IF you can bring it in under FAR Part 103 it’s an ultralight and you don’t need inspections or licensing… but I strongly recommend lessons. Alledgely, Chuck Yeager took a couple hours of instruction prior to getting into an ultralight (in that case a fixed-wing) and unless you think you’re better than Chuck Yeager you’d do well to follow his example.
Larger you’ll need inspections and licensing, either under Sport Pilot (and good luck finding a lighter-than-air instructor for that category) or Private Pilot and above. As for what that would entail, behold my one and only contribution to Cecil answering a question. There have been people who owned (relatively) small airships for personal use, seating one or two people, but they are very rare and very expensive both to purchase and to operate.
Hydrogen is always a good substitute. From what I’ve read, the problem with the Hindenberg was as much or more the flammable doped cloth exterior as it was the hydrogen itself. Presumably modern materials can address that issue.
Also with the spectacular crash of the Hindenberg which looks like a major disaster - of the 97 people on board, only 36 died. That beats the death rate of many airline crashes today.
Alberto Santos Dumont may have been one of the pioneers, but he was not by any means the only one flying personal miniature dirigibles back then. I’ve been researching the career of Lincoln Beachey for a book I’m writing. He had his own dirigible ( The “Rubber Cow”)while he was still a teenager, and flew it onto the White House lawn and delivered a message intended for the president. He flew in Baltimore, Boston, and other places, commanding high fees. Eventually he got himself an airplane, and became one of the best and most acrobatic flyers, praised by the Wrights. There’s a YouTube video of him racing a race car. He was tragically killed while performing at the San Francisco Exposition of 1915. He landed his craft safely in the water, but drowned.
How do pilot certificates for experimental aircraft work exactly, since experimental implies a wide range of potential types of structures, mechanics, and motion? I would think it cumbersome to cover all that in a single written test, and even more so to test in practice.
The pilot certificate doesn’t have an “experimental” rating - that’s applied to the aircraft.
The categories* for pilot licenses are things like “fixed wing”, “rotorcraft”, “multi-engine”, “tailwheel” etc. - broad groups based on certain key characteristics like how they stay up in the air, propulsion systems, and so forth. The aircraft get labels like “fixed wing” or “lighter than air” based on certain key features, with a label like “experimental” meaning “this was not built by a commercial factory using plans certified by the FAA”. Experimental can mean new military hardware, something you built with a kit in your garage, a certified airplane modified for research purposes (NASA has a number of those), and so forth.
So… a zepplin pilot flying a zepplin under the “experimental” category will need a Sport Pilot license at a minimum and may need a private pilot license in the lighter-than-air group with possible add-on’s like “multi-engine” depending on the propulsion system. Such a license will allow the same pilot to fly a zepplin outside of the “experimental” group that matches up with the rest of the license and certifications.
Note that I am using language in LAYMAN’s terms, not the specific and technical terms used in US regulations.