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.
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.
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.
> 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?)
Not to detract from your overall point, but you do the same thing you do when burning fuel while cruising: Add ballast.
Yes, but how do you add ballast to an airship while it is underway? Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the zeppelins did.
It has to be more energy efficient to re-compress your lifting gas back into storage bottles. What do modern airships do? This has to be a solved problem.
You are carrying fuel and using oxygen from the atmosphere to combust it. When it's hot, it's a gas. By simply cooling it and recovering most of it, you are potentially left with more mass than you started off with... and Oxygen is relatively heavy.
The fine article shows them lowering a container from a crane. I'd love to see them connect the crane to an electric generator and actually regen the potential energy of the container into electricity.
Even more efficient might be raising another container at the same time in a (mostly) balanced manner. Then you don't have as much loss from conversion/storage.
Fun fact: many inclined elevators work this way :)
This idea of extracting water from air keeps coming back, but every time someone tries it, they learn of the same thermodynamic limits. It is extremely energy-intensive to extract water from the air, and it only really works if the climate is humid enough that there is water in the air to extract. This is exactly what a dehumidifier does, and the off-the-shelf version you can buy at home depot is no more than 5-10x worse than the thermodynamic limits - those generate a pitiful amount of water for a lot of energy intake.
Do we even need to extract the water? The point is to capture weight, and the only reason to liquefy the water is to store it more efficiently, by volume.
Storing higher humidity air doesn't sound very efficient, storing liquefied humid air sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, and storing compressed air sounds like an unnecessarily complicated alternative to just compressing the hydrogen.
You're both missing the forest for the trees, when the airship is electric obviously you don't have to add ballast while flying because you don't have to compensate for burnt fuel.
Not necessarily - the great thing about airships is that they can go anywhere, and pick up cargo at places that aren't ports. You can go pick up logs from logging camps directly, for example.
That seems like it would be really bad for energy efficiency: now you need batteries large enough for propulsion during the whole trip, plus extra for extracting water vapor.
Why not just take on some liquid water at the destination when you drop the cargo?
Because that's less flexible and there may not be water at the destination in the first place. That said, Flying Whales are trying to do exactly that, because ballast tech just isn't capable enough yet.
I think they're aware of all these problems because they do mention almost everything you said in the linked post thinking through the idea: https://www.elidourado.com/p/cargo-airships
Obviously that was simply a post thinking through everything hypothetically and I didn't read anything that seemed like they actually had the best solution, but at least they seem to be aware of the challenges to landing and off-loading cargo efficiently.
Reading that article I see no proposed solutions to this sail problem. They mention wind as an issue for delivery times but not safety. There's also no acknowledgement that the "scaling law" that makes building huge airships lucrative also makes these problems worse.
Right, I am not saying they're right or wrong (not something I would know anything about), but it seems they've been vaguely aware of the issues from the start. Namely, before the SpaceX engineer and starting the company.
You're failing to see the secret that is exposed by the fact that their Chief Engineer comes from hyperloop. They're going to dig tunnels connecting all their destinations and run the airships underground in a vacuum sealed network. No atmospheric drag at all! Bingo!
I don't particularly defend feasibility of Hyperloop, but did want to point out that your comment sounded awfully like when people were ridiculing the idea of human flight, landing on the moon etc... Finding engineering solutions to what looked as "impossible" challenges were some of the best feats of humanity so far.
If you put it above ground, you are a few short bullets from killing everyone in the loop. Hitting a wall of air in a vacuum at hundreds of miles per hour is going to be like hitting a brick wall. Ask any reentering spacecraft.
The same problem exists underground, the weakest points being the stations themselves which can be bombed.
A failure in the system itself (even just a power outage or malfunctioning equipment) would mean people suffocate inside after a matter of minutes.
So, sure, it is possible to create it, but it is impossible to make any sort of safety guarantees. In other words, literally any other mode of transport would be safer, including a hydrogen-filled dirigible.
So, sure, the concept itself might be possible, but an engineer doesn't concern themselves with possible. That is for scientists. An engineer considers what is realistic AND possible, because that is an engineer’s job: to make the possible real. This cannot be real; literally no regulator would ever sign off on it.
> So, sure, it is possible to create it, but it is impossible to make any sort of safety guarantees.
Right, because cars and planes and trains and boats and bicycles and footpaths and airships all famously have 100% perfect safety track records, right?
Huh? In what world is a hyperloop going maybe 700mph comparable to a spacecraft reentering from orbit at 17,000mph? Also, maybe there's something I'm missing but spacecraft can and do renter from orbit intact, thus proving that this problem is solvable even when the forces at play are orders of magnitude greater. Apply your safety argument to passenger airliners or even ordinary trains and you'll see that they are also "impossible to make safety guarantees" for.
Just cover the thing in solar, and run it on electric. Add a couple of wind turbines too. I mean, the whole concept is preposterous, so why not just lean into it?
Solar powered airships floating around the world, following the prevailing winds, accepting durable goods by… catapult or something, delivery by chucking it out the window over populated areas. Paint them some nice pastel colors and we’re in Solarpunk world.
Wouldn't delivery be done by quadcopter drones? There have already been pilots projects where Amazon does delivery by drone in a couple of places. I don't think they were a success, but an airship adds some constraints that might make the more viable. Downside is the copters needs to return to whatever altitude the ship is currently cruising at, which might be close to their ceiling.
But on a side note my first reaction to the headline of this article was "no they are not". Airships have a number of fundamental drawbacks that I don't think we are any closer to solving. Ultimately they're as slow as a cargo ship, can only carry a relatively small and light payload like an airplane, require specialized ports like ships and airplanes, and are expensive to build and operate. They just don't have a viable niche.
But if you drop them via cheap parachute, you wouldn't need anything to return. I bet they'd only be slightly less accurate delivery than what their "don't give a damn" delivery system in place now.
Maybe, but as you point out you lose your pinpoint accuracy and also it consumes a parachute for every delivery. Your customers end up with a whole bunch of cloth to dispose of and you have to store enough for every delivery. The beauty of the quadcopter is that it is reusable. It can also use air brakes to help slow the descent and really only burn power on the very last bit of the delivery and then on the ascent back up, where it is no longer burdened by the package.
> Your customers end up with a whole bunch of cloth to dispose of
We're coming up on Great Depression 2: Electric Boogaloo pretty soon [citation needed], so we could just do the same thing our ancestors did with flour sacks back in the day and turn them into children's clothes. Or maybe even tents for the ever-growing homeless camp-cities. The dystopian possibilities are endless!
You seem to be losing the spirit of the conversation, and that spirit is the idea is preposterous. In that spirit, being reusable is irrelevant. I'm sure if they wanted, they could figure out how to make a disposable parachute that can be composted or recycled. At that's a far as practical as I'm willing to go
Why bother with a parachute? Just redesign houses with bungee-net drop zones for packages. It'd probably result in less damages than the average FedEx delivery anyway.
Jet packs and tax free shopping as next step. Wait for your friendly airship to come around and go get your duty free stuff somehow... Surely there is some places they can visit on the way so it counts...
I calculated, than the airship with 100tonns capacity, and wind speed 25m/s require 25tons trust to compensatecthenwind. It is Boeing jet engine, not Electric fan require.
I've seen some YouTube videos converting Boeing jet engines to electric, but you have to smash that like and ring that subscribe bell to be able to see the build
What makes you think "docks with extremely strong mooring structures" is a particularly difficult problem to solve? A giant metal hook anchored in concrete attached to the ship with some steel cables doesn't seem like it would be that difficult for a team of smart engineers with a multi-million dollar budget to figure out a good design for. Certainly not so difficult or expensive as to threaten to make the entire concept nonviable.
Historically the difficulty isn't in building the mast, it is in preventing the airship from being smashed into the mast by the wind. Or in dramatic cases flipping end over end because it was only moored on one location.
Interesting. Why a mast and not just the ground? Pull up the mooring lines (probably more than the amount needed to actually hold the ship, for redundancy), connect them to the ship, then pull on the lines with winches until the ship is on the ground. That's basically how seafaring ships work... are there any unique challenges with airships?
I think if that was the biggest problem, they'd be used much more. There are a lot of places with light and regular winds, and we're also pretty good at predicting winds in the 1 day forward timescale. And of course there's the regular and predictable high winds that were traditionally used by sail ships.
Even a light wind with a giant sail area is dangerous. An empty 20ft shipping container weighs about two tons. If it's hanging from an airship and the wind causes it to shift even a foot it'll kill you dead if it hits you. If it hit a light frame building it would bust right through a wall. It would also easily knock down a non-reinforced cinder block wall.
A cargo airship would lowering cargo would essentially be an incredibly dangerous crane. The sail area of the airship makes it far more dangerous than lowering external cargo with a helicopter.
"Hindenburg made 17 round trips across the Atlantic in 1936 — its first and only full year of service — with ten trips to the United States and seven to Brazil."
Couldn't the sail factor be reduced by ionizing wind coming at the vehicle who then keeps away from the vehicle while going around it, depositing little energy?
> "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."
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
Customs in software is already a bit of a thing, judging from what postal tracking reports on occasion. I guess that doesn’t obviate the need for physical inspections, but it should make them faster.
Sadly, the US still receives 95% of all postal imports through 1 of 5 international service centres: Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; New York, NY, and San Francisco, CA
Northwest = NO YUO!
Technically 22 other places are supposed to accept international mail, but in reality, the other 5% go through Newark (for some surface mail), Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa.
The issue is customs isn’t going to happen at some random factory / job site. International mail looks point to point from and end users perspective but as far as the government in concerned it’s all going throw a small number of locations as it enters the county. At least relative to the number of street addresses.
I don’t expect it will, I’m just surprised whenever my parcel shows it’s been cleared by customs before it has even left the origin country. (And that’s not a timezone bug, it’s explicitly described as a remote authorization, a preauthorization, or something like that.) Customs (partly) in software is not an absurd idea, was my point, I have no opinion on airships other than acknowledging their inherent coolness.
Cargo planes require dedicated airports and runways and all that jazz, whereas the selling point of cargo airships seems to be to not need any of that; the article depicts one such airship handling a shipping container directly at a warehouse, for example. The need to go through some sort of customs process complicates things, but being able to put customs checkpoints further inland (closer to the end-destination) seems like it'd be appealing.
My concern is around the space an airship takes up; coordinating traffic for maximum throughput is going to be a nightmare.
They don't need to be immune from the same fluctuations in fuel costs. But if they use less fuel per ton, then a rise in fuel prices should benefit them more.
Airships could potentially be electric and solar powered. That would insulate it from fuel cost fluctuations. It would also resolve the issue with refueling.
