How Airships Could Overcome a Century of Failure

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modeltrains

modeltrains

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March 2, 2022 A new breed of airships seeks to take flight and provide a greener solution for both luxury travel and heavy industry. But is the business case for bringing them back enough to overcome a troubled past?
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Every 5-10 years we see a new airship that will revolutionize air travel and air cargo.

It never happens. I suspect the main reasons are economics, weather, public perception, and history.

Helium is already in short supply and expensive and not really green. carbon fiber is expensive.

Airships are slow and low. They cruise less than 40kts below 10,000ft. In the wether and wind.
Even a 10kt headwind reduces your cruise speed by 25%. Rain, wind, icing, turbulence.
How do you top mountains safely?

How do you convince the public or FedEx that a 100 hour trip is better than a 10 hour trip?
 
mach7 said:
Every 5-10 years we see a new airship that will revolutionize air travel and air cargo.

It never happens. I suspect the main reasons are economics, weather, public perception, and history.

Helium is already in short supply and expensive and not really green. carbon fiber is expensive.

Airships are slow and low. They cruise less than 40kts below 10,000ft. In the wether and wind.
Even a 10kt headwind reduces your cruise speed by 25%. Rain, wind, icing, turbulence.
How do you top mountains safely?

How do you convince the public or FedEx that a 100 hour trip is better than a 10 hour trip?
Click to expand...
They are pretty clear in the video that they won't ever compete with mature transportation markets and that their business will always serve a very small niche. But, in those small niches, they have the potential to be disruptive. What if all those places served by weird services like "Ice Road Truckers" could be served year 'round and not just in winter? What if the people assembling high voltage towers in the mountains with helicopters could drop a fully built tower in one trip rather than three, five, or six and having a crew assemble it ten stories in the air and exposed to the elements? What if they could harvest timber from inaccessible mountainsides without building roads or logging railroads?

At least, that's their hope. It's a small market, and they admit that, but in those markets they have historically hoped, and still hope, to find a place. It hasn't worked out before, but still, I wish them luck.
 
I'd like to see passenger rail make a comeback. I like the idea of a scenic view and comfortable accommodations. Unfortunately, rail travel is expensive. I looked into Amtrak's Sanford FL to Lorton VA car train. It was three times the cost of air travel and compared to driving, it was almost 3 times the cost and would only save me about 5 hours on the trip.
 
Rob Campbell said:
I'd like to see passenger rail make a comeback. I like the idea of a scenic view and comfortable accommodations. Unfortunately, rail travel is expensive. I looked into Amtrak's Sanford FL to Lorton VA car train. It was three times the cost of air travel and compared to driving, it was almost 3 times the cost and would only save me about 5 hours on the trip.
Click to expand...
Someone on here talked about going from the East Coast to one of the Balls rocket launches out west and by taking a train it was going to be more economical, so I went and looked it up on the Amtrak site and found the same thing that you did. It's very expensive, I don't know how they keep the cars filled up at those rates.

If America would quit going to the other side of the planet and bombing people like we always do, we would have lots of money to put in high-speed rail systems. Where you could go from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours, and have every major city connected with all high-speed trains. Putting out no pollution and getting all of their power from solar, wind, and many other non-polluting ways. But that's another whole story ;) .
 
Airships don't fare well in bad weather like you see in "Ice Road Truckers". Virtually every large airship every built was destroyed by weather events. I'm not counting the small blimps used for TV cameras... and they ground those in high winds, too.
 
hobie1dog said:
Someone on here talked about going from the East Coast to one of the Balls rocket launches out west and by taking a train it was going to be more economical, so I went and looked it up on the Amtrak site and found the same thing that you did. It's very expensive, I don't know how they keep the cars filled up at those rates.

If America would quit going to the other side of the planet and bombing people like we always do, we would have lots of money to put in high-speed rail systems. Where you could go from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours, and have every major city connected with all high-speed trains. Putting out no pollution and getting all of their power from solar, wind, and many other non-polluting ways. But that's another whole story ;) .
Click to expand...
My wife and I took Amtrak last August from here (Ohio), to New Mexico. Of course it took longer, but it was several hundred dollars cheaper than airfare. The price jump between coach and a roomette was staggering. For the two of us it would have been about $1000 more for the round trip, but the seats in coach on Amtrak are FAR nicer than most business class seats on airplanes. We really enjoyed it (except for one part in the middle that wasn't really Amtrak's fault).
 
modeltrains said:
The question is where do those systems get put.
Click to expand...

