Cargo Airships Are Happening
elidourado.com
elidourado.com
To safely operate a suitably efficient (large) airship, we'd need both huge specialized docks with extremely strong mooring structures to keep wind from smashing the airship into whatever is near it, and a system (such as a 3-axis propulsion system on the airship) that is capable of counteracting wind force acting on the airship when it's near the ground or other solid objects and not docked.
Despite the many attractive advantages of airships, there's yet been anything like a good solution to this problem. There are other challenges too (what do you do when you drop off your cargo and the airship wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly compress your gas?), this is just the biggest.
Not to detract from your overall point, but you do the same thing you do when burning fuel while cruising: Add ballast.
Yes, but how do you add ballast to an airship while it is underway? Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the zeppelins did.
Citation? Would not the condenser need to burn fuel, thus lightening the ship?
Why not just take on some liquid water at the destination when you drop the cargo?
Storing higher humidity air doesn't sound very efficient, storing liquefied humid air sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, and storing compressed air sounds like an unnecessarily complicated alternative to just compressing the hydrogen.
Fun fact: many inclined elevators work this way :)
Obviously that was simply a post thinking through everything hypothetically and I didn't read anything that seemed like they actually had the best solution, but at least they seem to be aware of the challenges to landing and off-loading cargo efficiently.
If you put it above ground, you are a few short bullets from killing everyone in the loop. Hitting a wall of air in a vacuum at hundreds of miles per hour is going to be like hitting a brick wall. Ask any reentering spacecraft.
The same problem exists underground, the weakest points being the stations themselves which can be bombed.
A failure in the system itself (even just a power outage or malfunctioning equipment) would mean people suffocate inside after a matter of minutes.
So, sure, it is possible to create it, but it is impossible to make any sort of safety guarantees. In other words, literally any other mode of transport would be safer, including a hydrogen-filled dirigible.
So, sure, the concept itself might be possible, but an engineer doesn't concern themselves with possible. That is for scientists. An engineer considers what is realistic AND possible, because that is an engineer’s job: to make the possible real. This cannot be real; literally no regulator would ever sign off on it.
In that case, the air can just "go around" the space craft. Try pushing down a syringe with the end capped. Bet you can't do it. Now imagine that at 700 mph; you will get a lot of heat and destruction. No heat shielding will save you.
> Apply your safety argument to passenger airliners or even ordinary trains and you'll see that they are also "impossible to make safety guarantees" for.
See sibling comment.
Right, because cars and planes and trains and boats and bicycles and footpaths and airships all famously have 100% perfect safety track records, right?
There are no mitigations and the only option is death. Maybe you can repressurize the tubes ... assuming there is power to do so ... to evacuate people. This is the main issue, there is no air outside your vehicle. If a window breaks (see: airplanes where this happens every so often) everyone inside is dead. No discussions, no second chances.
That's the problem. The main problem and you can't engineer around it. There are no emergency procedures because if you have an emergency, you are dead; and there will be emergencies.
Equally, if the train stopped in an emergency, the valves around it could fail safe to open and let the atmosphere back in. The train has to be pressurised anyway so a small delay there isn’t unreasonable
Killing everyone in the train because someone gets in a fight and fires a gun is pretty much a non-starter. That's the real problem you got to solve. It's not like a plane where someone can fire a gun in nearly any direction without consequence to the plane, firing a gun in literally any direction on a hyperloop would mean certain death for everyone on board.
It's in a vacuum, it's not like you can drop oxygen masks. In a vacuum, your blood boils and your eyeballs are sucked out. It's a pretty shitty way to go, but you'll lose consciousness before the worst of it.
And presuming that whole wagon doesn't burst because a couple of bullet holes, is it unrealistic for onboard pressurized tanks to keep up with escaping air while outside is getting pressurized?
Do you mind sharing the parameters you fed GPT?
This is the worst case scenario by assuming only one valve is functioning. Theoretically, even that could break, but I'll assume there are enough redundant valves that at least one will always work.
> is it unrealistic for onboard pressurized tanks to keep up with escaping air while outside is getting pressurized?
It depends on the size of the hole. A bullet hole for an average train car size would take hours to become deadly and could easily be corrected by onboard air (depending on how much air is onboard), but a gun isn't going to cause a bullet sized hole. It is quite violent. Something like a catastrophic door failure, or derailment, would deplete the oxygen in less than a second. Basically, the inverse of oceangate; instead of everyone imploding, everyone would explode. Since I also suspect there will be valves on the vessel to handle releasing small amounts of gas enroute (to allow adjusting internal pressures to match destination atmospheric pressures), this could also get stuck open.