Longshoremen, lines at limited numbers of ports, etc., there a lots of problems that airships can solve simply by allowing airship ports to exist in, say, Kansas.
The need for specific geological features dramatically limits the amount of ports we can have, which seriously affects costs. If you could build a single, tiny airship point in every major city, you could save a bundle, and likely be close enough to the destination to unload directly to the customer at the port.
I would assume that heavier stuff would be where the demand is. Air freight is expensive, because weight is expensive, because fuel is expensive, and it's obviously an environmental disaster.
The article isn't about solving those problems, it's about taking a few days longer to do the actual travel to save a bunch of money, since there's already massive delays on either end.
No, the article is saying "actually I was wrong about being longer and slotting in between airplane and cargo ship; we can be as fast as planes, but cheaper, and take a big slice of that whole huge market". Which is why they need to explain why airships won't also have customs etc.
I guarantee that's not going to be a viable option. No nation, especially China or the USA, is going to allow an aircraft free access to land unknown cargo at a random warehouse without going through customs. It's going to have to land at some kind of airfield just like a cargo plane would.
I am not sure what US law on the matter is, but many countries have what are known as "bonded warehouses", which store uncleared goods within the destination country. Are you a customs expert? If so, please comment on whether the US has an equivalent.
Gotta give those F-22s target practice to keep their bloodlust sated. Otherwise they start snacking on commercial traffic and that can get real awkward real fast.
Yeah, doesn't it kida turn anything under it into a heavy cargo crane safety zone ? Like, you not let people walk at random under suspended loads & thats what a loading/unloading operation for this turns into.
Not that I put any credence into the idea in the article, but for your particular question, the same way it occurs now at airports - bonded warehouses.
I don't know if you're aware, but bonded warehouses are customs facilities. The vast majority of goods never pass through a Government customs facility.
the reason that property is so expensive is because that's where the people are. There's no point in avoiding the biggest cost of air freight - getting goods to consumers who don't live near the limited freight hubs, if you land it in the middle of nowhere and now need to ship by rail or truck AND last mile delivery
There are lots of people inland and away from sea ports. Many hubs of industry (such as Wisconsin which makes many mechanics' tools) could take advantage of this if it were available.
Let's say airfreight takes 7 days, with the flight being one of them. Then his airship would take 11 days, which is not much worse. He was expecting the comparison to be 5:1.
That's the take I would have made too, but no, the author explicitly claims that airships can be faster than airfreight by somehow magically sidestepping customs, warehousing, and trucking.
> 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.
> Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5 days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to look pretty good. 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.
Maybe the key phrase here is "If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other". So he's imagining that big enough companies will have their own airship port, and presumably plug in customs to that.... So then the next question is, how big does an airship port have to be? Presumably it doesn't need huge runways?
I'd imagine the author knows that you can't just sidestep customs, and it does feel a bit disingenuous that they didn't call that out. But hey, it's a pitch for money first and foremost. I'd imagine that they're just giving a complete list of things that slow down air freight and that internally they have plans for tackling each one, like not having to unload cargo to get it through customs and so using the airship as its own trucking vehicle post-customs.
This already happens, has happened for ages, and yet somehow the logistics industry manages to accomplish transshipment without fucking everything up . . . most of the time, anyway.
His argument is not quite correct. Let's try to steelman it.
If an airplane takes 12 hours to cross the ocean, and it takes 2 days on both sides with customs, warehouses, trucking and the last mile delivery, then it's a total of 4.5 days. If the airship takes 5 days to take the ocean, and the same 2 days on both sides, the total is 9 days. Despite being 10 times as slow in flight, the end-to-end delivery time is only two times slower than the one for the airplane.
Maybe that's the idea, but it deserves some polishing.
The main observation that this guy made one year ago was that airships benefit from the square-cube law. A truly gigantic airship can carry a load proportional to its volume, but experiences drag proportional to its cross-sectional area, so it ends up having very good fuel economy. But to get to this scale you need to be at least as big as the Hindenburg, preferably much larger.
But then it's difficult to see how you can deliver loads of a few hundred tons from point to point.
I think the guy would have a much better pitch if he sticks to the idea that the speed disadvantage is significantly reduced by the first and last mile overhead that impact equally both cargo jets and airships.
That exists and it's called ocean freight. Air freight is where you pay a premium to get a small amount of stuff there NOW. Ocean freight is what you use when you need 15 shipping containers of stuff there in a couple of weeks.
Whether there is any market for an "in between" mode is an open question, and it's the business case of these airships for better or worse.
Yeah my initial reaction was you're comparing today's air freight in a static state with your envisioned optimal airship model; that's not realistic. The alternative to spending big on an entire new industry isn't doing nothing; it's using that investment in some other way, like optimizing air freight, or intra-continental, or addressing the entire overseas manufacturing/shipping model.
Maybe a smaller issue than wind, but something is wrong with this claim:
"If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other..."
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.
Not quite how it works. (At least, not in the US).
Firstly, not just any FBO is a point of entry.
Which brings us to the second point, the entire reason for designated points of entry is so that the customs officials can be on site already. As in, assigned to that FBO. Now at times specialists have to be sent out. (Think exotic or rare animals or biological/agricultural products.) But if that happens, your freight, and maybe even you, are quarantined and your freight isn't going anywhere any time soon. Believe me.
Most important, and relevant in this context is the third issue. Which is the fact that arrivals are met by customs officials and passengers and cargo are always subject to the same inspections/regulations as they are at any commercial airport.
So the original question is valid, how are they handling customs at the scale they're hoping to achieve in a fashion any faster than anyone else?
FBO = fixed base operator = private jet terminal or service provider at airports that caters to general aviation (non-commercial) flights. FBOs provide services like fueling, hangar space, and sometimes even customs clearance for international flights.
So they build operate their own airship FBOs? Honestly seems like the smaller hurdle to jump if all the engineering problems are solved, they will find a way to navigate this too. It’s a bit naive to assume they will comply with existing constraints versus defining what the airship industry would need. They won’t roll this out globally on day one, the largest and most obviously profitable areas will be source/destinations are probably easy to guess. They could even do their proof of concept it less regulated markets before coming to the US later. Plenty of room to solve these problems later.
Not sure how realistic, but could the inspectors go to the airship instead? They are not planes: Not only can they "park" while airborne, but at least there were concepts of boarding/unboarding in the air as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/realestate/26scapes.html
They could in theory but I'm dubious governments will be willing to shape their customs enforcement to accommodate this company. Best case I think they might be able to do a drop off at a place for customs inspections and pick them up again with a different craft once cleared.
That's a chicken and egg problem. You have to get big enough to move enough cargo to make it worth getting special accommodations or go through the paperwork of being a proper import/export business to self report.
There are a limited number of rail crossings they need to work with and it's conveniently on the ground. This company is pitching direct shipper to receiver deliveries via air so getting agents onto the ships is a lot harder and the company wants to drop off directly at customers all over the country meaning no proper port of entry. There are ways to do that but they're regulated as import/export businesses.
Rail lines go all over the country but they check when you cross even if that’s not your destination. I would expect the same to be true here: e.g. an airship leaving Mexico would go to, say, Riverside via a customs stop in San Diego or Calexico.
I agree with most other criticisms in the thread about the feasibility of this, but your suggestion is not _totally_ crazy. There are airports where you can land _if_ you give customs a heads up that you'll be flying there from abroad and they'll send a dude. The only one I've interacted with is in the Bahamas but I don't see any reason it's a showstopper. There're a lot bigger showstoppers on the critical path for this project than that.
It's down to the laws of the country and the government could make an exception to go direct if they want for special items. One of the things the airships might make sense for is huge wind turbine blades that are too large to go by road. The government might well do it for that kind of thing.
But for regular freight I doubt it. I use to fly from England to France in a single engine plane, pre Brexit, and you might think just stick stuff in the plane in an airfield in the UK, fly to a field in France drop it off, vive the single market and that. But no you have to fly to a customs airport in the UK, queue up with your passport as usual, do the same in France then fly on to your field. Probably France to Germany say would be ok. It all depends on the local laws.
Also how many hours you save compared to truck/van? You still have to load it to one to drive it to where ever airship is moored, and then unload it, load to airship. Fly that to destination(weather depending). And same. Or you could drive from start to end. At certain distances it might make sense, but I think those might be somewhat limited.
Also the customs exist at both ends. Usually, you have to do preliminary enforcement too. That’s what DHL does at least. Still, most of your time “wastage” will happen at customs and there is no technological innovation for that. There is no way any (or most) governments will allow you to by pass them.
Yeah--I came here to highlight this too. I think all the legacy systems around international shipping won't permit direct to consumer pick up and delivery. Unless someone can show me an existing example?
Some international logistics businesses pickup from and ship directly to customers. They are well-practiced in avoiding customs delays and have extensive experience with non-traditional transport, such as semi-submursibles.
Seriously, if a Toyota supplier in Japan delivers parts daily to a factory in Ohio, do they go through regular customs or is there some other arrangement? Can they fly directly to an airfield near the factory?
That feels like a different scenario. Intuitively I would expect some pre-arranged clearance process that is valid for some period to avoid say daily paperwork lodging. Even the inspection process could be streamlined if there's some trust between the authorities and the regularly shipping parties.
It still doesn't address the case where a random small business receives a container full of their latest items from a supplier.
The first thing I funnily thought of with direct-to-customer was narcotics. If countries don't inspect goods coming in (assuming that countries with a risk of narcotics being shipped out have already lost), then it makes for a great muling opportunity, or just wholesale shipment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As it turns out, ships are just really good at shipping. People keep trying airships with no fundamental tech or economic breakthroughs and they should all expect the same result.
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.
I used to have intermodal carriers as customers, so for an IT guy I know a good bit about it. I went to comment on his post and it said only paid subscribers can comment. I'm not going to pay him to point out issues he'd need to deal with.
Yeah, it seems like every attempt at an airship company for the last 70 years or so just ends up speed-running the development of modern travel/logistics that makes airships obsolete. Same way crypto is/was speed-running the need for modern financial regulation.
On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the industrial revolution the average pace of technological advance was extremely slow. The Mongols conquered Asia with weaponry that would have been instantly familiar to people living 2000 years earlier. Perhaps our descendants 1000 years from now will still be using refrigerators virtually identical to our own.
I think it's more like the Western economy is silently crashing than technological development having reverted back to ~19th century rate, although the latter is said to be happening too - something feels wrong about tech lately.
Most of those are still in the lab, Starship is an incremental improvement that was largely a matter of funding, LLMs are at best a threat to telemarketers and customer service reps, perhaps paralegals.
I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve into nothing once any real-world application is attempted. I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions without incident.
I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make batteries obsolete.