There is a high speed line proposed at least from Columbus, OH to Chicago and through Fort Wayne. There has been chatter, but to my knowledge no real commitment and property acquisition yet. Still, I'd like to be able to hope on a train, see the Cubs and go back home.
 
modeltrains said:
The question is where do those systems get put.
Click to expand...
Someone: "Well you put it in the interstate median."

Not on I-70 here in central Missouri, the median is too narrow for both clearance and for proper drainage channels for both the track and the road.

ESPECIALLY with the kinds of rains we can have in Missouri, http://climate.missouri.edu/climate.php
The town of Holt in northwestern Missouri holds the world record for a high-intensity rain, having received 12 inches within a 42-minute period on June 22, 1947.
Click to expand...

Look how narrow the median is, https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9727864,-92.5219682,117m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

And then there's the thing about how do you protect these first responder vehicle crossings in the median from a high speed train running in the median,
meaning protection from both first responder vehicles traversing the crossing & how do you protect the physical structure of the crossing from the impact forces and the slipstream forces of the high speed trains,
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9707668,-92.4009549,65m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
And then there's the question of how do you 100% perfectly prevent crashed semis from getting in those high speed train tracks in the median, especially during ice and sleet,
a couple references,
https://www.missourinet.com/2015/10/27/modot-accident-at-i-70-could-close-traffic-up-to-six-hours/and
https://fox2now.com/news/missouri/s...lls-near-columbia-close-interstate-for-hours/and it ain't just semis which tag that median center guardrail,
(AND the following article's photo drives home how narrow the existing I-70 median is here in rural central Missouri, barely 2 SUV lengths wide)
https://www.atssa.com/Blog-News/ATSSA-Blog/guardrail-saves-missouri-womans-life-in-icy-conditions
 
NateB said:
and property acquisition
Click to expand...
Ahh, there's the punchline, whose homes and businesses do you seize and destroy in order to create the geography on which to lay tracks inside population centers?
 
mach7 said:
Every 5-10 years we see a new airship that will revolutionize air travel and air cargo.

It never happens. I suspect the main reasons are economics, weather, public perception, and history.

Helium is already in short supply and expensive and not really green. carbon fiber is expensive.

Airships are slow and low. They cruise less than 40kts below 10,000ft. In the wether and wind.
Even a 10kt headwind reduces your cruise speed by 25%. Rain, wind, icing, turbulence.
How do you top mountains safely?

How do you convince the public or FedEx that a 100 hour trip is better than a 10 hour trip?
Click to expand...
Depends on the freight I suppose.
I imagine hydrogen-filled airship drones. No need for people.
Fire risk can be estimated and insured.
 
Rob Campbell said:
I'd like to see passenger rail make a comeback. I like the idea of a scenic view and comfortable accommodations. Unfortunately, rail travel is expensive.
Click to expand...

Exactly.
I will guarantee you that trains will make a massive comeback if we start subsidizing them like Europe and China do. But why would we want to do that?

There was a time in my life when I needed to regularly travel between Boston<->NYC<->DC. For a while, I was iterating between $99 airplane shuttle flights and $120 Amtrak. But eventually, my destination sites changed just enough so that getting to/from train stations became a PITA, so I fell back on driving. Door-to-door, driving my car was quicker, more convenient, cheaper, and more enjoyable.

I would still love to take a cross-country (US or Canada) train some day. But every time I price it out, the trips adds upto $4-5K/person.
That puts it into a budget category of trips to some seriously exotic destinations.
https://www.amtrakvacations.com/vacation-types/most-popular
hobie1dog said:
If America would quit going to the other side of the planet and bombing people like we always do, we would have lots of money to put in high-speed rail systems. Where you could go from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours, and have every major city connected with all high-speed trains.
Click to expand...