I suspect, if anyone were to actually do this, they would go for low pressure (like high altitude) instead of a vacuum. The speed of sound is so high, they could easily reach it in the tunnel. Further, people just need oxygen masks instead of dying a horrible death.
Nobody has mentioned this while following along with all the US hyperloop failures, so it is clear nobody has really tried engineering this thing, IMHO, and why I said my original comment about it. If someone were actually engineering the system, these are all pretty obvious things. As described in the original 1800's systems and by Elon, it is an impossible system. I used to think about this thing all the time in the '90s, so maybe I've thought too much about it.
I'm also curious about other issues, like maintaining low atmosphere or a vacuum (these were the key failures in older attempts in the late 1800's) in the tunnel in an energy efficient way. If it can't be kept, things will deteriorate at an accelerated rate, introducing catastrophic failures early in the system lifetime. There is also maintenance and inspections to consider. Not to mention that underground is already dealing with increased pressure from the earth, it also has to support it while maintaining a vacuum. I suspect above-ground tubes are probably far cheaper to build and maintain, but at that point, you might as well build a train.
Since moving to Europe, I can go pretty much anywhere in Europe in a day. Heck, I can get on a train this evening, sleep in a bed on the train, and wake up on the other side of Europe tomorrow morning for breakfast, for a little more than the cost of an average hotel room. Trains are great, well understood, and pretty fast. The problem the US has (as seen with the California high speed rail), is that they 'want it to be all US based' instead of hiring experts from across the ocean who work on these things every day. The US has no experience building high speed networks, which is part of the reason the hyperloop even has a chance at getting money. It's a collaborative Dunning-Kruger effect.
I think if the US can get to the point where they can develop high speed networks, in general, then stepping up to something like the hyperloop is a good idea. Other nations are still working on the hyperloop and they are making good progress, but I'm not as familiar with their details.
Fail-open air valves are a thing.
> to evacuate people
Emergency exits are a thing.
> If a window breaks
Why would a shuttle in an underground vacuum tube have windows?
> The main problem and you can't engineer around it
Pretty sure people said the same thing about most of the modes of transportation I mentioned above.
Few if any modes of transportation are safe when bombs come into play.
As we ramp down fossils we this kind of thing would enable eg international agreements to limit and progressively lower shipping sector co2 credits over time.
We need to do this for all co2 emitter sectors since all the slices of the pie are fairly small so focusing on eg top-3 doesn't solve the problem.
At least the ships release other chemicals in their emissions that decrease solar warming.
A cargo airship would lowering cargo would essentially be an incredibly dangerous crane. The sail area of the airship makes it far more dangerous than lowering external cargo with a helicopter.
But on a side note my first reaction to the headline of this article was "no they are not". Airships have a number of fundamental drawbacks that I don't think we are any closer to solving. Ultimately they're as slow as a cargo ship, can only carry a relatively small and light payload like an airplane, require specialized ports like ships and airplanes, and are expensive to build and operate. They just don't have a viable niche.
But if you drop them via cheap parachute, you wouldn't need anything to return. I bet they'd only be slightly less accurate delivery than what their "don't give a damn" delivery system in place now.
We're coming up on Great Depression 2: Electric Boogaloo pretty soon [citation needed], so we could just do the same thing our ancestors did with flour sacks back in the day and turn them into children's clothes. Or maybe even tents for the ever-growing homeless camp-cities. The dystopian possibilities are endless!
enter the Jump-o-cabin, press The Button, be catapulted into airship 3, fly to somewhere else, get parachuted down..
Bonus: the just-landed Jump-o-cabin can be used as free-standing toilet. uh, Was already used as...
As long as it's just one small bubble with hydrogen, you can flare it off or combine with oxygen from the air outside to reduce lift.
How does an airship solve any of those problems? Its still got to go through customs and such, and still go through local truck delivery
I think that has to come after, not before.
>"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
If it’s only vaguely similar in fact, then that seems hardly convincing.
Yeah, and that shit isn't going to happen either for a bazillion $very_good_reasons.
Not least safety.
I mean, yeah, let's just turn up at a densely populated environment and use a winch to long-line drop a few tons of cargo.
Whilst the general public and employees are walking around the place ?
When there's overhead cabling around ?
