https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlander_...
First flight was 2012, production starts in 2028? Maybe?
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?
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.
Can you not compress the helium, when you no longer want it so buoyant?
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.
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.
Up to a critical density/weight/kwh, afterwards it doesn't matter.
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".
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).
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!
How can you build a railroad across an ocean?
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.
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:
New rail will be very expensive to install and politicians are afraid of saying "we may need taxes to cover this".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.