I don't know how old you are, but regardless, can you not see how technological change has occurred within your own single human lifespan? This wasn't true in a meaningful way to an individual's life trajectory until the last century or so. The changes are coming so continuously and with such significant future implications, it's impossible for me not to just stand in awe.
Whether the specific proof of radical change you're waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to everything that came before it.
Then iPhone 4 came out in 2010. Google SDC prototype drove for 140k miles by then. It's 2024, and iPhone 4 is still sort of usable. Might run 0.25B LLM? Waymo is serving just couple small areas in US. There's no categorical successor to phones. No one other than Waymo achieved SDC.
Oculus DK1 shipped in 2012. VR is still a niche anime/gamer/anime-gamer product. AI bubble is correcting fast. Boom Overture supersonic jetliner isn't flying. Starship just landed for the first time, and it did land but appeared to have gone full banana soon after. Insane but it's not going into service for a little while. Brain-computer interfaces... meh. They were always stuck at immune response problem and that's why no one is doing invasive BCI, not because it wasn't invented back in 80s or whenever it was.
GP's claim is that things are slowing down and none of inventions are life changing big. Things are definitely slowing down and none of recent inventions are intercontinental teleportation certified for commercial services big.
TBH the last 10 years of my life I've noticed technilogical stagnation, enshitification, marginal improvments. The 20 years before that was an amazing wild ride.
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Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful discussion, even here. Sometimes people get (or try to get) a boat-load of money to do a thing that's bad from first principles, because they lack experience in the relevant field. In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun of, because it's funny.
In the case of TFA: The airships as proposed solve none of the problems the author claims unless they just bypass customs and border control, which is, you know, a crime. And if your startup is hinged on the idea of committing nation-tier crimes at scale to succeed, that doesn't merit rebuttal. It merits mockery.
Hence why I mentioned the Satoshi, because that's also really funny, for similar reasons: because people who get really good at one complicated thing, in our cases here, programming; suddenly think that everything else is less complicated, and therefore easily handled "in the roadmap" and they go out and make fools of themselves for not doing literally a few minutes of solid research beforehand.
That said I will absolutely cop to the downvote comment. My bad there.
> Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful discussion, even here.
Incorrect. The HN guidelines repeatedly emphasize that HN is for thoughtful discussion and intellectual curiosity, and not for sneering, being snarky, flamebaiting, going on generic tangents, internet tropes, or political or ideological battle.
And, these aren't arbitrary - there's a reason for them. Those negative behaviors degrade discourse. The main reason why HN has managed to remain a semi-civilized place to be (as opposed to Reddit and Twitter) after two-ish decades of existence and significant user growth is because of those guidelines and dang's impartial commitment to implementing them.
Your comment 41849098 above breaks a frankly impressive amount of the guidelines and anyone who even does a cursory read-over of them (they're conveniently copy-pasted above) can see that.
> In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun of, because it's funny.
Well, then don't do it on HN. Sneering about "crypto losers" and sarcastically saying "The only prayer I say on the regular is "Lord, bless me with the confidence of a mediocre tech bro."" does not gratify intellectual curiosity, breaks the guidelines, is completely value-less fluff, and negatively contributes to the discourse and quality of HN. If you want to do that - do it on Twitter.
I get why someone will have the conservative position. I even get that someone enjoys schadenfreude at people who are not conservative. I just don’t get why someone who has low risk-tolerance would come to a startup forum to express their low risk-tolerance.
That would be like if I spent any amount of time on child-free subreddits or on forums about stanced cars.
Well for one, the topics covered on here are far broader than just startups. And for two, a lot of the ones that are startups are actually interesting, they're trying to solve actual problems. In fact, putting aside the incompetence, this one I would say falls into that category.
That said, not all ideas are created equal, and IMO at least, this one is not, and what makes it fall short is so obvious that I have trouble treating it as a serious proposition on the part of the people behind it, let alone one worth putting money into.
I'm old enough to remember Airship Industries (1979):
>The AD500 was "a new-generation airship making use of advanced materials and technology." It was 164 feet (50 m) long and contained 181,200 cubic feet (5,130 m3) of helium.
>Unfortunately, on 8 March 1979, the month-old AD500 was seriously damaged when the nosecone failed while the ship was moored in high winds.
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
It absolutely can happen, but not for routine goods where being on schedule is highly important. But for outsize goods, waiting for a favorable weather forecast is a much smaller concern than strengthening roads or perhaps even removing a bridge or two. For how wind turbine deployment, freight airship would be a gamechanger and there's a long (but truly narrow) tail of more niche use cases. Including any "unknown unkowns" that really can't exist before matching transportation.
The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling containers between China and the rest of the world that's still tiny.
Modern airships are semi-rigid. They have a keel and a rigid structure to support the empennage. The rest of the structure can be deflated and collapsed just like a non-rigid blimp.
There are tons of dumb startups that were created by former SpaceX people. Having worked at SpaceX doesn't magically turn you into a superior person that can solve all problems. But having worked at SpaceX is a great way to convinced investors to give you money.
Hyperloop succeeded at exactly what it was meant to succeed at, which was planting just enough FOMO to get a handful of rail projects in California delayed and ultimately canceled.
I take your point in that there are a lot of naysayers here, as there were with Hyperloop. There were also hundreds of volunteers working on the project, who clearly thought it had a chance of working--and many more saying rockets would never be made reusable, it had been tried before, too many problems that can never be solved...
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
- Winston Churchill
Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible? Is it because we just no longer believe that things truly are impossible (or dumb)? The ideas that all turn out to be "impossible" successes are ones where the math or physics bears out the idea but the engineering is "impossible."
Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had physics problems, and no matter how hard anyone tried, they were guaranteed to run into them. Cargo airships also have a physics problem that make them absurdly expensive and risky to put cargo on. In both cases, this is an idea that is 100 years old and where the physics has been studied. This time is not different unless you have solid reasoning.
Contrast that with rockets, to use another Musk example: Rockets are well within the bounds of physics, but a hard engineering problem. Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).
> Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).
No it wasn't. It was done many times in the 60s and 70s — e.g. all the moon landings.
Because airships are simple and cheap, and as the blog post says: if they can get cargo point-to-point across the Atlantic, they will put air freight out of business.
If they can't do that, at least they could be competitive.
Ships are simple and cheap. Airships are known to combine the drawbacks of ships (slow, weather-dependent) with the drawbacks of airplanes (needs to be light so it can fly).
That is not a winning combination for putting any kind of freight carrying out of business. The main reason people use air freight today is to get something from one continent to another in 24 hours. Airships will never do that.
Apples and oranges. Of my many engineer friends none of them thought the hyper loop was viable, it’s an absurdly bad idea. Like installing compressed air jets in cars for faster acceleration. Another one of Elons missives.
Reusable rockets were more of an economic issue, is there enough demand for economic viability. That was always going to be the real magic. I think that is still an open question but it at least appears plausible.
Even if they solve most of the technical issues could this ever be competitive with planes/ships/trucks? Under what circumstances?
It just doesn't seem very practical, basically you'd need to transport freight to places with no access to sea/roads or rails and can't fit it on an airplane. Is there a lot of demand for this? Also presumably such areas would have harsh and unpredictable weather..
> Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
Survivor bias? For every case of it working out there are many more of people wasting time and enthusiasm on something that's a dead end (and this was the general consensus for the past 80 years or so)
Some loads simply don't fit on trucks, or rather on the roads that the trucks have to use. Heavy lift airship would operate in a market segment that does not even exist without them.
Big transformers are now limited to boat transportation, and it's a constraint on grid design. I assume this is also the case for other industries that become river bound but wouldn't necessarily be so if not for equipment transportation. So this could be a game changer (more so I think than this faster than boat slower than plane thing).
Wind turbine blades is the obvious one. On-shore turbines would be much larger (which btw implies lower rpm, which implies being less annoying) if they were not constrained by land transport.
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.
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.
Large container ships are now in the 20,000 TEU range.
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.
> The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU.
Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo", not "500 ton total mass". And 500 tons of cargo are at minimum 25 TEU.
If they are competing with 747 freighters, those containers will almost always be "cubed out" (the container volume is full long before reaching its maximum legal weight), meaning the airship would load several times as many containers.
This is another advantage they have against air freight. Those 747s are frequently cubed out themselves, flying lighter than they would like. And you can't easily build much more volume into jet aircraft (well, you can, that's what the Airbus Beluga XL is, and apparently several air freight companies are pestering Airbus to re-open a production line for those). Airships, on the other hand, will be practicably impossible to cube out.
> Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo".
From their images, the airship is about 30 containers long. That's only 600 feet, shorter than the Macon or the Hindenburg. Useful lift of the Hindenburg was 232,000 kg.
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?
Rather than taking a huge shipment, delivering it, and having to deal with an empty airship, maybe it's better to think of it as a slowly drifting warehouse. Drones can handle delivery and restock across short distances, and the airship doesn't land at all. This would let you maintain a more or less consistent mass.
That’s cool, but also a quite different business and operating model where storage and delivery multiplexing are much more of a thing than with air freight.
The other problem is the drones. For this to work you’d be shipping either regular TEU containers or the air freight equivalent (not sure what they’re called but there’s a standard shape I believe), however no drone available today can move either of those. That means new drones, new shipping form factors, or both, and those are both hard problems that you probably don’t want to face when already trying to launch a new freight modality.
Awesome idea, but as you say, seems more like a sort of "last mile delivery vehicle" than cargo transport.
You could imagine some sort of futuristic flying Amazon warehouse/drone carrier: It would be pre-stocked at a distribution center, with packets already arranged in a way that they can be picked up by drones individually. Then it floats over a neighborhood while the drones deliver the individual packets to the homes below.
I was thinking of these as an alternative to having a distribution center. They're just always traveling on a few routes determined mostly by prevailing winds, making big circles around the planet. If you live on one of those routes, you can last mile delivery directly from the warehouse as it passes overhead. If not, the drones are loading/unloading a train or some such.
Yeah although typically they used water ballast, which is cheap and easy to find.
One thing worth considering is going back to hydrogen as a lifting gas. Not only is it a better lifting gas than helium and much cheaper, it could be used as fuel.
An airship that burned its own lifting gas would have the curious property of getting heavier the further it traveled. This could be countered by dual-fueling it and also have engines that burned heavier-than-air fuel like kerosene or propane. The hydrogen engines could burn the lifting gas at the same rate as the kerosene engines burn the ballast-fuel.
The Graf Zeppelin burnt Blaugas[1] because it's about the same density as air, so as the fuel tanks emptied the buoyancy didn't change. See [2] for other things the Zeppelins did, which says "The LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin had bi-fuel engines, and could use gasoline and Blau gas as a propellant. Twelve of the vessel's gas cells were filled with a propellant gas instead of lifting gas with a total volume of 30,000 cubic metres, enough for approximately 100 flight hours. The fuel tank had a gasoline volume of 67 flight hours. Using both gasoline and Blau gas, one could achieve 118 hours of cruise time."