Even in perfect weather, with no wind, no rain, its still a dumb-as-shit idea.
Nor is it clear how they are refuelled, or how they are immune from the same fluctuations in fuel cost as conventional cargo aircraft.
But what is clear is that you should “possibly invest” in his syndicate which is funding all this…
Northwest = NO YUO!
Technically 22 other places are supposed to accept international mail, but in reality, the other 5% go through Newark (for some surface mail), Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa.
This creates some long detours.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/reports/audit-reports/international-...
Countries know goods must flow through certain choke points so they can essentially quality control the manifests.
Remove that and pre-authorised customs will go again.
My concern is around the space an airship takes up; coordinating traffic for maximum throughput is going to be a nightmare.
> For air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage.
> Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5 days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to look pretty good. If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time.
The need for specific geological features dramatically limits the amount of ports we can have, which seriously affects costs. If you could build a single, tiny airship point in every major city, you could save a bundle, and likely be close enough to the destination to unload directly to the customer at the port.
Whether there is any market for an "in between" mode is an open question, and it's the business case of these airships for better or worse.
If an airplane takes 12 hours to cross the ocean, and it takes 2 days on both sides with customs, warehouses, trucking and the last mile delivery, then it's a total of 4.5 days. If the airship takes 5 days to take the ocean, and the same 2 days on both sides, the total is 9 days. Despite being 10 times as slow in flight, the end-to-end delivery time is only two times slower than the one for the airplane.
The main observation that this guy made one year ago was that airships benefit from the square-cube law. A truly gigantic airship can carry a load proportional to its volume, but experiences drag proportional to its cross-sectional area, so it ends up having very good fuel economy. But to get to this scale you need to be at least as big as the Hindenburg, preferably much larger.
But then it's difficult to see how you can deliver loads of a few hundred tons from point to point.
I think the guy would have a much better pitch if he sticks to the idea that the speed disadvantage is significantly reduced by the first and last mile overhead that impact equally both cargo jets and airships.
"If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other..."
How do you handle customs inspections and duties on imports? As TFA states, in current air freight, "there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker..." Freight has to go through the warehouse on arrival in-country so the customs inspectors can look at it and assess duties. The article seems to envision the airship dropping down directly at the destination address, which would be that nation's customs agency's worst nightmare.
Seriously, if a Toyota supplier in Japan delivers parts daily to a factory in Ohio, do they go through regular customs or is there some other arrangement? Can they fly directly to an airfield near the factory?
It still doesn't address the case where a random small business receives a container full of their latest items from a supplier.
The first thing I funnily thought of with direct-to-customer was narcotics. If countries don't inspect goods coming in (assuming that countries with a risk of narcotics being shipped out have already lost), then it makes for a great muling opportunity, or just wholesale shipment.
Frequency != latency
I ran a tugboat business and we had all of the required paperwork to file directly with U.S. Customs.
In many cases, we moved cargo too big to be transferred at a port or terminal.
> I ran a tugboat business
Probably no different from private airfields, you have to file customs paperwork before arriving, and they can send inspectors out.
Firstly, not just any FBO is a point of entry.
Which brings us to the second point, the entire reason for designated points of entry is so that the customs officials can be on site already. As in, assigned to that FBO. Now at times specialists have to be sent out. (Think exotic or rare animals or biological/agricultural products.) But if that happens, your freight, and maybe even you, are quarantined and your freight isn't going anywhere any time soon. Believe me.
Most important, and relevant in this context is the third issue. Which is the fact that arrivals are met by customs officials and passengers and cargo are always subject to the same inspections/regulations as they are at any commercial airport.
So the original question is valid, how are they handling customs at the scale they're hoping to achieve in a fashion any faster than anyone else?
But for regular freight I doubt it. I use to fly from England to France in a single engine plane, pre Brexit, and you might think just stick stuff in the plane in an airfield in the UK, fly to a field in France drop it off, vive the single market and that. But no you have to fly to a customs airport in the UK, queue up with your passport as usual, do the same in France then fly on to your field. Probably France to Germany say would be ok. It all depends on the local laws.
1) The economic model is unproven so even initial costs will be far too high to pay of debt incurred to manufacture, market, and maintain and they're not competitive with extant mass-market alternatives on cost & time out-of-the-gate with no clear pathway to even being niche competitive, let alone having mass-market adoption. And no, the Airship cruise industry is never going to take-off (heh) because there wouldn't be any extant "ports of call" (unlike with sea-going cruise ships) and no way to economically stimulate their construction.
