Airships could return to our crowded skies

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191107-how-airships-could-return-to-our-crowded-skies

by clouddrover • 7 years ago

88 74 7 years ago

Jaruzel2• 7 years ago

The opening preamble of this article is clearly a shill for the BBCs adaptation of His Dark Materials.

That said, the reason we don't have a return to airships, is that they cannot carry the sheer numbers that planes can, need a much larger 'docking' area compared to planes, and take 100 times as long to get anywhere compare to modern air travel.

sandworm101• 7 years ago

They may be slower than planes, but they were not as slow as people think. (Remember that "airship" is not the same as "blimp".) They easily did 100+kph in a strait line. That makes them faster than road travel, and very much faster than marine crossing times. They might not ever compete with 747s but there are some business cases for delivery of goods or provision of information services (airborne cell towers).

FabHK• 7 years ago

That makes them faster than road travel

Not in Germany.

patall2• 7 years ago

I agree that airships will never directly replace with airplanes. However, historically airships reached 100 - 160 km per hour which is gets you to about 2 days for a transatlantic flight. Thats about a day more than a flight today but given the reduced effect of jetlag, I would assume quite a few people would go for it (not the buisness travellers, obviously). However, for that airships would need to have as much space as a cruise ship and therefore become really big again. You would start on in a small plane, land on the airship, travel long distance with it and exit again why another plane.

1996• 7 years ago

I disagree. They could replace planes for me.

Give me a real bed in a room that can be locked (even if shared with a few other people), and a restaurant to socialize like in a train. For comfortable travel I would pay extra, business or not. I must not be the only consumer wanting that.

And no, regardless of "class", airplane travel is miserable. I do not want to seat in a open space with people walking around, eating on my lap or from a folding table food served on a tray.

zaroth• 7 years ago

Could an airship make sense as a loading dock for drones making deliveries?

Laden drones which can drop down to their delivery point from above, and then return empty back to the air dock seem like they could operate much more quietly and efficiently than drones which need enough power to maintain altitude as they travel horizontally to their target.

Of course the drone would need the capability to throttle up and climb fully laden, possibly even minus one rotor, and the energy reserves to spare.

But the theory would be launching off the airship, and traveling horizontally (at altitude) above the target, then a controlled descent straight down to the drop point.

Presumably you would have two or three ships so one would be in position, while another was moving to/from the ground warehouse, while the 3rd was being loaded for the next batch.

The whole thing only makes sense if the energy density of the drone batteries doesn’t allow them to simply launch from a remote warehouse and proceed directly to their destination at altitude and return all on their own power.

TulliusCicero• 7 years ago

Could an airship make sense as a loading dock for drones making deliveries?

Carrier has arrived: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B5DPovWY7o

beenBoutIT• 7 years ago

Imagine how quickly those things would become the modern day Wells Fargo stagecoach to be plundered for our masses of under-employed and well-armed poor! Not to mention the conspiracy theories that would quickly pop up around anything like that; it's spying/vaccinating/etc.

Forge36• 7 years ago

This is beautiful. Thank you for sharing

dmos622• 7 years ago

US military tested airships extensively. They proved to have considerable advantages in certain naval operation roles. It all ended with the airship aircraft carriers (you read that right) crashing in separate accidents. They turned out to be extremely difficult to control (not crash) in extreme weather.

zrail• 7 years ago

In the 1930s, to be clear. Technology has advanced considerably.

dodobirdlord2• 7 years ago

Of course the drone would need the capability to throttle up and climb fully laden, possibly even minus one rotor, and the energy reserves to spare.

I've put some thought into this from time to time and I see a few alternatives. One is to use a tow line with some sort of auto-belay, and shield the rotors so that the line can't get snagged under usual circumstances. Then a drone can be reeled in if the need arises. Another option is to have drones able to adhere to each other (magnets? velcro? carabiners?) so that functional lightly-laden drones can perform an in-air rescue of a malfunctioning drone before it reaches the ground. This assumes that a malfunctioning drone would still have some mechanism to slow its descent, which isn't unreasonable.

thombat• 7 years ago

The unimpeded path required for a tow line would restrict the number of drones an airship could operate, since it would presumably need to be nearly directly above them. This would also make it difficult to operate in cities with overhead cables.

cagenut2• 7 years ago

for context, 60 tonnes is two fully loaded 40 foot shipping containers.

if you could make it battery-electric and autonomous, then you've solved for global shipping emissions (cuz we don't need the ships anymore).

losteric• 7 years ago

Very promising, bringing agile supply chains to a global scale. Plane shipping is cost prohibitive for many goods, while using ships requires large volumes or overhead of middlemen selling sub-container capacity...

With airships, smaller businesses can directly trade over long distances. I'm personally excited by agriculture potential... shipping spoilable heirloom produce straight from farm to markets across the country would be disruptive.

