Pathfinder 1: The Airship That Could Usher in a New Age | Hacker News Reader

Pathfinder 1: The Airship That Could Usher in a New Age

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I am old enough to have seen now 30 years of, "Maybe airships are coming back" articles.

I liked the one that looked like a bum, that was the best one.

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

First flight was 2012, production starts in 2028? Maybe?

Kind of like VR then. Promising tech, that is always just a few more iterations away from being incredible.

I play VR games on a $500 device. It's pretty incredible already.

I mean we haven't really used airships for anything except war since the turn of the century. And even in war their usecases were very specialized. It seems like a solution looking for problems.

My dad's uncle is 94 and he remembers seeing the Hindenburg flying over Atlantic Canada toward New Jersey the day before it crashed and burned. He was born in 1930 so was 6 and 3/4 years old at the time. Obviously he also lived through WW2. It's crazy how much he has lived through and seen.

I seem to have missed the business reasoning for this development?

Why are they investing money and time into this?

I thought the consensus is that airships are just too hard to dock/land, handle in anything than low wind scenarios that they are not much use?

If we get serious about reducing emissions - airtravel has to go in its current form. So there could be an opening for lighter than air approach.

This would be such a big dent in humanity learning that the people on the other side of the world are just that: people.

I sincerely hope we will be able to maintain current air-travel by switching to efuels and similar means.

Humanity having to ditch air-travel at todays levels would be a massive social negative.

We won’t. We still haven’t even started touching geo-engineering at scale yet.

Getting humanity to give up anything without either killing or enslaving a large swath is not happening or realistic. We can’t even get rid of nuclear weapon stockpiling which has a much lower positive vibe from nearly everyone.

Nah. The most likely scenarios are a switch to pure ammonia combustion and/or sourcing "all green" methane to make carbon-neutral or near-zero emissions flight. Unfortunately, ammonia combustion is inefficient and synthetic hydrocarbon fuel is far too expensive atm.

We'll never get away from the brutal physics:

1. Long flights require planes to get lighter (burn fuel) as they go further so battery power doesn't work.

2. Wings are just too damn efficient at producing lift.

3. Putting enough on-board safe-station-keeping power (weight) on an airship makes it a very poor airship.

4. A very good airship is least safe to fly precisely where is has the most potential to cause damage and loss of life.

>1. Long flights require planes to get lighter (burn fuel) as they go further so battery power doesn't work.

Up to a critical density/weight/kwh, afterwards it doesn't matter.

I just don't see how it's a better idea than high-speed rail.

Probably cheaper to deploy, but the capacity will always be low and speed slow.

I'm not one for an "either or" generally, but I really have a hard time seeing the benefit of blimps beyond "this is neat and kinda fun".

Intra-continental I don't think anything beats high-speed rail. Inter-continental I don't think high speed rail is viable, unless you have a transatlantic locomotive in your pocket that you aren't telling anyone about.

I don't think this is an issue. It's a 1% problem.

Most of the population of the world lives on 2 contiguous land masses. Flights to bridge the masses is fine but would represent a small fraction of the transport needed.

Rail doesn't have to solve all problems. It's a good solution to most problems.

But back to the blimp proposals, I can't see how a blimp would be a better option vs a boat. (Traditional flight is probably better than either).

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

Imagine a hexagonal grid of these between continents, with aqua-farms, data-centers, resorts, casinos, floating cities/solar/wind sprinkled in between. Err... Aqua-Loop?

Maybe 'grow' them 'in-situ' like corals, funghi, sponges, seaweed, algae, bamboo, whatever, by means of genetic manipulation.

edit: Not to forget, conduits for HVDC, ZBLAN, and all sorts of pipelinable stuff for the global super smart grid.

FUCK YEAH!

edding: Icebergs, yes, yes, Gridguards no less!

"I don't see how it's a better idea than high-speed rail" is pretty much my follow up to almost any proposal for transportation improvements in the states, which critically are never rail, what wild is almost everyone I've ever spoken with agree and yet..crickets

That's because the only way to make rail work in the US is via a federal government implementation.

New rail will be very expensive to install and politicians are afraid of saying "we may need taxes to cover this".

High speed rail is slow. NY to LA, Miami to Seattle will take forever. And a tunnels under the Rockies will be quite the challenge.

