The (biggest) problem that keeps airships from practical use is that they are huge sails. Big sails mean even small amounts of wind can be powerful forces acting on the airship. In the air a big push from the wind might be safely managed, but if you're near anything solid such as the ground, you can get smashed to bits.<p>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.<p>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.
> "But 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."<p>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
Maybe a smaller issue than wind, but something is wrong with this claim:<p>"If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other..."<p>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.
No. They absolutely are NOT happening. In fact, this is one of the very few technical solutions I'm very confident to state is never happening.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This reads as a technologist that has absolutely no clue about anything regarding the shipping or the logistics industry. I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction.
This effort is just starting up? Flying Whales expect to have an airship in 2025 and be operational in 2028 per <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-11/outback-town-launches-airship-cargo/104457420" rel="nofollow">https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-11/outback-town-launches...</a> . Not that this is a race; better if several companies succeed.
Cargo airships will not happen,in any land based area where wind happens,ie :anywhere
this has been hammered flat on numerous aviation
engineering forums
the only way around the guaranteed ground handling
debaucle is to engineer mega structur masts for anchoring,which will need to have a circular pad underneath,where the cargo would have to follow the LTA,as it pivots in the wind so back to a debaucle,with lots of smashing stuff
one possibility is airship to ocean ship transfers
where wind drift can be managed.....sort of
could be made to work for passengers snd small cargo that loads through the central pivot in the mast
still the anchoring phase will always be very high risk
The article on the site is vague, but if you go to the company's site, and examine the images, you can get a close look at the airship design. The image on the web site [1] is higher resolution than the web site needs, and you can zoom in if you open the image directly.<p>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.<p>Large container ships are now in the 20,000 TEU range.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66b24fc3f58cf05c3cbc4d19/fa1855e5-93a3-4462-8b32-6b3b4bfefbbf/Hangar_Cutaway.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66b24fc3f58cf0...</a>
One challenge I've heard of is: If you carry 100 tons of cargo from point A to point B in an airship, for the airship to return to point A, it needs to take on another 100 tons of new cargo (or ballast), or it needs to vent (or compress) lifting gas, in order to maintain the correct buoyancy. I wonder what the best approach is here, & how it affects the economics? Is water ballast safe & cheap enough, or is there a better way?
> <i>Over the summer, Jim incorporated Airship Industries. He hired a team of cracked ex-SpaceX engineers. And he raised a large pre-seed round...</i><p>This typo is perfect.
<i>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.</i><p>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?<p>Competitive enough on speed while being less expensive makes sense, though.
I see this brought up every few years but nothing ever seems to happen. I used to live not far from the Weeksville station in NC and would occasionally see flights from there. Would love to see these all over. <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/weeksville-dirigible-hangar" rel="nofollow">https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/weeksville-dirigible-han...</a>
Articles about airship dreambuilding have been a mainstay of HN and Reddit since the early days. The tech has always been super inspiring, yet "just around the corner". It would be almost sad to see them actually become a reality.
The article said nothing about weather hazards or the fact that it’s a big fat target for a war drone to bring down.<p>It’s not just an easy target to hit, it’s a symbolic target.<p>Airships were abandoned because very large objects falling out of the sky did not appeal to the public… and too many of them fell.<p>Extremely severe weather brings down relatively tough aircraft, but once on the ground or in hangars they are relatively safe. Airships are flying cheesepuffs.
I think this has actually great potential for fruit transports.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The CargoLifter-Conendrum:<p>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.<p>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.<p>Today the CargoLifter hangar is the biggest indoor water park.
I feel there were very good reasons that airships were abandoned. I don't know what those reasons were, but unless they enumerate the reasons and explain why they have now solved them, I will assume they are also going to fail.<p>According to AI, there have been 5 historical attempts to make airships work before the modern resurgence:<p>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).
On a related note, I recommend this short presentation by Hacker News regular @simonw on the history of airships, including a look at the future of airships:<p>"When Zeppelins Ruled The Earth" (6m47s)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU&ab_channel=SimonWillison" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU&ab_channel=Simon...</a>
It is a wonderful solution looking for a problem. I imagine there must be at least one landlocked country interested in the adventure.<p>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?
In the render it shows the airship directly loading while hovering above a warehouse. This is currently not allowed under FAA regulations and would require a regulatory change. Not being able to do that makes a lot of the business model assumptions questionable.
They are missing out on a golden opportunity, North Carolina disaster could be where they shine and show the world what they can do!!! Someone needs to advise these folks, they are desperate for non-road transportation up there... (western NC AND Eastern TN).
There's oversimplification of how logistic is working. For example it's not gonna happening solving last mile delivery using this airship, not even mentioning the pickup.
<a href="https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter" rel="nofollow">https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter</a><p>What has changed?
Is there an actual problem here that airships solve? Is getting cargo across the Pacific one or two days faster (and that's presumably a best case, since airships are heavily weather and wind dependent) actually that valuable? I would have though the scale of international shipping would anyway mean its pretty cheap to set up a continuous stream of cargo, which airships would struggle to replicate in any efficient way.<p>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.
cargo airships are not ever gona happen
pure unobtainium
we are domehow glosding over the imposibility of combining a transport ship with a built in mega crane,that has no fixed base or solid anchoring system
all bulk cargo operations are dangerouse enough already
cargo airships can not be engineered to work
zeeeero
Sounds good does not work.<p>Reminds me of CargoLifter:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>Also "current FAA guidance disallows the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas". So good luck with that.<p>As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.<p>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).<p>Venting helium is way to expensive and one of the reasons CargoLifter failed, was that they never managed to get water collection running.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>Now imagine a 388x78 m giant filled with hydrogen, with hordes of engines everywhere, dropping of a bunch of containers at some delivery center...<p>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.<p>Then cargo gets loaded off and ballast of the same weight must be moved onto the ship.<p>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?).<p>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!<p>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.
Consider a cargo airship operated remotely. The propulsion would be based on solar powered fans. Even if it took weeks to cross the ocean it would need essentially no cost to operate (or incredibly little) compared to operating a ship. If one blows up (hydrogen is volatile) you'd dump all the cargo on the ocean but you wouldn't be dumping tons of diesel fuel and the frame of the the ship is smaller than a ship. If you can do it without a crew you've essentially made shipping almost free except for loading and unloading at ports. <i>AND</i> you can put ports in areas that don't have access to inlets to the oceans or good shorelines. The most difficult part is the volatility of the lifting gas. You might have to load and unload cargo on platforms away from the coastline to prevent explosions. As for the hydrogen itself, the balloon can create it's own lifting gas by separating hydrogen from the atmosphere with an onboard chemical electric apparatus (presumably) if it ends up leaking hydrogen on its voyage. Lifting gas volatility has always been the biggest problem.
Serious question out of curiosity. Has anyone solved the lifting gas volatility problem (is the lighter the gas the more volatile)? That's the main deal breaker with all zeppelin proposals.
What is the current target use-case for this company's airships, the use-case that will get them a consistent business that will allow them to grow?<p>What is the target operating speed considering cargo weight?<p>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?