The jet stream travels around the world at an altitude of about five miles, at 150-200 mph.
Here’s a handy cite. So, why not use lighter than air craft to ferry large payloads between countries and continents in the jet stream’s path cheaply? That 150-200 mph tailwind would probably scoot a zeppelin right along, at very little in the way of fuel costs.
I know there must be some factor I’m leaving out, so I’m giving the savage pit bulls of the Dope a chance to point out the flaws in this plan before I find myself in a natty captain’s suit, piloting a zeppelin and screaming “I’m Master of the World!!!”
You’ll recall that the biggest problem with zeppelins wasn’t that they occassionally burst into flames, but that they were torn apart by thunderstorms.
Besides, lighter than air craft have relatively low payload capabilities, and at a speed of 200 mph, would take 18 hours to cross the ocean. That negates a lot of the speed advantage they’d have over cargo ships.
Very little in the way of fuel costs for the zeppelin’s engines.
However, you’ve still gotta fill that gas bag with something to keep your zeppelin aloft.
If you fill it with hydrogen, you’ve got the whole Hindenberg problem. If you fill it with helium, you’re talking about an enormous monetary investment in lifting gas, a little of which is inevitably going to leak out with each trip. If you fill it with hot air, you’ve got to burn something to heat the air and keep it hot.
The jet stream is narrow and moves rapidly over a wide range of latitudes, taking some serious turns along the way. How would you know it was going to be where you wanted it to be at any given time?
Yeah, but haven’t we come up with some super light, super strong metals since the heyday of the zepps? What if we made zepps out of the same stuff they make racing bikes out of?
Besides, lighter than air craft have relatively low payload capabilities, and at a speed of 200 mph, would take 18 hours to cross the ocean. That negates a lot of the speed advantage they’d have over cargo ships.
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Granted, there are lower payload capabilities, but the fuel savings might more than make u pfor that.
I’m thinking the REAL disadvantage for zepps is that they have to follow the jet stream or pay an enormous fuel penalty. As for the speed advantage – you have to admit, that’s a hell of a speed advantage.
I wasn’t aware that helium was such an expensive commodity to produce. C’mon, they put it in kid’s party balloons and use it to talk funny, what can it cost?
That I think would be a serious problem. Maybe by having a series of zepp ports along the usual path of the stream, the zepp would be able to disembark somewhere on the far side of the ocean or the continent with its payload.
Even solving all these problems mentioned above, you’d still have to change the minds of the aviation and travel communities, which closed the book on lighter-than-air decades ago.
Wikipedia’s page (I know, I know, but they sound like they know what they’re talking about) on jet streams says “The wind speeds vary according to the temperature gradient, averaging 55km/h or 35 mph in summer and 120km/h or 75 mph in winter”, which wouldn’t be fast enough to be worth bothering with.
Cheaper and slower than a jumbo jet? Faster and more expensive than a ship? I think there’s gotta be a market for this (if such a thing can be built and operated).
Your businessmen are still going to want to take a 747, and if you want to send twenty thousand tons of iron ore somewhere, then the ship is the only option, but there must be a lot of passengers and medium-priority, relatively light goods that would be happy to use a 24 hour crossing of the Atlantic, if it were cheaper than a regular aircraft. Mail is the big one that comes to mind. Often, letters are whisked overseas in a Boeing, only to sit in some sorting facility for hours and hours at the other end before the bags are even opened. If mail is unloaded from a plane in the morning in London, it’s missed that day’s postal delivery, and will sit there until it is sorted that evening, and delivered the following day. This means the postal administrations are paying for a high speed service they don’t always need, simply because sending it by ship isn’t an option. When a letter or a parcel takes a week in transit between international addresses, a few extra hours of actual travel can be absorbed, and the postal administrations would jump at the opportunity if there were savings.
Private courier articles, airfreighted newspapers and magazines, small items ordered online, etc, would be the perfect commodities to be transported this way. There would even be a willing passenger market for it too, I’d imagine. Backpackers come to mind.
I was considering this, and you’re probably correct. However, air travel is a tight business profitwise, and if some operator (maybe a Virgin-type outfit) sees even a few dollars in it, then somebody somewhere will run passenger flights. Those guys are always looking for angles.
Slightly off-topic; I saw a design many years ago for an LTA SST. That’s right, a supersonic zeppelin. The theory was to use a zeppelin to raise the vehicle to an appropriate altitude and then light off the jets. The reason for using a zeppelin for lift was that the vehicle had a circular wing (like a hollow cylinder) because a circular wing wouldn’t produce a sonic boom, but also provided no lift.
I don’t know how practical the idea was, but it made the cover of Popular Science back in the '70s.
Slower? - certainly. Cheaper? - not likely. An airship that could carry even a moderate fraction of the load of a jumbo jet would not be cheap at all.
If the eastbound Atlantic crossing will take something like 24 hours, then the airship must include sleeping accommodations - a further burden on its payload. Against the prevailing winds, its flight time will be much longer, and so will its costs.