> I just don't see how it's a better idea than high-speed rail.

How can you build a railroad across an ocean?

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

That does not appear practical to replace intercontinental flights.

One of the reasons why air travel is practical, and rail isn't, is because you don't need to build any infrastructure between airports. The other reason is because you can adjust flights between airports without needing to adjust infrastructure.

That would depend on several things. For one, how dense that grid would be. For another, what would be built into/next to/adjacent to the nodes/hubs and spokes of that grid, making building such a grid of floating, submerged tunnels worthwile in the first place. Hen<->Egg, bootstrapping, yadda yarr yarr...

edding: Also imagine something like really long freight trains, a mile or so, double stacked, only running at something like 200 mph. And compare the capacity with any freight plane in use, vs. the speed of container ships. Also the possibility for pipelines right next to it. Conduits for energy and data. On and on and on...

edding: In case you havn't noticed, linking myself, elsethreads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43131224

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130680

It's 2-4% at worst. While it might be nice to reduce, it's not pressing.

The transition is well under way for the big 3 carbon emission sources -- electricity generation, ground transportation and heating. After agriculture, air travel is one of the biggest remaining obstacles to net zero.

If you can handle the wind scenario and don't mind slow speed, you can run on electricity for a very long time (and have quite a large surface area to stick panels on) which makes opex look attractive compared with heavier than air flight as well as being climate friendly. There's also probably an element of "Sergey Brin believes in it and he's not short of money..."

Yeah.

The opening paragraphs admit that Sergey Brin paid for it.

And the final paragraphs finally get past the "Big!, Shiny!!, Cool!!!" gushing, to admit that there don't seem to be any use cases.

Maybe Sergey is a steampunk fan?

I can fully accept a "I like the idea and have the money" motive. But a journalist worth their money should make this clear.

> But a journalist worth their money...

The author did...eventually. After making sure that his article had collected all the Clicks, Time on Page, and whatever other metrics he needs to keep the BBC convinced that he's worth paying a journalist's salary to.

1. A guy with $164 billion is willing to pay $250 million for it.

2. If in the future a Peak Oil type scenario arises, and electric planes aren't able to overcome issues of battery energy density, and power-to-gas doesn't come through either, some replacement form of air travel might be very useful. Low probability, but very high reward.

#2 is fanciful.

in scenario 2 people just start either digging a lot of canals or laying more train tracks.

A German company had a go at this with CargoLifter [1] in the mid 90s. They wanted - as the name says - transport oversized loads that are hard to transport on road or would otherwise require an expensive transport like long detours on waterways. Their hangar is now an indoor water park [2].

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Islands_Resort

I am well aware of their fate.

Turns out, if you transport extremely heavy stuff, you'll either need to take on massive ballast when offloading or ditch much of your expensive Helium. Either is not helping with turning a profit.

Let alone that fact, that any of this will only work of there is no wind at both the start and end of your journey.

But I guess the swimming resort is kinda nice.

As compared to transporting passengers, transporting cargo seems like a good choice when it comes to the weather, you probably have a lot more freedom in scheduling flights, being able to wait for good conditions. With the ballast, did they not plan to compensate the weight of the cargo with water? Certainly adds complexity and probably also risk if you have to load a hundred tons of water into an airship relatively quickly, but does not sound completely unreasonable to me.

Part of the pitch was to be able to deliver extra heavy cargo to places without other infrastructure, but if there is no other infrastrukcture, how do they get the water(-tanks) and (big) pumps there?

Portable pumps used by fire fighters can deliver up to 2 m³/min at 10 bar weighing somewhere in the range of 150-200 kg. With five of those you could load 100 tons in 10 minutes which seems quick enough to me but I have no idea how quick one has to be, I am just comparing to the time scale I would assume dropping off the cargo would take. And I would just place the pumps on the airship and lower them to the ground, maybe together with the cargo. And for tanks, 100 m³ are five of the larger above ground pools worth of water weighing about 100 kg a piece. Or look at those water inflated flood barriers. You could probably carry 100 m³ worth of water storage into the middle of nowhere without too much trouble in a bunch of back bags if you really had to. What you still need is a water source. If you only have a normal tap, it will take a hand full of days to fill 100 m³, but completely feasible. Or a diesel generator, a small pump, and enough hoses to reach a nearby lake or stream. Nothing you could not deliver with a helicopter. But what actually is the imagined use case here, under what circumstances would you want to drop off some heavy and probably expensive equipment in the inaccessible middle of nowhere? As soon as you can get there with (off-road) vehicles, it seems pretty simple to get the necessary materials there.