That article mentions that the Zeppelins experimented with burning Hydrogen lift gas as fuel "without much success" but doesn't add detail.
My understanding was blau-gass was unpressurized propane, which is a little more dense than air. But I guess according to that article it's slightly less.
I'd expect that, like a lot of problems zeppelins had in the 1920s, burning hydrogen would be more feasible with modern technology.
I'd also point out that the thing that made hydrogen dangerous in those airships was that the skin was two layers. The inner skin was the gas bags, which were very fragile, and then the rigid structure and the outer skin to protect the fragile bags. This was a problem because hydrogen could accumulate and mix with air between the inner and outer skins. The outer skin also was quite flammable. Nowadays, we can make materials that are both strong enough to serve as an outer skin and impervious enough to serve as a gas bag for lifting gas, so modern airships have only one skin and nowhere for the lifting gas to mix with air inside the structure.
Uncompressed propane would have simply been called Propangas I think. That term had been established well enough in the second half of the century and while the Zeppelin-era was before that, I doubt that the term changed much.
But if you aim for a buoyancy-neutral fuel, you can just add hydrogen to the mix, as little or much as you need. That custom blend then would be precisely the thing you don't invent a creative name for but just use a color code ("the blue one").
This actually makes me think these people are unserious. This is an obsolescent airship design. ZeppelinNT, Airlander 10, and Lockheed P-719 all use the semi-rigid design with integral gas bags.
To move in the opposite direction you could use photovoltaics to electrolyze lifting/fuel hydrogen from water. Up there above the clouds you'd have pretty good conditions for solar if you could make the panels light enough.
As I understand it, it's common for a cargo ship to unload full containers and take on empties for the return voyage. Are cargo vessels holds always partially full vs. empty containers, bouncing between ports?
Would this issue even be a problem for fixed routes? If you're always taking full containers between two points, that is.
>(slang) Extremely good at something (usually a video game).
Neither the Merriam-Webster dictionary nor the Cambridge dictionary[0] list meaning 4, further hinting that it is a use that is mostly occurring in niche online communities. Note that I'm not saying meaning 4 is incorrect[1]. There's no such thing. Words is words. Usage is meaning. But I think I am justified in my belief that it is still relatively uncommon.
[0] The OED wanted money to show me their list of meanings.
[1] Although it is almost assuredly a mishearing of "crack".
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 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?
Competitive enough on speed while being less expensive makes sense, though.
Airships don't require a runway; a century ago they could moor to skyscrapers, or ships at sea.
If (big regulatory issues here) you can deliver directly from one site to another, you eliminate trucking goods to the source airport & from the destination airport. A 3 hour dirigible flight is slower than a 45 minute cargo plane flight, but buffering at a warehouse to loading / unload a truck (twice) could easily add 2-3 days latency.
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. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/weeksville-dirigible-han...
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.
Unrealized futurism predating both in magazine form was Popular Mechanics and Popular Science hype of Moller skycars as the original goat, and virtual reality being a close second.
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. AND 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.
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.
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.
Today the CargoLifter hangar is the biggest indoor water park.
The article said nothing about weather hazards or the fact that it’s a big fat target for a war drone to bring down.
It’s not just an easy target to hit, it’s a symbolic target.
Airships were abandoned because very large objects falling out of the sky did not appeal to the public… and too many of them fell.
Extremely severe weather brings down relatively tough aircraft, but once on the ground or in hangars they are relatively safe. Airships are flying cheesepuffs.
Perhaps. Airships will likely want to travel along jet streams since the wind speeds can outpace the airspeed of the airship. The neat thing here is that weather that will be problematic can be predicted days in advance, not just hours. Even 2 hours gets you pretty far in an airship in wind-calm, especially compared to (say) container ships. When you aren't in wind-calm, you can probably take advantage of winds by choosing your altitude wisely.
There has been no increase in air turbulence accidents per passenger mile over the past 30 years despite a quadrupling of air traffic (so more chances to encounter turbulence).
After normalizing the data by annual flight hours, there was no obvious trend over time for
turbulence-related Part 121 accidents during this period [1989-2018].
The BBC article cites a modelling paper. In a conflict between real data and a simulation, real data should win.
Turbulence for an airliner is going to be experienced differently for an airship. I'm not sure what to expect, TBH, but the difference between a plane moving at Mach 0.8 and an airship moving at 80 mph will definitely be real.
The L-8/Ghost Blimp took off with a crew of two from San Francisco in 1942. They found an oil slick (which was the last time either crew member was known to be alive) and then drifted before it crash landed in front of a home in Daly City.
I had never heard of this event before now and it’s a heck of an interesting late night rabbit hole. Thanks for the link!
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.
According to AI, there have been 5 historical attempts to make airships work before the modern resurgence:
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).
I think this has actually great potential for fruit transports.
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.
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.
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.
On water: More like atlantis, with a harbor and a loading dock.
Above water: maybe rope-anchored airships.
What I wanted to point out is that taxes are ground based, meaning the volume that's available above the ground usually is not used because of physical limitations of buildings and construction.
You could increase that efficiency of recurring costs for land vs storage space with airships.
I don’t see how storage space in airships could come anywhere as cheap as storage space on land even taking land taxes into account. Airships are not cheap and would need regular maintenance. I guess the water analog of a warehouse would be a barge to get perhaps you’re thinking more of an airbarge concept. Even still, warehouses are cheap in a way that flying things are not.
Well, this discussion is in the context of airships, so there's no question that everything that doesn't require potential energy to defeat gravity and to stay in position is more efficient.
The most efficient solution is btw not doing anything, and just leave the goods where they are produced, and stop producing too much for the own population. I'm pointing out that the concepts of finance and economies don't necessarily come hand in hand with what's more efficient to build. Otherwise people would use trains and not cars and planes.
I guess what I was trying to say is that we first have to kind of agree on a common description of what we describe as the best solution for the problem of storage space.
Is it financial costs only? Is it energy costs over time? Is it taxes over time? Is it physical space vs ground area ratio? Is it popularity and convenience (like in the car vs train case)?
You were arguing that warehouses are cheap to build, but that only works far outside densely populated areas.
A lot of countries are settled more densely than the US due to sheer lack of available land. So if we want to describe this problem correctly, we'd also have to account for South-East Asian, or South-American, or Polynesian, or European countries in my opinion.
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.
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:
It is a wonderful solution looking for a problem. I imagine there must be at least one landlocked country interested in the adventure.
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?
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
Cargo airships are not going to replace container ships, but they may well have their niche. One such use-case is prompt delivery of supplies that are urgently needed in high quantity in underdeveloped areas. For example, delivering some grammar to the parent comment.
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).
>Lighter Than Air, a company owned by Google's co-founder, begins testing Pathfinder 1, a next-generation airship that could revolutionize air travel, cargo transport, and the movement of humanitarian aid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also "current FAA guidance disallows the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas". So good luck with that.
As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.
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).
Venting helium is way to expensive and one of the reasons CargoLifter failed, was that they never managed to get water collection running.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Now imagine a 388x78 m giant filled with hydrogen, with hordes of engines everywhere, dropping of a bunch of containers at some delivery center...
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.
Then cargo gets loaded off and ballast of the same weight must be moved onto the ship.
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?).
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!
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.
No really because the gas helium or oxygen, is super low density (in fact the lowest 2 density gasses there are).
This means that you would need a compressor which can on one end suck super large volumes of gas but sill achieve high compression.
Those are heavy and need lots of energy which you don't have on an airship.
I looked up some compressor manufacturers. And got roughly the following:
Large helium compressors, which compress like 2000 liters of helium per minute to 200bar, weight around 2 tons and consume power in the order of 60kw.
Not sure if 2000 liters per minute is the right amount but you get the idea.
So even if you can fit that thing on your airship, the 60kw power plant and all its accompanying fuel does not fit.
And remember you are doing this because of fuel usage the first place!
So you would be using fuel to compress gas which you have to compress because you are using fuel...
Usually gasses like this are compressed (and liquified) via something like the Linde process:
Yes, this seems like the best paragraph from the article related to those questions:
Airship Industries is designing its vehicle to dominate transoceanic air freight. It checks all the right boxes. It shortens end-to-end freight delivery time. It lowers freight handling costs, delays, and breakage. It’s highly profitable on a unit basis. It lowers fuel burn and carbon emissions by 75 percent without any sustainable fuel breakthroughs.
How many shipping container can a single airship carry?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?)
Not to detract from your overall point, but you do the same thing you do when burning fuel while cruising: Add ballast.
Yes, but how do you add ballast to an airship while it is underway? Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the zeppelins did.
It has to be more energy efficient to re-compress your lifting gas back into storage bottles. What do modern airships do? This has to be a solved problem.
> Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the zeppelins did.
Citation? Would not the condenser need to burn fuel, thus lightening the ship?
You are carrying fuel and using oxygen from the atmosphere to combust it. When it's hot, it's a gas. By simply cooling it and recovering most of it, you are potentially left with more mass than you started off with... and Oxygen is relatively heavy.
The article describes electric airships
The article describes diesel electric airships.
The fine article shows them lowering a container from a crane. I'd love to see them connect the crane to an electric generator and actually regen the potential energy of the container into electricity.
Even more efficient might be raising another container at the same time in a (mostly) balanced manner. Then you don't have as much loss from conversion/storage.
Fun fact: many inclined elevators work this way :)
The GP asked about burning fuel. But in the case of electric airships, you can run an electric condenser, extracting atmospheric water vapor.
This idea of extracting water from air keeps coming back, but every time someone tries it, they learn of the same thermodynamic limits. It is extremely energy-intensive to extract water from the air, and it only really works if the climate is humid enough that there is water in the air to extract. This is exactly what a dehumidifier does, and the off-the-shelf version you can buy at home depot is no more than 5-10x worse than the thermodynamic limits - those generate a pitiful amount of water for a lot of energy intake.
Do we even need to extract the water? The point is to capture weight, and the only reason to liquefy the water is to store it more efficiently, by volume.
Storing higher humidity air doesn't sound very efficient, storing liquefied humid air sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, and storing compressed air sounds like an unnecessarily complicated alternative to just compressing the hydrogen.
You're both missing the forest for the trees, when the airship is electric obviously you don't have to add ballast while flying because you don't have to compensate for burnt fuel.
The ballast is for cargo, which needs to be picked up and dropped off. Fuel is just a potential solution.
Why condense water from fuel or the air then when you can just connect to the local municipal water system? You're already at port!