However, a single container ship carrying upward 10,000 containers still offers value at larger scales.

jacquesm4• 7 years ago

Ships are ridiculously efficient and much easier to police for safe arrival than having only two containers (effectively a truckload) on a device costing a large multiple to operate compared to a truck. I don't think (pun intended) this will fly unless it is high value goods that are not yet high value enough to be flown with a jet.

cagenut2• 7 years ago

hi jacquesm, if you don't mind, i'd like to try an experiment with you. I've seen your name enough times here on HN that I recognize you as a 'regular'. the point-score in your profile indicates people here either love you or you post 100 times a day (or some combination thereof).

Here is the experiment: Stare very hard at this graph. memorize the trajectory and timeframe.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...

Keep it open in a tab and come back to later, maybe even several times over the course of a week or month.

For those reading along I mean specifically a few points:

  * emissions peak in 2020 (<2 months!)
  * emissions are approximately 50% reduced by 2030 (a mere decade!)
  * emissions achieve net-zero around 2050 (-5 to -10Gt/yr)
  * the entire back half of the century we run -5 to -15Gt/year

The experiment here is simple: try, just try, assuming we will achieve these goals (aka 1.5C). or for arguments sake 80-ish-% of them (2C, just slide everything to the right 5 - 10 years).

What I mean is, assume we succeed in avoiding the worst of the catastrophes. Assume success. Try optimism. Not in a blind way, but in a quantitative mental framing way.

From that place of quantitative optimism, "solve for zero". That is, in all of your thoughts, opinions, comments, actions, causes, votes, etc, ask yourself "is this consistent with solving for zero?"

The point of this experiment is that, in my opinion, the number one hold-up to making meaningful progress on this challenge is people who are trapped in "analysis and debate" mode where they assume the time-horizon is much longer than it is, or they assume the goal is marginal reduction of emissions, rather than zero (and then negative!).

I believe that we, as both a community here on HN and as a global civilization, are in desperate need of quantitative-optimism, rather than dismissive pessimism.

Now after all that typing to tie it back to your post here. We both know airships flying containers are not going to be as cost-efficient as a diesel powered truck or a kerosene fueled jet. That's basically just stating the obvious. But that's also accepting failure.

Please stop accepting failure as the default mental framework with which you engage the topic. For any one person it can seem like reasonable skepticism. But when the majority of a community does it, especially its most vocal members, then the cultural result is one of inaction and delay. Analysis paralysis. Stalling. Stalling on climate change is effectively denial, even if that's not your intent.

asdfadsfgfdda2• 7 years ago

The economics are bad. Imagine the unit cost is $10 million. This seems realistic, the prototype cost ~$30 million and this airship is made of 40,000 pounds of light weight materials with very manual assembly processes. The cost of capital and depreciation might be $1 million/year. If the cruise speed is maybe 70 MPH, even if electricity and maintenance were free, this will $1.60 per mile. A container ship will be about $.01 per mile in similar cost.

Then looking at energy consumption, a container ship might need 8 HP of power per 40 foot container sailing at 18 mph. This airship has 700 HP per container at 70 mph.

e12e• 7 years ago

With automated ships, and automated airships, you could do away with most loading/unloading - have the airships load/unload in coastal waters, use ships for the long haul across oceans?

Ideally you'd use windpower (sails) and solar (electricity) for the ships.

patall2• 7 years ago

Not with the current airships since they are all 'swimming' with helium and we there is by far not enough helium for that on this planet. Hydrogen based would be different story but thats how the first era of the airship ended.

Edit: Also, if there is one type of ship that is going to be replaced by airships, its going to be the cruise ship.

ghaff6• 7 years ago

Also, if there is one type of ship that is going to be replaced by airships, its going to be the cruise ship.

But modern cruise ships are huge and are largely oriented around providing tons of activities. In fact, as far as I know, there's only one ship that is more oriented around providing trans-Atlantic transportation (among other things and only for part of the year).

dgreensp• 7 years ago

Well that's cool.

I'd be interested to know more about the technical details. The article mentions something about "cells" to reduce risk of buoyancy loss from a tear, and something about ultracapacitors. While some of the details may be proprietary, I'm sure there are some interesting things to say about the technology that this article somehow manages to almost completely avoid.