> Turns out, if you transport extremely heavy stuff, you'll either need to take on massive ballast when offloading or ditch much of your expensive Helium.

Can you not compress the helium, when you no longer want it so buoyant?

Then the extremely heavy stuff you'd be transporting would at least partly be a lot of pressure tanks and compressors and fuel to power the compressing. I don't know how the numbers work out but I'm guessing you can't just make an air-submarine.

> I'm guessing you can't just make an air-submarine.

I hadn't realized I wanted this until I found out I couldn't have it :(

Might be a billionaire yacht alternative. Think super yacht but on the sky.

That's basically the plot of Bioshock Infinite

they're a replacement for cargoships. If done right, they're faster than a cargoship, but could (maybe) carry lots of capacity for cheap, while also not requiring them to take the same routes as a ship.

A few of these hovering over cities at all times would make good police watch towers with aimable spotlights and docking hubs for police drones.

They'll also be prime targets for drones.

>A century after terrifying disasters, is it a safe-enough bet?

In the Hindenberg disaster, 35 of the airship's 97 occupants died. Meanwhile, every time I browse the front page of HN, there seems to be another story of an aircraft crashing or being shot down and everyone on board being killed instantly.

Yeah in the end it's not about the risk, but about it taking a week to get across the Atlantic in one. Ain't nobody got time for that.

People cross the Atlantic in cruise ships all the time. I would be much more interested in an airship Cruise.

Why other than the novelty? I’ve taken an ocean liner with great food, lectures, shows, multiple places you could eat, a promenade walk, etc.

I like the airship idea over ocean ships because land doesn't get in the way. I imagine a ring of airships encircling the globe based on the prevailing winds. Except bigger, like a handful of sky cities (hydrogen being abundant, the square-cube law being what it is).

So instead of shipping something from the other side of the planet, you can just wait a few weeks until the warehouse is overhead, and burn a lot less fuel overall.

Or maybe you're having a conference in one. Either take a plane there and have your conference in the sky, taking the slow way back. Or get on when it's overhead and take a plane back (or if you're really patient, take the long way around the planet). The change of scenery would be much better than just flying to Vegas all the time.

Upthread was about moving people.

New York City to (near) London is almost certainly the most common route by ship and it really isn't that many people in the scheme of things. I couldn't imagine having gone to my boss and telling them I'd spend a week getting to London for an event and spend 4x or whatever the amount. You can also get New York to Hamburg or a shortish train trip from Paris. And business passengers are most of the (especially premium) travel volume on those general routes. (And that doesn't even take into account far less frequent liner schedules.)

I don't dispute that, if you take budgets out of the equation, we could probably make corporate events more exclusive and more fun, but that's not really the way things are.

Something like half of all rigid airships ended their lives in crashes. That's an airframe loss rate far in excess of anything you see with regular aircraft.

The Hindenburg was one of only two passenger airships, so imagine if 50% of passenger aircraft eventually crashed. There was also no obvious route towards making them safer at the time. Even if the problem of flammability could be solved, they were very vulnerable to bad weather and it was still decades before modern weather forecasting.

Forget 50%, the US Navy built five rigid airships.

ZR-1 through ZR-5.

The only one that wasn’t destroyed by a crash that also killed most if not all of its crew was ZR-3 and its history is filled with so many near-disasters that it was pure chance that the rigid airships program didn’t have a 100% loss rate.

More and more the present moment seems like a shitty echo of the gilded age.

previous discussion ~1.5 year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013919

Helium of all things basically leads me to believe this is wishful thinking only a billionaire could love. Granted, he wasn’t a rich man, but Weigert’s Vector W8 seems a reasonable comparison. Making something impressive is, frankly, asking for the free market to slap one in the face more often than change the world in the long run.

Bonus points if their ad campaign uses the slogan “The Segway of the Skies”

"Helium is less flammable than hydrogen" uh-huh

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