2) Inclement weather mitigations (aside from docking, re-routing (delaying), or rescheduling (also delaying)) are virtually non-existent so there's a much higher trip variance which eats into fuel, time, labor, and ultimately a far higher cost variance which (as a 2nd order effect) leads to an overall MUCH higher cost to operate ANY route compared to conventional cargo or mixed-mode transportation. As a historic model, look at the air cargo transport costs in the transition from mandated multi-stop piston engine refueling and in-weather flying in the late 1930s to single-hop above-the-weather flying in the gas turbine "jet age" of the late 1940s. It's not JUST that jets were much faster, they were also far more predictable to service routes AND had far lower maintenance costs. A lower, slower, and less predictable airship with higher maintenance costs and, at best, a handful of percentage points off of the dollars/mile/ton figure with a higher initial cost outlay doesn't merit investment.
3) Safety is still a huge issue for any airship attempting station-keeping or full-authority-navigation close to any ground-effect altitude which is, unfortunately, also the airspace where any accident is likely to cause the most collateral damage. No other form of transport has this problem and, with current tech, would seem insolvable without turning the airship into a poorly performing version of a plane or rotor-craft.
What IS spent on new ships globally, and what direction does it point in?
It points to that the business is not only doing good but that investments is being made, heavily.
• Approximately 900 container ships are currently being built or on order worldwide
• These have a combined capacity of 6.8 million TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units)
Major shipping lines:
• Evergreen: 20 ships of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2024-2025)
• OOCL: 10 vessels of 16,000 TEU capacity
• MSC: Multiple orders including 24,100 TEU ultra-large ships and smaller vessels
• CMA-CGM: 6 vessels of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2025)
On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the industrial revolution the average pace of technological advance was extremely slow. The Mongols conquered Asia with weaponry that would have been instantly familiar to people living 2000 years earlier. Perhaps our descendants 1000 years from now will still be using refrigerators virtually identical to our own.
I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve into nothing once any real-world application is attempted. I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions without incident.
I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make batteries obsolete.
Whether the specific proof of radical change you're waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to everything that came before it.
Oculus DK1 shipped in 2012. VR is still a niche anime/gamer/anime-gamer product. AI bubble is correcting fast. Boom Overture supersonic jetliner isn't flying. Starship just landed for the first time, and it did land but appeared to have gone full banana soon after. Insane but it's not going into service for a little while. Brain-computer interfaces... meh. They were always stuck at immune response problem and that's why no one is doing invasive BCI, not because it wasn't invented back in 80s or whenever it was.
GP's claim is that things are slowing down and none of inventions are life changing big. Things are definitely slowing down and none of recent inventions are intercontinental teleportation certified for commercial services big.
>The AD500 was "a new-generation airship making use of advanced materials and technology." It was 164 feet (50 m) long and contained 181,200 cubic feet (5,130 m3) of helium.
>Unfortunately, on 8 March 1979, the month-old AD500 was seriously damaged when the nosecone failed while the ship was moored in high winds.
And various other things not really working till they went bust in 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries
I wonder if Airship Industries (2024) will do any better?
Their ships don't looks very different - old co https://www.airliners.net/photo/Airship-Industries/Airship-I...
New co https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
"Well the front's not supposed to fall off, for a start."
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill
Reusable rockets were more of an economic issue, is there enough demand for economic viability. That was always going to be the real magic. I think that is still an open question but it at least appears plausible.
It just doesn't seem very practical, basically you'd need to transport freight to places with no access to sea/roads or rails and can't fit it on an airplane. Is there a lot of demand for this? Also presumably such areas would have harsh and unpredictable weather..
> Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
Survivor bias? For every case of it working out there are many more of people wasting time and enthusiasm on something that's a dead end (and this was the general consensus for the past 80 years or so)
So I'm just curious what is that segment and how large ($) can it be? What cargo exactly would it be transporting?
Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had physics problems, and no matter how hard anyone tried, they were guaranteed to run into them. Cargo airships also have a physics problem that make them absurdly expensive and risky to put cargo on. In both cases, this is an idea that is 100 years old and where the physics has been studied. This time is not different unless you have solid reasoning.
Contrast that with rockets, to use another Musk example: Rockets are well within the bounds of physics, but a hard engineering problem. Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).
Because airships are really cool.
If they can't do that, at least they could be competitive.