Conducting military operations is a relatively small part of the defense budget.
And just because we might spend less on military, doesn't automatically guarantee that we would allocate the delta amount for rail travel upgrades instead.
Technically, the federal budget is somewhat unlimited (as recent trends in expenditures has been illustrating), so if there was a political will and economic benefit to investing into high-speed rail, we could certainly do that at any time. Regardless of what's going on with the military spending.

hobie1dog said:
Putting out no pollution and getting all of their power from solar, wind, and many other non-polluting ways. But that's another whole story ;) .
Click to expand...

At what all these "high speed train" proposals cost (LA to SF was going to be $105Billion for ~400 miles of track) LA<->NYC would cost way north of $X Trillion (where x >1).
At these budgetary $$ amounts, we might as well "gift" each American family a new Tesla, and call it done. Same benefit to the environment, but way more practical, useful, and convenient.

IMHO,
a
 
teepot said:
They have been talking about a high speed train from LA to Vegas for at least 20 years. Still no train.
Click to expand...
I don't know where they'd put one, except to maybe dig up existing tracks. The mountain passes are narrow, and there's a lot of elevation changes, as anyone who has driven the I15 between them can attest.
 
mach7 said:
How do you convince the public or FedEx that a 100 hour trip is better than a 10 hour trip?
Click to expand...

Easy. Give me my own bed, toilet, and shower.

I won't fly to Europe, Oz Prison, or Japan. But I'd take a cruise. But I don't see how a hot air balloon could get that big, and be safe. Forget about helium.
 
OK, up next, "Flying Cars finally become real! We mean it this time! Forget all the other times we were wrong since the 1950's.... - Popular Science"

Multicopter aircraft being called a "car", that are not practical to drive on a road, not practical to use for say going to Target to get groceries, need not apply.

Oh, IIRC, a nice pretty artwork version of this (below) was on the cover of PopSci around 1980 or so. Another "Finally airships will become practical" type of thing. Prototype crashed due to some sort of structural failure, one of the 4 modified helicopters fell off. End of project.



Found this artwork. Do not know if that was from PopSci, or some other magazine.

tumblr_kp32v01xtn1qzsgg9o1_500.jpg
 
Last edited:
cerving said:
Disneyland.
Click to expand...
We nearly had a monorail system in Seattle. One of the knocks on it was "Monorails only work at Disney and aren't a real transit system." My answer to that was always "How many people does the Disney monorail move in a day? More than most mass transit systems." Unfortunately, it got shot down on the fourth election and so we're building light rail 20 years later at 2x the cost. Sigh.
 
mach7 said:
Every 5-10 years we see a new airship that will revolutionize air travel and air cargo.

It never happens. I suspect the main reasons are economics, weather, public perception, and history.

Helium is already in short supply and expensive and not really green. carbon fiber is expensive.

Airships are slow and low. They cruise less than 40kts below 10,000ft. In the wether and wind.
Even a 10kt headwind reduces your cruise speed by 25%. Rain, wind, icing, turbulence.
How do you top mountains safely?

How do you convince the public or FedEx that a 100 hour trip is better than a 10 hour trip?
Click to expand...

Yup, My sentiments exactly. Every 5-10 years just as you said, one can see in aviation journals someone authors an article about how great it would be to move freight by airship. Something about the gas bag being "free lift" and only the motive force is the primary expense. That is not totally true as hydrogen or helium (being more pricey) costs money and it would take time to recoup the initial gas costs. Plus I imagine there is slow leakage in large gasbags anyways and the lifting gas would need to be replenished over time.
And then there is the ground handling nightmare along with dealing with the weather.
No, the rigid airship had its heyday 100 years ago and will never be coming back. The non-rigid blimps that Goodyear uses for advertising look like they would be fun to ride in. No where else on earth can one hear a commander shout out, "Up ship!" upon launching. Kurt
 
Sometime around 1995 there was a Blimp with lights in the gas bag that flew tourists up and down the Strip. It stayed at an airport near us and was a nightly sight. IIRC rides were $100 per person. My wife and I talked about going. It stopped flying and we never heard why.
 
“… On that train, all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris…”

I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year), Donald Fagen.

This song really sums up the futuristic feel of the early’60’s.
 

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