Also aren't we running out of helium (because it's a mostly non-renewable resource on Earth)? I know it's not actually consumed by the airship, but that's a lot of helium, right? Edit: According to my calculations, filling up a Hindenburg with helium (0.2 million cubic meters) uses about 1/900 of the annual global helium production (about 180 million cubic meters).

jeffreyrogers• 7 years ago

You can use hydrogen instead of helium. It's flammable sure, but so are gasoline and jet fuel. Plus it is hard to make it explode unless you inject oxygen.

edaemon• 7 years ago

Hydrogen fell out of favor for airships after the Hindenburg disaster. It's much more dangerous than gasoline or jet fuel.

dmh2000• 7 years ago

And helium is getting expensive. I worked on an airship project in the early 2000's and it cost $100,000 to fill it. And there is always leakage from diffusion.

inetsee• 7 years ago

I remember reading (a very long time ago) that one of the primary use cases for using airships for carrying cargo was in regions that don't have an existing highway system to support fleets of big trucks. Africa in particular doesn't have superhighways crisscrossing the continent.

A quick search suggests that one Airlander costs about as much as 10 miles of two lane highway.

notatoad• 7 years ago

Yeah, there was a push a little while ago to start an airship delivery service to remote communities in northern canada. The economics of an airship look pretty good when you compare it to Boeing 737s.

seiko988• 7 years ago

VICE had did a show called 'Africa's cowboy capitalists' which highlighted how hard it is to move things (vehicles for the UN in this case) across Africa due to poor roads and corruption. An airship would have saved them a lot of trouble.

jacquesm4• 7 years ago

Or get shot down in one of many local wars. Friend of mine flew a homebrew plane across Africa and got shot at multiple times but a plane is quite a bit quicker than an airship. He also got 'arrested' several times after landing because they suspected he was a spy. Typically after they found out he was just a crazy Dutch person on a cross-Africa trip in a device of questionable airworthiness he was let go again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWdpgGryELA

aldoushuxley0012• 7 years ago

Your friend is awesome. I can't help but be reminded of Antoine de Saint-Exupery

weinzierl• 7 years ago

CargoLifter[1] tried to bring airships back in the late nineties. They started building a gigantic manufacturing building but ran out of money before they even started to build an airship. The hangar was later turned into an aqua park but ran into troubles because the heating expenses were too high. Not surprising given the hangar was designed to be open at both ends. Another commenter in a previous thread wrote that the aqua park does well nowadays[2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766309

old-gregg• 7 years ago

Interesting... Based on what I've read about airships, their biggest weakness is inability to deal with inclement weather. Conventional aircraft spend very little time in the clouds and usually fly above most storms (and they're fast/maneuverable enough to fly around with little time loss), and even when they're in, they fare quite well with de-icing equipment and automation to deal with cross-winds. Neither the original article or CargoLifter wiki page mention this.

_0ffh• 7 years ago

Well, Zeppelin NT [1] _did_ bring back the airship. At least insofar as they have produced a number of actual airships, as opposed to Cargolifer. Also Zeppelin NT existed before Cargolifter, and after - it is still an operating company.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_NT

malandrew• 7 years ago

Everyone keeps talking about these being slower than planes, but I'm wondering if it is more interesting to compare these to cargo ships and trucks instead for some routes. While the cargo capacity is a lot less, these can be point to point over land or sea (no switch to trucks at a port) and these move through the air and not water, so the energy requirements should be a lot lower since air is less dense than water.

The autonomous problem is far simpler than autonomous trucking. It's probably somewhat comparable for autonomous shipping.

That all said 4 TEUs is far from the ~20,000 TEUs that the largest cargo ships can carry. Even if you can build something that can move 20 TEUs, that's still three orders of magnitude difference in terms of volume.

For certain goods however, like moving wind farm blades and pillars, airships would be ideal.

asdfadsfgfdda2• 7 years ago

The key limitation is weather. Airships are definitely not "all weather" capable, they must avoid wind shear. So reliability will be lower than ships or trucks.

yowlingcat• 7 years ago

That raises an interesting question for me -- how do ships deal with inclement weather on the open sea anyways?

carapace• 7 years ago

These are great, but I think the way forward is cellular design. Do an image search for Alexander Bell's cellular kites. Build (relatively) small units that combine to scale, rather than trying to build huge machines right off. (Also makes your craft more resilient: say it breaks in half, both halves are also viable vehicles.)

Also, take advantage of Magnus effect.

starpilot• 7 years ago

This comes up every 5 years.

YeGoblynQueenne• 7 years ago

It is still flying way. Too. HIGH.

Can't we just go everywhere by train and boat, by land and sea? Humans were not meant to soar up in the sky, thousands of meters high. We're not birds.

I hate flying.

droithomme• 7 years ago

We "could" also all receive ponies.

Thorrez• 7 years ago

Last year, a blimp demeaned itself by setting two world records, including one for the fastest text on a touch screen mobile phone while water skiing behind a blimp.

That's misleading. The record was for "Fastest text message (SMS) on a touch screen mobile phone while water skiing." It happened to be set behind a blimp, but that's not a requirement for the record.

Airships could return to our crowded skies

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