That is not a winning combination for putting any kind of freight carrying out of business. The main reason people use air freight today is to get something from one continent to another in 24 hours. Airships will never do that.
No it wasn't. It was done many times in the 60s and 70s — e.g. all the moon landings.
The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling containers between China and the rest of the world that's still tiny.
The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU. This is comparable to a B-747 freighter. Current new price of a B-747 freighter is about US$400 million. Trips per unit time would be less but fuel cost would be lower.
Large container ships are now in the 20,000 TEU range.
It's not clear there's much demand for faster container shipping. Container ships tend to run slower than they can, to save fuel. Maersk has some 4,000 TEU high speed container ships capable of 29 knots, but due to lack of a market and huge fuel costs, they're mothballed in a loch in Scotland.
[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66b24fc3f58cf0...
Or maybe they are back? There aren't a lot of sources I could find.
Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo", not "500 ton total mass". And 500 tons of cargo are at minimum 25 TEU.
If they are competing with 747 freighters, those containers will almost always be "cubed out" (the container volume is full long before reaching its maximum legal weight), meaning the airship would load several times as many containers.
This is another advantage they have against air freight. Those 747s are frequently cubed out themselves, flying lighter than they would like. And you can't easily build much more volume into jet aircraft (well, you can, that's what the Airbus Beluga XL is, and apparently several air freight companies are pestering Airbus to re-open a production line for those). Airships, on the other hand, will be practicably impossible to cube out.
From their images, the airship is about 30 containers long. That's only 600 feet, shorter than the Macon or the Hindenburg. Useful lift of the Hindenburg was 232,000 kg.
One thing worth considering is going back to hydrogen as a lifting gas. Not only is it a better lifting gas than helium and much cheaper, it could be used as fuel.
An airship that burned its own lifting gas would have the curious property of getting heavier the further it traveled. This could be countered by dual-fueling it and also have engines that burned heavier-than-air fuel like kerosene or propane. The hydrogen engines could burn the lifting gas at the same rate as the kerosene engines burn the ballast-fuel.
That article mentions that the Zeppelins experimented with burning Hydrogen lift gas as fuel "without much success" but doesn't add detail.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blau_gas
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buoyancy_compensator_(aviation...
I'd expect that, like a lot of problems zeppelins had in the 1920s, burning hydrogen would be more feasible with modern technology.
I'd also point out that the thing that made hydrogen dangerous in those airships was that the skin was two layers. The inner skin was the gas bags, which were very fragile, and then the rigid structure and the outer skin to protect the fragile bags. This was a problem because hydrogen could accumulate and mix with air between the inner and outer skins. The outer skin also was quite flammable. Nowadays, we can make materials that are both strong enough to serve as an outer skin and impervious enough to serve as a gas bag for lifting gas, so modern airships have only one skin and nowhere for the lifting gas to mix with air inside the structure.
But if you aim for a buoyancy-neutral fuel, you can just add hydrogen to the mix, as little or much as you need. That custom blend then would be precisely the thing you don't invent a creative name for but just use a color code ("the blue one").
Sounds perfect for a cargo situation. Add new cargo as old cargo is removed.
Would this issue even be a problem for fixed routes? If you're always taking full containers between two points, that is.
The other problem is the drones. For this to work you’d be shipping either regular TEU containers or the air freight equivalent (not sure what they’re called but there’s a standard shape I believe), however no drone available today can move either of those. That means new drones, new shipping form factors, or both, and those are both hard problems that you probably don’t want to face when already trying to launch a new freight modality.
You could imagine some sort of futuristic flying Amazon warehouse/drone carrier: It would be pre-stocked at a distribution center, with packets already arranged in a way that they can be picked up by drones individually. Then it floats over a neighborhood while the drones deliver the individual packets to the homes below.
This typo is perfect.
>> 20 kills? Dude, you're cracked.
> (slang) Crazy; crackpot.
is more common in every day use than meaning 4
>(slang) Extremely good at something (usually a video game).
Neither the Merriam-Webster dictionary nor the Cambridge dictionary[0] list meaning 4, further hinting that it is a use that is mostly occurring in niche online communities. Note that I'm not saying meaning 4 is incorrect[1]. There's no such thing. Words is words. Usage is meaning. But I think I am justified in my belief that it is still relatively uncommon.
[0] The OED wanted money to show me their list of meanings.
[1] Although it is almost assuredly a mishearing of "crack".