Not necessarily - the great thing about airships is that they can go anywhere, and pick up cargo at places that aren't ports. You can go pick up logs from logging camps directly, for example.
That seems like it would be really bad for energy efficiency: now you need batteries large enough for propulsion during the whole trip, plus extra for extracting water vapor.
Why not just take on some liquid water at the destination when you drop the cargo?
Because that's less flexible and there may not be water at the destination in the first place. That said, Flying Whales are trying to do exactly that, because ballast tech just isn't capable enough yet.
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I think they're aware of all these problems because they do mention almost everything you said in the linked post thinking through the idea: https://www.elidourado.com/p/cargo-airships
Obviously that was simply a post thinking through everything hypothetically and I didn't read anything that seemed like they actually had the best solution, but at least they seem to be aware of the challenges to landing and off-loading cargo efficiently.
Reading that article I see no proposed solutions to this sail problem. They mention wind as an issue for delivery times but not safety. There's also no acknowledgement that the "scaling law" that makes building huge airships lucrative also makes these problems worse.
Right, I am not saying they're right or wrong (not something I would know anything about), but it seems they've been vaguely aware of the issues from the start. Namely, before the SpaceX engineer and starting the company.
You're failing to see the secret that is exposed by the fact that their Chief Engineer comes from hyperloop. They're going to dig tunnels connecting all their destinations and run the airships underground in a vacuum sealed network. No atmospheric drag at all! Bingo!
How can you call yourself an engineer and work on the hyperloop. Literally only takes about 30s of thought to realize it is an impossible idea.
I don't particularly defend feasibility of Hyperloop, but did want to point out that your comment sounded awfully like when people were ridiculing the idea of human flight, landing on the moon etc... Finding engineering solutions to what looked as "impossible" challenges were some of the best feats of humanity so far.
Please reveal the impossibility of the idea?
Sure.
If you put it above ground, you are a few short bullets from killing everyone in the loop. Hitting a wall of air in a vacuum at hundreds of miles per hour is going to be like hitting a brick wall. Ask any reentering spacecraft.
The same problem exists underground, the weakest points being the stations themselves which can be bombed.
A failure in the system itself (even just a power outage or malfunctioning equipment) would mean people suffocate inside after a matter of minutes.
So, sure, it is possible to create it, but it is impossible to make any sort of safety guarantees. In other words, literally any other mode of transport would be safer, including a hydrogen-filled dirigible.
So, sure, the concept itself might be possible, but an engineer doesn't concern themselves with possible. That is for scientists. An engineer considers what is realistic AND possible, because that is an engineer’s job: to make the possible real. This cannot be real; literally no regulator would ever sign off on it.
> So, sure, it is possible to create it, but it is impossible to make any sort of safety guarantees.
Right, because cars and planes and trains and boats and bicycles and footpaths and airships all famously have 100% perfect safety track records, right?
Huh? In what world is a hyperloop going maybe 700mph comparable to a spacecraft reentering from orbit at 17,000mph? Also, maybe there's something I'm missing but spacecraft can and do renter from orbit intact, thus proving that this problem is solvable even when the forces at play are orders of magnitude greater. Apply your safety argument to passenger airliners or even ordinary trains and you'll see that they are also "impossible to make safety guarantees" for.
> The same problem exists underground, the weakest points being the stations themselves which can be bombed.
Few if any modes of transportation are safe when bombs come into play.
Just cover the thing in solar, and run it on electric. Add a couple of wind turbines too. I mean, the whole concept is preposterous, so why not just lean into it?
Solar powered airships floating around the world, following the prevailing winds, accepting durable goods by… catapult or something, delivery by chucking it out the window over populated areas. Paint them some nice pastel colors and we’re in Solarpunk world.
Wouldn't delivery be done by quadcopter drones? There have already been pilots projects where Amazon does delivery by drone in a couple of places. I don't think they were a success, but an airship adds some constraints that might make the more viable. Downside is the copters needs to return to whatever altitude the ship is currently cruising at, which might be close to their ceiling.
But on a side note my first reaction to the headline of this article was "no they are not". Airships have a number of fundamental drawbacks that I don't think we are any closer to solving. Ultimately they're as slow as a cargo ship, can only carry a relatively small and light payload like an airplane, require specialized ports like ships and airplanes, and are expensive to build and operate. They just don't have a viable niche.
> Wouldn't delivery be done by quadcopter drones?
But if you drop them via cheap parachute, you wouldn't need anything to return. I bet they'd only be slightly less accurate delivery than what their "don't give a damn" delivery system in place now.
Maybe, but as you point out you lose your pinpoint accuracy and also it consumes a parachute for every delivery. Your customers end up with a whole bunch of cloth to dispose of and you have to store enough for every delivery. The beauty of the quadcopter is that it is reusable. It can also use air brakes to help slow the descent and really only burn power on the very last bit of the delivery and then on the ascent back up, where it is no longer burdened by the package.
> Your customers end up with a whole bunch of cloth to dispose of
We're coming up on Great Depression 2: Electric Boogaloo pretty soon [citation needed], so we could just do the same thing our ancestors did with flour sacks back in the day and turn them into children's clothes. Or maybe even tents for the ever-growing homeless camp-cities. The dystopian possibilities are endless!
You seem to be losing the spirit of the conversation, and that spirit is the idea is preposterous. In that spirit, being reusable is irrelevant. I'm sure if they wanted, they could figure out how to make a disposable parachute that can be composted or recycled. At that's a far as practical as I'm willing to go
Why bother with a parachute? Just redesign houses with bungee-net drop zones for packages. It'd probably result in less damages than the average FedEx delivery anyway.
The copters can fly into a net suspended from the airship, rather than needing to gain all the altitude themselves.
Jet packs and tax free shopping as next step. Wait for your friendly airship to come around and go get your duty free stuff somehow... Surely there is some places they can visit on the way so it counts...
how about people? why only freight?
enter the Jump-o-cabin, press The Button, be catapulted into airship 3, fly to somewhere else, get parachuted down..
Bonus: the just-landed Jump-o-cabin can be used as free-standing toilet. uh, Was already used as...
I like the people delivery idea. Maybe wrap them in bubble wrap, and then drop them with a smallish parachute like NASA did with the Mars lander.
I avidly wait for that factorio mod!
or the final panel of an xkcd comic!
I calculated, than the airship with 100tonns capacity, and wind speed 25m/s require 25tons trust to compensatecthenwind. It is Boeing jet engine, not Electric fan require.
I've seen some YouTube videos converting Boeing jet engines to electric, but you have to smash that like and ring that subscribe bell to be able to see the build
What makes you think "docks with extremely strong mooring structures" is a particularly difficult problem to solve? A giant metal hook anchored in concrete attached to the ship with some steel cables doesn't seem like it would be that difficult for a team of smart engineers with a multi-million dollar budget to figure out a good design for. Certainly not so difficult or expensive as to threaten to make the entire concept nonviable.
Historically the difficulty isn't in building the mast, it is in preventing the airship from being smashed into the mast by the wind. Or in dramatic cases flipping end over end because it was only moored on one location.
Interesting. Why a mast and not just the ground? Pull up the mooring lines (probably more than the amount needed to actually hold the ship, for redundancy), connect them to the ship, then pull on the lines with winches until the ship is on the ground. That's basically how seafaring ships work... are there any unique challenges with airships?
The unique challenge is that everything is way up in the air and constantly moving around.
Build two masts and anchor from bow and aft?
I think if that was the biggest problem, they'd be used much more. There are a lot of places with light and regular winds, and we're also pretty good at predicting winds in the 1 day forward timescale. And of course there's the regular and predictable high winds that were traditionally used by sail ships.
Even a light wind with a giant sail area is dangerous. An empty 20ft shipping container weighs about two tons. If it's hanging from an airship and the wind causes it to shift even a foot it'll kill you dead if it hits you. If it hit a light frame building it would bust right through a wall. It would also easily knock down a non-reinforced cinder block wall.
A cargo airship would lowering cargo would essentially be an incredibly dangerous crane. The sail area of the airship makes it far more dangerous than lowering external cargo with a helicopter.
The article is talking about atlantic freight trips - middle of the ocean is not one of those places with light winds.
"Hindenburg made 17 round trips across the Atlantic in 1936 — its first and only full year of service — with ten trips to the United States and seven to Brazil."
A modern ship can make the same number of trips and not be dependent on weather at all.
... with unsustainable CO2 emissions. We need to be ramping down fossils use rapidly.
Ships are pretty good emissions wise because if the sheer amount of cargo they carry, even with burning the absolutely worst crap they can
Couldn't the sail factor be reduced by ionizing wind coming at the vehicle who then keeps away from the vehicle while going around it, depositing little energy?
> 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?
As long as it's just one small bubble with hydrogen, you can flare it off or combine with oxygen from the air outside to reduce lift.
> "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."
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
It doesn’t. The author is dreaming that airships might be able to just drop cargo off anywhere and I guess customs just happens in software somehow.
Nor is it clear how they are refuelled, or how they are immune from the same fluctuations in fuel cost as conventional cargo aircraft.
But what is clear is that you should “possibly invest” in his syndicate which is funding all this…
Customs in software is already a bit of a thing, judging from what postal tracking reports on occasion. I guess that doesn’t obviate the need for physical inspections, but it should make them faster.
Sadly, the US still receives 95% of all postal imports through 1 of 5 international service centres: Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; New York, NY, and San Francisco, CA
Northwest = NO YUO!
Technically 22 other places are supposed to accept international mail, but in reality, the other 5% go through Newark (for some surface mail), Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa.
This creates some long detours.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/reports/audit-reports/international-...
The issue is customs isn’t going to happen at some random factory / job site. International mail looks point to point from and end users perspective but as far as the government in concerned it’s all going throw a small number of locations as it enters the county. At least relative to the number of street addresses.
Sure, but why does that only benefit airships and not conventional airplanes?
I don’t expect it will, I’m just surprised whenever my parcel shows it’s been cleared by customs before it has even left the origin country. (And that’s not a timezone bug, it’s explicitly described as a remote authorization, a preauthorization, or something like that.) Customs (partly) in software is not an absurd idea, was my point, I have no opinion on airships other than acknowledging their inherent coolness.
Manifest approvals has been a reality for a while. But that works because, not despite, the bottlenecks.
Countries know goods must flow through certain choke points so they can essentially quality control the manifests.
Remove that and pre-authorised customs will go again.
Cargo planes require dedicated airports and runways and all that jazz, whereas the selling point of cargo airships seems to be to not need any of that; the article depicts one such airship handling a shipping container directly at a warehouse, for example. The need to go through some sort of customs process complicates things, but being able to put customs checkpoints further inland (closer to the end-destination) seems like it'd be appealing.
My concern is around the space an airship takes up; coordinating traffic for maximum throughput is going to be a nightmare.
