunately, so flammable.

Regular aircraft carriers where extremely flammable and filled with explosives.

Originally they had wooden decks, boatloads of fuel, and no meaningful armor. Nowadays their made with ~70,000 tons of steel, and fire is still a major concern.

While not technically an aircraft carrier but capable of carrying, launching and landing aircraft, the example of USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) comes to mind:

On 12 July 2020, a fire started on a lower vehicle-storage deck while the ship was undergoing maintenance at Naval Base San Diego. It took four days for firefighters to extinguish the fire, which injured at least 63 sailors and civilians and severely damaged the ship. After a lengthy investigation into the cause of the fire, a sailor was charged with arson but was acquitted at trial. Repairs to the ship were estimated to take up to seven years and cost up to $3.2 billion, so the ship was decommissioned on 15 April 2021 and sold for scrap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bonhomme_Richard_(LHD-6)

Hence why damage control was (and still is) so important, which the American Navy was very good at.

Neither of the 'airship' aircraft carriers described in the article failed due to fire.

Helium airships were not flammable.

Helium airships are not particularly flammable.

They don't deal with rough weather well, though.

Also, isn't Helium non-renewable (at least on Earth) and becoming quite scarce?

A recent find in Minnesota may change that outlook: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/minnesota-dream-he...

Everyone thinks we're working on fusion reactors for electricity. Silly fools. Of course it's for creating more helium. /s

Airships are cool but are a large easy target.

Yes, the notion of an airship as aircraft carrier was really only viable for a short time when aircraft engine technology wasn't good enough for high-altitude flight.

With the incorporation of superchargers and turbochargers in aircraft engines (and an overall increase in power), this drastically increased the altitude limits for propeller aircraft.

When the airships could still fly higher than aircraft, that reduced their vulnerability to direct attack.

Once someone figures out the Stealth Airship design, warfare will change!

Just knock out their radar from orbit and seed some clouds ahead of the invasion

I'd watch that movie.

So are regular aircraft carriers - hence they're traveling with escorts :).

An airship however is way easier to shoot down using non military technology that some nutjob group could afford. They're slow, big and a lot less armored than ships, and they'd make the news if shot down, which is what the above actors are after; in this world I don't see them like a safe solution for transportation.

In the context of aircraft carriers it probably is never a good idea to have them directly at the front. If it is close enough to be shot down by a Texan wielding a sawed of shotgun it probably is too close to the front. Same is true for the ship kind, if you can walk up to it with a welder and cut holes into its armor plating it is too close.

In the context of transportation planes seem to have significant issues dealing with loons wielding laser pointers. So unless you classify those as military technology you will have a hard time finding something cheaper and easier to get your hands on.

Yeah. But regular aircraft carriers are smaller for carrying similar aircraft groups, because they only need to by less dense than water, not air.

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