This intended meaning is obvious from context.
Even "S-tier" has crept into the non-gamer vernacular. My wife and her friends - not gamers - are using it.
TikTok spreads this stuff like wildfire.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked
https://www.tiktok.com/discover/what-does-cracked-mean-in-sl...
I didn't understand this part, specifically how you could beat today's air freight. Why wouldn't airships be subject to the same (ahem) overhead at either end?
Competitive enough on speed while being less expensive makes sense, though.
If (big regulatory issues here) you can deliver directly from one site to another, you eliminate trucking goods to the source airport & from the destination airport. A 3 hour dirigible flight is slower than a 45 minute cargo plane flight, but buffering at a warehouse to loading / unload a truck (twice) could easily add 2-3 days latency.
You're right that there are big regulatory issues still.
I remember when i had a students job, some older colleague told me he sunk a nice sum into this. Foolishly, maybe!
It’s not just an easy target to hit, it’s a symbolic target.
Airships were abandoned because very large objects falling out of the sky did not appeal to the public… and too many of them fell.
Extremely severe weather brings down relatively tough aircraft, but once on the ground or in hangars they are relatively safe. Airships are flying cheesepuffs.
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS2101....
After normalizing the data by annual flight hours, there was no obvious trend over time for turbulence-related Part 121 accidents during this period [1989-2018].
The BBC article cites a modelling paper. In a conflict between real data and a simulation, real data should win.
Also the airship is simply too slow to dodge any sudden severe weather, even if they saw it coming hours before.
How many of them fell? Tried searching this up and barely any fell. Very few deaths too.
This list is quite comprehensive I think
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-8
The L-8/Ghost Blimp took off with a crew of two from San Francisco in 1942. They found an oil slick (which was the last time either crew member was known to be alive) and then drifted before it crash landed in front of a home in Daly City.
I had never heard of this event before now and it’s a heck of an interesting late night rabbit hole. Thanks for the link!
The list of Zepplins is also enlightening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zeppelins
Many countries export and import fruits from neighboring countries, because goods like fruits need a riping process and time, and storage space locally is more expensive than transporting them via container ship.
For example, almost the same fruits that are exported from Hawaii are simultaneously imported from Chile, and vice versa. Both nations grow those natively, but storage space on the ground is more expensive than shipment.
If this was part or focus of the airship freighting company, I'd see great potential there. Not even that, they wouldn't even need to transport anything, if they could invent a storage space in the air that's tax free, or maybe even offshore above the water.
like, a boat?
Above water: maybe rope-anchored airships.
What I wanted to point out is that taxes are ground based, meaning the volume that's available above the ground usually is not used because of physical limitations of buildings and construction.
You could increase that efficiency of recurring costs for land vs storage space with airships.
The most efficient solution is btw not doing anything, and just leave the goods where they are produced, and stop producing too much for the own population. I'm pointing out that the concepts of finance and economies don't necessarily come hand in hand with what's more efficient to build. Otherwise people would use trains and not cars and planes.
Is it financial costs only? Is it energy costs over time? Is it taxes over time? Is it physical space vs ground area ratio? Is it popularity and convenience (like in the car vs train case)?
You were arguing that warehouses are cheap to build, but that only works far outside densely populated areas.
A lot of countries are settled more densely than the US due to sheer lack of available land. So if we want to describe this problem correctly, we'd also have to account for South-East Asian, or South-American, or Polynesian, or European countries in my opinion.
Fruits picked ripe from the tree are significantly tastier and probably healthier.
If you're want to use your cargo airship for point to point transport, you'll need ballast at the target point so that the buoyancy of the airship doesn’t change too much. CargoLifter back then used water. Their prototype could lift an armoured vehicle and lower it – while maintaining buoyancy through pumping water with an high speed pump. They planned cargo services for very remote points.
But if you’ll can transport water and a high speed pump and a mobile mooring tower to the very remote target, chances are, you’ll already can transport the cargo itself to that target.
Today the CargoLifter hangar is the biggest indoor water park.
According to AI, there have been 5 historical attempts to make airships work before the modern resurgence:
The early experimental phase (1780s–1850s), The pioneering era (1850s–1900s), The golden age (1900s–1930s), A post-Hindenburg decline (1930s), Cold War military uses (1940s–1970s), and A modern resurgence (1990s–present).
"When Zeppelins Ruled The Earth" (6m47s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU&ab_channel=Simon...