They don't need to be immune from the same fluctuations in fuel costs. But if they use less fuel per ton, then a rise in fuel prices should benefit them more.
Airships could potentially be electric and solar powered. That would insulate it from fuel cost fluctuations. It would also resolve the issue with refueling.
Or you could just have a Terraform fuel plant synthesizing fuel colocated with every landing site.
The fuel plant doesn't have to be colocated with the pickup/delivery sites — you can do a fuel stop en-route if needed.
Is that you Casey? If so, though we disagree on the future of Airships, I love what Terraform is doing.
A smuggler's dream.
Longshoremen, lines at limited numbers of ports, etc., there a lots of problems that airships can solve simply by allowing airship ports to exist in, say, Kansas.
The need for specific geological features dramatically limits the amount of ports we can have, which seriously affects costs. If you could build a single, tiny airship point in every major city, you could save a bundle, and likely be close enough to the destination to unload directly to the customer at the port.
Is it for bulkier but lightweight stuff that trains can't handle or something?
I would assume that heavier stuff would be where the demand is. Air freight is expensive, because weight is expensive, because fuel is expensive, and it's obviously an environmental disaster.
The article isn't about solving those problems, it's about taking a few days longer to do the actual travel to save a bunch of money, since there's already massive delays on either end.
No, the article is saying "actually I was wrong about being longer and slotting in between airplane and cargo ship; we can be as fast as planes, but cheaper, and take a big slice of that whole huge market". Which is why they need to explain why airships won't also have customs etc.
I'm not sure about how they solve customs, but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse (avoiding trucks).
I guarantee that's not going to be a viable option. No nation, especially China or the USA, is going to allow an aircraft free access to land unknown cargo at a random warehouse without going through customs. It's going to have to land at some kind of airfield just like a cargo plane would.
I am not sure what US law on the matter is, but many countries have what are known as "bonded warehouses", which store uncleared goods within the destination country. Are you a customs expert? If so, please comment on whether the US has an equivalent.
There's also 'free trade' areas within China that allow transfer without import and export tax and other innovations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Free-Trade_Zone
Not a customs expert, but a short research suggests bonded warehouses do indeed exist in the United States: https://openjurist.org/title-19/us-code/section-1311/bonded-...
Next article: Transparent Airships Are Happening
I mean, the US just lets Chinese spy balloons wander aimlessly through its airspace :-P
Gotta give those F-22s target practice to keep their bloodlust sated. Otherwise they start snacking on commercial traffic and that can get real awkward real fast.
> but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse
Yeah, and that shit isn't going to happen either for a bazillion $very_good_reasons.
Not least safety.
I mean, yeah, let's just turn up at a densely populated environment and use a winch to long-line drop a few tons of cargo.
Whilst the general public and employees are walking around the place ?
When there's overhead cabling around ?
Even in perfect weather, with no wind, no rain, its still a dumb-as-shit idea.
Yeah, doesn't it kida turn anything under it into a heavy cargo crane safety zone ? Like, you not let people walk at random under suspended loads & thats what a loading/unloading operation for this turns into.
Drones for end customers make more sense then
How will the airship and its cargo clear customs at a random warehouse with presumably no staffing of border agents?
Not that I put any credence into the idea in the article, but for your particular question, the same way it occurs now at airports - bonded warehouses.
Which airports have bonded warehouses but do not already host customs facilities or agents?
I think that has to come after, not before.
I don't know if you're aware, but bonded warehouses are customs facilities. The vast majority of goods never pass through a Government customs facility.
In which countries are they legally identical, or even mostly identical, to the customs facilities commonly found in international airports?
I am not the parent, but they did not say bonded warehouses were identical to government customs facilities at airports.
>"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hence why I also said ‘or even mostly identical’?
If it’s only vaguely similar in fact, then that seems hardly convincing.
Maybe it's still a customs/border facility. It can just be inland now, away from the very expensive waterfront/costal property
the reason that property is so expensive is because that's where the people are. There's no point in avoiding the biggest cost of air freight - getting goods to consumers who don't live near the limited freight hubs, if you land it in the middle of nowhere and now need to ship by rail or truck AND last mile delivery
There are lots of people inland and away from sea ports. Many hubs of industry (such as Wisconsin which makes many mechanics' tools) could take advantage of this if it were available.
Would that inland facility still have a 100 mile jurisdiction boundary around it as well?
Yes, of course, with a grid of these facilities across the country.
Easy, put it on a starship instead, and fire it off like a ballistic missile at the target warehouse.
Implementation details /s
Let's say airfreight takes 7 days, with the flight being one of them. Then his airship would take 11 days, which is not much worse. He was expecting the comparison to be 5:1.
That's the take I would have made too, but no, the author explicitly claims that airships can be faster than airfreight by somehow magically sidestepping customs, warehousing, and trucking.
> 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.
> Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5 days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to look pretty good. 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.
Maybe the key phrase here is "If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other". So he's imagining that big enough companies will have their own airship port, and presumably plug in customs to that.... So then the next question is, how big does an airship port have to be? Presumably it doesn't need huge runways?
I'd imagine the author knows that you can't just sidestep customs, and it does feel a bit disingenuous that they didn't call that out. But hey, it's a pitch for money first and foremost. I'd imagine that they're just giving a complete list of things that slow down air freight and that internally they have plans for tackling each one, like not having to unload cargo to get it through customs and so using the airship as its own trucking vehicle post-customs.
This already happens, has happened for ages, and yet somehow the logistics industry manages to accomplish transshipment without fucking everything up . . . most of the time, anyway.
His argument is not quite correct. Let's try to steelman it.
If an airplane takes 12 hours to cross the ocean, and it takes 2 days on both sides with customs, warehouses, trucking and the last mile delivery, then it's a total of 4.5 days. If the airship takes 5 days to take the ocean, and the same 2 days on both sides, the total is 9 days. Despite being 10 times as slow in flight, the end-to-end delivery time is only two times slower than the one for the airplane.
I think the idea is to pickup at the source and deliver direct to the destination, eliminating the warehousing and trucking completely.
Maybe that's the idea, but it deserves some polishing.
The main observation that this guy made one year ago was that airships benefit from the square-cube law. A truly gigantic airship can carry a load proportional to its volume, but experiences drag proportional to its cross-sectional area, so it ends up having very good fuel economy. But to get to this scale you need to be at least as big as the Hindenburg, preferably much larger.
But then it's difficult to see how you can deliver loads of a few hundred tons from point to point.
I think the guy would have a much better pitch if he sticks to the idea that the speed disadvantage is significantly reduced by the first and last mile overhead that impact equally both cargo jets and airships.
My reading is that it doesn't solve it, it just indicates there is a market for non-urgent freight in which airships could compete.
That exists and it's called ocean freight. Air freight is where you pay a premium to get a small amount of stuff there NOW. Ocean freight is what you use when you need 15 shipping containers of stuff there in a couple of weeks.
Whether there is any market for an "in between" mode is an open question, and it's the business case of these airships for better or worse.
Yeah my initial reaction was you're comparing today's air freight in a static state with your envisioned optimal airship model; that's not realistic. The alternative to spending big on an entire new industry isn't doing nothing; it's using that investment in some other way, like optimizing air freight, or intra-continental, or addressing the entire overseas manufacturing/shipping model.
Maybe a smaller issue than wind, but something is wrong with this claim:
"If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other..."
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.
> How do you handle customs inspections and duties on imports?
Probably no different from private airfields, you have to file customs paperwork before arriving, and they can send inspectors out.
Not quite how it works. (At least, not in the US).
Firstly, not just any FBO is a point of entry.
Which brings us to the second point, the entire reason for designated points of entry is so that the customs officials can be on site already. As in, assigned to that FBO. Now at times specialists have to be sent out. (Think exotic or rare animals or biological/agricultural products.) But if that happens, your freight, and maybe even you, are quarantined and your freight isn't going anywhere any time soon. Believe me.
Most important, and relevant in this context is the third issue. Which is the fact that arrivals are met by customs officials and passengers and cargo are always subject to the same inspections/regulations as they are at any commercial airport.
So the original question is valid, how are they handling customs at the scale they're hoping to achieve in a fashion any faster than anyone else?
FBO = fixed base operator = private jet terminal or service provider at airports that caters to general aviation (non-commercial) flights. FBOs provide services like fueling, hangar space, and sometimes even customs clearance for international flights.
So they build operate their own airship FBOs? Honestly seems like the smaller hurdle to jump if all the engineering problems are solved, they will find a way to navigate this too. It’s a bit naive to assume they will comply with existing constraints versus defining what the airship industry would need. They won’t roll this out globally on day one, the largest and most obviously profitable areas will be source/destinations are probably easy to guess. They could even do their proof of concept it less regulated markets before coming to the US later. Plenty of room to solve these problems later.
Not sure how realistic, but could the inspectors go to the airship instead? They are not planes: Not only can they "park" while airborne, but at least there were concepts of boarding/unboarding in the air as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/realestate/26scapes.html
They could in theory but I'm dubious governments will be willing to shape their customs enforcement to accommodate this company. Best case I think they might be able to do a drop off at a place for customs inspections and pick them up again with a different craft once cleared.
I bet they would change their workflow if it was an Amazon warehouse. Amazon could change the rules in DC.Accomodate for certain size warehouses.
That's a chicken and egg problem. You have to get big enough to move enough cargo to make it worth getting special accommodations or go through the paperwork of being a proper import/export business to self report.
Is that really so different from how customs officers go on board trains now?
They don't in Turkey, they just force everyone to deboard.
There are a limited number of rail crossings they need to work with and it's conveniently on the ground. This company is pitching direct shipper to receiver deliveries via air so getting agents onto the ships is a lot harder and the company wants to drop off directly at customers all over the country meaning no proper port of entry. There are ways to do that but they're regulated as import/export businesses.
Rail lines go all over the country but they check when you cross even if that’s not your destination. I would expect the same to be true here: e.g. an airship leaving Mexico would go to, say, Riverside via a customs stop in San Diego or Calexico.
I agree with most other criticisms in the thread about the feasibility of this, but your suggestion is not _totally_ crazy. There are airports where you can land _if_ you give customs a heads up that you'll be flying there from abroad and they'll send a dude. The only one I've interacted with is in the Bahamas but I don't see any reason it's a showstopper. There're a lot bigger showstoppers on the critical path for this project than that.
That sounds expensive.
It's down to the laws of the country and the government could make an exception to go direct if they want for special items. One of the things the airships might make sense for is huge wind turbine blades that are too large to go by road. The government might well do it for that kind of thing.
