The books would open quickly if there were economic advantages. My guess is that there aren’t.
If it was cheaper to get things across the Atlantic by airship, then it WOULD be in progress today. One of those advantages of the free market, eh?
As it is, cargo is both profitable and plentiful…by heavier-than-air aircraft.
Until that changes, expect nothing other than experimental blimps on the scene.
C’mon, they use platinum for catalytic converters in cars, what can it cost?
The free market is a lovely thing to have around, except sometimes it bites the neighbor kid or shits on the rug. Not being able to zep across the ocean is one of those exceptions.
So, the fact that we can’t “zep across the ocean” because it’s not attractive to a free market economy is a bad thing? I don’t understand your point.
The Japanese actually used this method with their balloon bombs during WWII. They would launch the balloons from Japan to an altitude high enough to catch the jet stream and in a few days they would reach the U.S. and drop their bombs.
Nope. We still make aircraft out of aluminum, just like the Graf Zepplin and the Hindenburg.
Oh, sure, we’ve got better envelope materials - the early 20th century zepps used “gold beater’s skin” for the gas containers, which was a fancy name for the inner lining of cow stomach. We’ve got synthetics now which can serve the same functions but are easier to work with and more durable , and equally if not more light in weight. Composite materials can replace some metal components with equal strength and less weight. But any airship is going to mass tons, even if overall it’s lighter than the air it displaces.
Different engineering problem entirely.
Not really. And what savings you might have are going to disappear the moment you have a headwind.
You know, the husband and I actually looked into this a few years ago (we were considering building our own singe-seat airship for fun and recreation), but darn if I can remember the quoted price. The problem isn’t so much the expense as the quantity required.
Kid’s party balloons are pretty darn light, so you don’t need much helium (which, by the way, is mined/drilled for, not “produced” - it’s mostly a byproduct of natural gas extraction). But a cubic foot (or yard or meter or whatever) of helium only lifts so much. You need a lot of helium to lift even a single person.
According to the research we did, manned helium balloons, depending on payload, cost $3,000-10,000 a fill. We actually have a gentleman with a two-seat blimp in the area. He says a fill for the gas runs him about $3,000 as well. That’s for, what, a 300-400 lbs payload? That’s $10 to lift one pound (half a kilogram for you metric types).
And the darned stuff leaks out Helium exists as diatomic molecules that happen to be very small and can sneak through pores/flaws in just about anything. And there’s the volume problem - you’d need helium by the tanker-truck. And there’s the cost to transport the helium, even in a compressed state, from storage depot to your zepp.
Hydrogen has twice the lifting capacity of helium… but there’s that explosion potential you have to worry about.
This has got me wondering about unmanned, remote control cargo zepps, as somebody mentioned above.
Semi-trailers drive to an out-of-town zepp-port on the coast, the thing is loaded up and guided across the ocean, where it lands at another similar port. In the rare event it does blow up, nobody is hurt.
Except when the 50 or 100 or 300 tons of cargo come crashing down on their head. These would be even less economically viable than otherwise if they were limited to over-ocean operations.
Why do I have to change their minds? I build the airship, book cargo/passengers, make money. I bet that whole “making money” thing would be VERY INTERESTING to the aviation and travel industry. Especially outfits like Delta.
Yes, with low reliability, & no accurancy.
You’re thinking passengers. I’m thinking cargo. The major expense in the transportation industry will increasingly be fuel as prices go up. Even if zepps have a lower payload capacity than a jet, an enormous savings in fuel costs would still help. The stratosphere is 7 miles up, once you get there, your fuel costs shrink to virtually zero (there might be some need for steering power, but so little it might be accomplishable by solar powered motors). On a transoceanic or transcontinental trip, that’s a significant savings, to say the least.
Frankly, this was what I expected when I started the thread – that there was some obvious and well-known issue that made airship transportation impossible, under current conditions.
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To judge by the major airlines’ habit of going belly up with a certain dull regularity, that statement is disputable.
I was thinking of Mrs. Evil Captor and her love of buying things via Ebay. And the cost of shipping things from Japan. Bet there might be some money for a big carrier that could do cheap interocean or intercontinental transport.
Point taken.
How you gonna have a headwind when you are in the jet stream which AFAIK, travels more or less east to west as it circumnavigates the globe? My idea is you have several zepp, they all circumnavigate the globe via the jet stream (there’s also one south of the equater that IIRC runs in the opposite direction).
It’s a lot like river transportation. Rivers are slower than land travel. Their direction of flow and their boundaries are fixed. But they offer advantages that more than make up for that, so there is still plenty of barge traffic on the Mississippi.
Well, this might well be the issue I was expecting to find. A zepp large enough to carry cargo might indeed require that $10,000 fill, and if we don’t have materials that can stop helium leakage.
Hydrogen is out of the question. Hydrogen filled zepps would be incredibly tempting targets for terrorists, and assholes in general.
By that logic (“if it’s a good idea, somebody would be doing it already”), there would never be any new developments in the world.
That said, I think this particular idea has some problems. Airships are susceptible to bad weather, so I imagine weather delays would be frequent. And airships don’t have a very high payload capacity. The Hindenburg was basically the size of the Titanic (about 10% shorter) and carried only 100 people, including crew. Even with today’s technology, the Zeppelin NT is longer than a Boeing 747 and only carries 12 passengers.
That’s not correct. Hydrogen has half the density of helium, but that doesn’t translate to twice the lifting capacity. Lifting capacity is the difference in weight between the gas and displaced air, so it’s proportional to the difference in density. Average molecular weight of air is about 30, helium is 4, and hydrogen is 2, so hydrogen has (30-2)/(30-4)=1.077 times more lifting capacity (i.e 7.7% more) than helium.