Someone long ago did a napkin calculation for me showing a hard vacuum airship made of reinforced concrete can work if you make it big enough. What are a few miles on the cosmic scale?
>Lighter Than Air, a company owned by Google's co-founder, begins testing Pathfinder 1, a next-generation airship that could revolutionize air travel, cargo transport, and the movement of humanitarian aid.
are doing with their ship? I think it's built and sitting around. (https://www.domusweb.it/en/sustainable-cities/gallery/2023/1...)
They currently are showing the world what cargo airships can do (ie nothing). The world just perpetually doesn't want to listen.
What has changed?
Honestly, it sounds like a cool thing to work on, but this article is not convincing about the potential market. I can easily imagine former SpaceX and Hyperloop engineers thinking a cool technology will simply find a market, but that's not really what Elon Musk did with SpaceX.
A team of what??
Reminds me of CargoLifter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
The german article states that the price the Zeppelin GmbH (yes those guys) calculated, that the costs of transportation via airship, would be about 10 times as high as conventional methods.
CargoLifter used helium which is stupidly expensive, this is supposed to use hydrogen and more modern materials but i think that does not make a factor of 10.
Also "current FAA guidance disallows the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas". So good luck with that.
As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.
Old Airships had either rain collectors (yep really) or piston engines which burned gas with a similar density to air (which digs a lot into your carrying capacity and volume).
Venting helium is way to expensive and one of the reasons CargoLifter failed, was that they never managed to get water collection running.
This article and the linked website have no idea how to solve the propulsion problem. There is some stuff about turbines going with the the old Zeppelin approach, of burning gas. Or something about solar cells, which obviously would not work because solar cells are rigid and heavy but this is supposed to be semi rigid. And you would need heavy batteries too.
Also airships sink when they get wet. And it gets warm the gas expands and it rises. You need ballast to account for that; this is large so it will do that a lot.
Don't forget how stupidly large these things are and thus how much wind is a problem. The linked website claims a predicted length of 388 and width of 78 Meters minimum!
So maneuverability is going to be a large problem, you can overcome this by adding lots of propellers everywhere but that add weight and uses fuel.
Now imagine a 388x78 m giant filled with hydrogen, with hordes of engines everywhere, dropping of a bunch of containers at some delivery center...
Since wind might be coming from every direction you need a landing circle (!) of roughly a km in diameter. This is why old Zeppelins landed at large (!) airstrips or sometimes on masts attached to skyscrapers.
Then cargo gets loaded off and ballast of the same weight must be moved onto the ship.
That ballast has to go somewhere, so the ship either needs water tanks (again loss of carrying capacity). Or the landing strip has some attachable ballast (how do you transport that back and forth?).
If you have the infrastructure to accommodate this thing you can be reached by truck or rail, which is cheaper, not depended on weather and so on... And weirdly enough you can be reached by cargo aircraft which is a solved problem!
Door to door delivery was exactly what CargoLifter was supposed to do. But it was basically a more expensive and clunky helicopter. Thus it failed.
Can't you just compress lifting gas to reduce it's volume?
But compressing the gas takes time. If you intend to leave the ship parked there until you finish this, you will need a lot more of space.
I looked up some compressor manufacturers. And got roughly the following:
Large helium compressors, which compress like 2000 liters of helium per minute to 200bar, weight around 2 tons and consume power in the order of 60kw.
Not sure if 2000 liters per minute is the right amount but you get the idea.
So even if you can fit that thing on your airship, the 60kw power plant and all its accompanying fuel does not fit.
And remember you are doing this because of fuel usage the first place! So you would be using fuel to compress gas which you have to compress because you are using fuel...
Usually gasses like this are compressed (and liquified) via something like the Linde process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampson%E2%80%93Linde_cycle
That is industrial scale and does not go onto anything that moves...
And you would need to store your compressed gasses somewhere too.
All of this is super complex, heavy, requires stupid amounts of energy and thus is way to costly to do on something that flies.
What is the target operating speed considering cargo weight?
How much cargo can such an airship carry at its target operating speed such that this is more efficient than air-freight and land-freight?
Airship Industries is designing its vehicle to dominate transoceanic air freight. It checks all the right boxes. It shortens end-to-end freight delivery time. It lowers freight handling costs, delays, and breakage. It’s highly profitable on a unit basis. It lowers fuel burn and carbon emissions by 75 percent without any sustainable fuel breakthroughs.
How many shipping container can a single airship carry?