But for regular freight I doubt it. I use to fly from England to France in a single engine plane, pre Brexit, and you might think just stick stuff in the plane in an airfield in the UK, fly to a field in France drop it off, vive the single market and that. But no you have to fly to a customs airport in the UK, queue up with your passport as usual, do the same in France then fly on to your field. Probably France to Germany say would be ok. It all depends on the local laws.
Also how many hours you save compared to truck/van? You still have to load it to one to drive it to where ever airship is moored, and then unload it, load to airship. Fly that to destination(weather depending). And same. Or you could drive from start to end. At certain distances it might make sense, but I think those might be somewhat limited.
Also the customs exist at both ends. Usually, you have to do preliminary enforcement too. That’s what DHL does at least. Still, most of your time “wastage” will happen at customs and there is no technological innovation for that. There is no way any (or most) governments will allow you to by pass them.
Yeah--I came here to highlight this too. I think all the legacy systems around international shipping won't permit direct to consumer pick up and delivery. Unless someone can show me an existing example?
In the U.S., a shipping company that is also a registered “Importer/Exporter of Record” can move stuff directly.
I ran a tugboat business and we had all of the required paperwork to file directly with U.S. Customs.
In many cases, we moved cargo too big to be transferred at a port or terminal.
Some international logistics businesses pickup from and ship directly to customers. They are well-practiced in avoiding customs delays and have extensive experience with non-traditional transport, such as semi-submursibles.
Seriously, if a Toyota supplier in Japan delivers parts daily to a factory in Ohio, do they go through regular customs or is there some other arrangement? Can they fly directly to an airfield near the factory?
That feels like a different scenario. Intuitively I would expect some pre-arranged clearance process that is valid for some period to avoid say daily paperwork lodging. Even the inspection process could be streamlined if there's some trust between the authorities and the regularly shipping parties.
It still doesn't address the case where a random small business receives a container full of their latest items from a supplier.
The first thing I funnily thought of with direct-to-customer was narcotics. If countries don't inspect goods coming in (assuming that countries with a risk of narcotics being shipped out have already lost), then it makes for a great muling opportunity, or just wholesale shipment.
The facts parts are sent and delivered daily doesn't mean they travel in 1 day.
Frequency != latency
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.
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.
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.
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.
As it turns out, ships are just really good at shipping. People keep trying airships with no fundamental tech or economic breakthroughs and they should all expect the same result.
Agreed. I've been reading about the return of airships since I was a kids in the 1980s. The fundamentals haven't changed.
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.
"I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction."
What IS spent on new ships globally, and what direction does it point in?
It's a cyclical industry, so whether it "points" or peaks can be argued, but in 2021 561 container ships were ordered vs 114 in 2020
• Approximately 900 container ships are currently being built or on order worldwide
• These have a combined capacity of 6.8 million TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units)
Major shipping lines:
• Evergreen: 20 ships of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2024-2025)
• OOCL: 10 vessels of 16,000 TEU capacity
• MSC: Multiple orders including 24,100 TEU ultra-large ships and smaller vessels
• CMA-CGM: 6 vessels of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2025)
New container ships being built is around all time high. Look it up.
It points to that the business is not only doing good but that investments is being made, heavily.
If the economics work, I’d imagine the best time is when there are the most ships built since that indicates unmet cargo demand.
I used to have intermodal carriers as customers, so for an IT guy I know a good bit about it. I went to comment on his post and it said only paid subscribers can comment. I'm not going to pay him to point out issues he'd need to deal with.
Yeah, it seems like every attempt at an airship company for the last 70 years or so just ends up speed-running the development of modern travel/logistics that makes airships obsolete. Same way crypto is/was speed-running the need for modern financial regulation.
On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the industrial revolution the average pace of technological advance was extremely slow. The Mongols conquered Asia with weaponry that would have been instantly familiar to people living 2000 years earlier. Perhaps our descendants 1000 years from now will still be using refrigerators virtually identical to our own.
I think it's more like the Western economy is silently crashing than technological development having reverted back to ~19th century rate, although the latter is said to be happening too - something feels wrong about tech lately.
CRISPR, Yamanaka factors, computational biology, brain computer interfaces, Starship, LLMs... we are nowhere near the top of the tech S curve.
Most of those are still in the lab, Starship is an incremental improvement that was largely a matter of funding, LLMs are at best a threat to telemarketers and customer service reps, perhaps paralegals.
I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve into nothing once any real-world application is attempted. I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions without incident.
I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make batteries obsolete.
I don't know how old you are, but regardless, can you not see how technological change has occurred within your own single human lifespan? This wasn't true in a meaningful way to an individual's life trajectory until the last century or so. The changes are coming so continuously and with such significant future implications, it's impossible for me not to just stand in awe.
Whether the specific proof of radical change you're waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to everything that came before it.
Then iPhone 4 came out in 2010. Google SDC prototype drove for 140k miles by then. It's 2024, and iPhone 4 is still sort of usable. Might run 0.25B LLM? Waymo is serving just couple small areas in US. There's no categorical successor to phones. No one other than Waymo achieved SDC.
Oculus DK1 shipped in 2012. VR is still a niche anime/gamer/anime-gamer product. AI bubble is correcting fast. Boom Overture supersonic jetliner isn't flying. Starship just landed for the first time, and it did land but appeared to have gone full banana soon after. Insane but it's not going into service for a little while. Brain-computer interfaces... meh. They were always stuck at immune response problem and that's why no one is doing invasive BCI, not because it wasn't invented back in 80s or whenever it was.
GP's claim is that things are slowing down and none of inventions are life changing big. Things are definitely slowing down and none of recent inventions are intercontinental teleportation certified for commercial services big.
TBH the last 10 years of my life I've noticed technilogical stagnation, enshitification, marginal improvments. The 20 years before that was an amazing wild ride.
[flagged]
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Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful discussion, even here. Sometimes people get (or try to get) a boat-load of money to do a thing that's bad from first principles, because they lack experience in the relevant field. In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun of, because it's funny.
In the case of TFA: The airships as proposed solve none of the problems the author claims unless they just bypass customs and border control, which is, you know, a crime. And if your startup is hinged on the idea of committing nation-tier crimes at scale to succeed, that doesn't merit rebuttal. It merits mockery.
Hence why I mentioned the Satoshi, because that's also really funny, for similar reasons: because people who get really good at one complicated thing, in our cases here, programming; suddenly think that everything else is less complicated, and therefore easily handled "in the roadmap" and they go out and make fools of themselves for not doing literally a few minutes of solid research beforehand.
That said I will absolutely cop to the downvote comment. My bad there.
> Counterpoint: Not everything deserves thoughtful discussion, even here.
Incorrect. The HN guidelines repeatedly emphasize that HN is for thoughtful discussion and intellectual curiosity, and not for sneering, being snarky, flamebaiting, going on generic tangents, internet tropes, or political or ideological battle.
And, these aren't arbitrary - there's a reason for them. Those negative behaviors degrade discourse. The main reason why HN has managed to remain a semi-civilized place to be (as opposed to Reddit and Twitter) after two-ish decades of existence and significant user growth is because of those guidelines and dang's impartial commitment to implementing them.
Your comment 41849098 above breaks a frankly impressive amount of the guidelines and anyone who even does a cursory read-over of them (they're conveniently copy-pasted above) can see that.
> In my mind at least, that's perfectly fine to make fun of, because it's funny.
Well, then don't do it on HN. Sneering about "crypto losers" and sarcastically saying "The only prayer I say on the regular is "Lord, bless me with the confidence of a mediocre tech bro."" does not gratify intellectual curiosity, breaks the guidelines, is completely value-less fluff, and negatively contributes to the discourse and quality of HN. If you want to do that - do it on Twitter.
I get why someone will have the conservative position. I even get that someone enjoys schadenfreude at people who are not conservative. I just don’t get why someone who has low risk-tolerance would come to a startup forum to express their low risk-tolerance.
That would be like if I spent any amount of time on child-free subreddits or on forums about stanced cars.
Well for one, the topics covered on here are far broader than just startups. And for two, a lot of the ones that are startups are actually interesting, they're trying to solve actual problems. In fact, putting aside the incompetence, this one I would say falls into that category.
That said, not all ideas are created equal, and IMO at least, this one is not, and what makes it fall short is so obvious that I have trouble treating it as a serious proposition on the part of the people behind it, let alone one worth putting money into.
This effort is just starting up? Flying Whales expect to have an airship in 2025 and be operational in 2028 per https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-11/outback-town-launches... . Not that this is a race; better if several companies succeed.
I'm old enough to remember Airship Industries (1979):
>The AD500 was "a new-generation airship making use of advanced materials and technology." It was 164 feet (50 m) long and contained 181,200 cubic feet (5,130 m3) of helium.
>Unfortunately, on 8 March 1979, the month-old AD500 was seriously damaged when the nosecone failed while the ship was moored in high winds.
And various other things not really working till they went bust in 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries
I wonder if Airship Industries (2024) will do any better?
Their ships don't looks very different - old co https://www.airliners.net/photo/Airship-Industries/Airship-I...
New co https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
>Unfortunately, on 8 March 1979, the month-old AD500 was seriously damaged when the nosecone failed while the ship was moored in high winds.
"Well the front's not supposed to fall off, for a start."
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
It absolutely can happen, but not for routine goods where being on schedule is highly important. But for outsize goods, waiting for a favorable weather forecast is a much smaller concern than strengthening roads or perhaps even removing a bridge or two. For how wind turbine deployment, freight airship would be a gamechanger and there's a long (but truly narrow) tail of more niche use cases. Including any "unknown unkowns" that really can't exist before matching transportation.
The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling containers between China and the rest of the world that's still tiny.
Modern airships are semi-rigid. They have a keel and a rigid structure to support the empennage. The rest of the structure can be deflated and collapsed just like a non-rigid blimp.
I'd bet a bunch of former SpaceX engineers will figure out a solution.
There are tons of dumb startups that were created by former SpaceX people. Having worked at SpaceX doesn't magically turn you into a superior person that can solve all problems. But having worked at SpaceX is a great way to convinced investors to give you money.
Yeah, dude was head of Hyperloop. Nailed that one
Hyperloop succeeded at exactly what it was meant to succeed at, which was planting just enough FOMO to get a handful of rail projects in California delayed and ultimately canceled.
I take your point in that there are a lot of naysayers here, as there were with Hyperloop. There were also hundreds of volunteers working on the project, who clearly thought it had a chance of working--and many more saying rockets would never be made reusable, it had been tried before, too many problems that can never be solved...
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill
Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible? Is it because we just no longer believe that things truly are impossible (or dumb)? The ideas that all turn out to be "impossible" successes are ones where the math or physics bears out the idea but the engineering is "impossible."
Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had physics problems, and no matter how hard anyone tried, they were guaranteed to run into them. Cargo airships also have a physics problem that make them absurdly expensive and risky to put cargo on. In both cases, this is an idea that is 100 years old and where the physics has been studied. This time is not different unless you have solid reasoning.
Contrast that with rockets, to use another Musk example: Rockets are well within the bounds of physics, but a hard engineering problem. Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).
Well, TIL something I thought was demonstrated mid-century didn't happen until the 90s.
> Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).
No it wasn't. It was done many times in the 60s and 70s — e.g. all the moon landings.
>Why do people lionize trying ideas that are known to be dumb and/or impossible?
Because airships are really cool.
Because airships are simple and cheap, and as the blog post says: if they can get cargo point-to-point across the Atlantic, they will put air freight out of business.
If they can't do that, at least they could be competitive.
Ships are simple and cheap. Airships are known to combine the drawbacks of ships (slow, weather-dependent) with the drawbacks of airplanes (needs to be light so it can fly).
That is not a winning combination for putting any kind of freight carrying out of business. The main reason people use air freight today is to get something from one continent to another in 24 hours. Airships will never do that.
Great, form an airship club. Stop throwing $100 million after $100 million of your investors' cash at your hobby.
I'll keep that in mind if I ever have money to invest in airships with.
(This was obviously not aimed at you, but at the VCs who have been trying this for the last 30 years)
Apples and oranges. Of my many engineer friends none of them thought the hyper loop was viable, it’s an absurdly bad idea. Like installing compressed air jets in cars for faster acceleration. Another one of Elons missives.
Reusable rockets were more of an economic issue, is there enough demand for economic viability. That was always going to be the real magic. I think that is still an open question but it at least appears plausible.
Even if they solve most of the technical issues could this ever be competitive with planes/ships/trucks? Under what circumstances?
It just doesn't seem very practical, basically you'd need to transport freight to places with no access to sea/roads or rails and can't fit it on an airplane. Is there a lot of demand for this? Also presumably such areas would have harsh and unpredictable weather..
> Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
Survivor bias? For every case of it working out there are many more of people wasting time and enthusiasm on something that's a dead end (and this was the general consensus for the past 80 years or so)
Some loads simply don't fit on trucks, or rather on the roads that the trucks have to use. Heavy lift airship would operate in a market segment that does not even exist without them.
> market segment
So I'm just curious what is that segment and how large ($) can it be? What cargo exactly would it be transporting?
Big transformers are now limited to boat transportation, and it's a constraint on grid design. I assume this is also the case for other industries that become river bound but wouldn't necessarily be so if not for equipment transportation. So this could be a game changer (more so I think than this faster than boat slower than plane thing).
Wind turbine blades is the obvious one. On-shore turbines would be much larger (which btw implies lower rpm, which implies being less annoying) if they were not constrained by land transport.
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.
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.
Large container ships are now in the 20,000 TEU range.
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.
[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66b24fc3f58cf0...
> The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU.
Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo", not "500 ton total mass". And 500 tons of cargo are at minimum 25 TEU.
If they are competing with 747 freighters, those containers will almost always be "cubed out" (the container volume is full long before reaching its maximum legal weight), meaning the airship would load several times as many containers.
This is another advantage they have against air freight. Those 747s are frequently cubed out themselves, flying lighter than they would like. And you can't easily build much more volume into jet aircraft (well, you can, that's what the Airbus Beluga XL is, and apparently several air freight companies are pestering Airbus to re-open a production line for those). Airships, on the other hand, will be practicably impossible to cube out.
> Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo".
From their images, the airship is about 30 containers long. That's only 600 feet, shorter than the Macon or the Hindenburg. Useful lift of the Hindenburg was 232,000 kg.
15 FEU is indeed very small.
For the curious the search string you want is "Maersk cargo ships in Loch Striven".
I searched around a bit and it seems they have been gone from the Loch since 2011: https://inflatableboatjourneys.blogspot.com/2011/07/kyles-of...
Or maybe they are back? There aren't a lot of sources I could find.
At some point in the future the real cost of operating with fossil fuels will catch up.
Battery cargo ships make a lot of sense, since you can slow-steam far slower without losing efficiency, with an electric motor.
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?
Rather than taking a huge shipment, delivering it, and having to deal with an empty airship, maybe it's better to think of it as a slowly drifting warehouse. Drones can handle delivery and restock across short distances, and the airship doesn't land at all. This would let you maintain a more or less consistent mass.
That’s cool, but also a quite different business and operating model where storage and delivery multiplexing are much more of a thing than with air freight.
The other problem is the drones. For this to work you’d be shipping either regular TEU containers or the air freight equivalent (not sure what they’re called but there’s a standard shape I believe), however no drone available today can move either of those. That means new drones, new shipping form factors, or both, and those are both hard problems that you probably don’t want to face when already trying to launch a new freight modality.
Awesome idea, but as you say, seems more like a sort of "last mile delivery vehicle" than cargo transport.
You could imagine some sort of futuristic flying Amazon warehouse/drone carrier: It would be pre-stocked at a distribution center, with packets already arranged in a way that they can be picked up by drones individually. Then it floats over a neighborhood while the drones deliver the individual packets to the homes below.
I was thinking of these as an alternative to having a distribution center. They're just always traveling on a few routes determined mostly by prevailing winds, making big circles around the planet. If you live on one of those routes, you can last mile delivery directly from the warehouse as it passes overhead. If not, the drones are loading/unloading a train or some such.
Yeah although typically they used water ballast, which is cheap and easy to find.
One thing worth considering is going back to hydrogen as a lifting gas. Not only is it a better lifting gas than helium and much cheaper, it could be used as fuel.
An airship that burned its own lifting gas would have the curious property of getting heavier the further it traveled. This could be countered by dual-fueling it and also have engines that burned heavier-than-air fuel like kerosene or propane. The hydrogen engines could burn the lifting gas at the same rate as the kerosene engines burn the ballast-fuel.
The Graf Zeppelin burnt Blaugas[1] because it's about the same density as air, so as the fuel tanks emptied the buoyancy didn't change. See [2] for other things the Zeppelins did, which says "The LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin had bi-fuel engines, and could use gasoline and Blau gas as a propellant. Twelve of the vessel's gas cells were filled with a propellant gas instead of lifting gas with a total volume of 30,000 cubic metres, enough for approximately 100 flight hours. The fuel tank had a gasoline volume of 67 flight hours. Using both gasoline and Blau gas, one could achieve 118 hours of cruise time."
That article mentions that the Zeppelins experimented with burning Hydrogen lift gas as fuel "without much success" but doesn't add detail.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blau_gas
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buoyancy_compensator_(aviation...
My understanding was blau-gass was unpressurized propane, which is a little more dense than air. But I guess according to that article it's slightly less.
I'd expect that, like a lot of problems zeppelins had in the 1920s, burning hydrogen would be more feasible with modern technology.
I'd also point out that the thing that made hydrogen dangerous in those airships was that the skin was two layers. The inner skin was the gas bags, which were very fragile, and then the rigid structure and the outer skin to protect the fragile bags. This was a problem because hydrogen could accumulate and mix with air between the inner and outer skins. The outer skin also was quite flammable. Nowadays, we can make materials that are both strong enough to serve as an outer skin and impervious enough to serve as a gas bag for lifting gas, so modern airships have only one skin and nowhere for the lifting gas to mix with air inside the structure.
Uncompressed propane would have simply been called Propangas I think. That term had been established well enough in the second half of the century and while the Zeppelin-era was before that, I doubt that the term changed much.
But if you aim for a buoyancy-neutral fuel, you can just add hydrogen to the mix, as little or much as you need. That custom blend then would be precisely the thing you don't invent a creative name for but just use a color code ("the blue one").
The way the cutaway images on their site look, the bouyant members would be nestled in the actual structure in large tanks.
https://www.shipbyairship.com/
This actually makes me think these people are unserious. This is an obsolescent airship design. ZeppelinNT, Airlander 10, and Lockheed P-719 all use the semi-rigid design with integral gas bags.
To move in the opposite direction you could use photovoltaics to electrolyze lifting/fuel hydrogen from water. Up there above the clouds you'd have pretty good conditions for solar if you could make the panels light enough.
> it needs to take on another 100 tons of new cargo (or ballast) ... in order to maintain the correct buoyancy.
Sounds perfect for a cargo situation. Add new cargo as old cargo is removed.
As I understand it, it's common for a cargo ship to unload full containers and take on empties for the return voyage. Are cargo vessels holds always partially full vs. empty containers, bouncing between ports?
Would this issue even be a problem for fixed routes? If you're always taking full containers between two points, that is.
> Over the summer, Jim incorporated Airship Industries. He hired a team of cracked ex-SpaceX engineers. And he raised a large pre-seed round...
This typo is perfect.
I don’t think it’s a typo. There’s an emergent usage of “cracked” meaning “awesome”.
They did survive SpaceX, after all. You'd expect a few scars.
Nothing says fun times like a mad rocket scientist!
I am blind. What typo?
"Crack engineer" means an engineer who is smart and capable. "Cracked engineer" means an engineer who is insane.
It's just how the kids and the terminally online are saying it these days
Not even particularly new. I remember seeing it used talking about Counter-Strike pros in the early 2000s
Cracked founders!
> (slang) Extremely good at something (usually a video game).
>> 20 kills? Dude, you're cracked.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cracked
Except for the very online, I think meaning 5
> (slang) Crazy; crackpot.
is more common in every day use than meaning 4
>(slang) Extremely good at something (usually a video game).
Neither the Merriam-Webster dictionary nor the Cambridge dictionary[0] list meaning 4, further hinting that it is a use that is mostly occurring in niche online communities. Note that I'm not saying meaning 4 is incorrect[1]. There's no such thing. Words is words. Usage is meaning. But I think I am justified in my belief that it is still relatively uncommon.
[0] The OED wanted money to show me their list of meanings.
[1] Although it is almost assuredly a mishearing of "crack".
It's generational. Gen Alpha increasingly use "cracked" to mean talented.
Even "S-tier" has crept into the non-gamer vernacular. My wife and her friends - not gamers - are using it.
TikTok spreads this stuff like wildfire.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked
https://www.tiktok.com/discover/what-does-cracked-mean-in-sl...
This is an extremely online place filled with people who game or are gamer-adjacent.
This intended meaning is obvious from context.
I assume the word "cracked"?
Cracked is coming form Irish slang? As in the `craic is 90`. Pronounced `crack` [0]
[0]: https://ireland-calling.com/irish-slang-craic/
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 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?
Competitive enough on speed while being less expensive makes sense, though.
Airships don't require a runway; a century ago they could moor to skyscrapers, or ships at sea.
If (big regulatory issues here) you can deliver directly from one site to another, you eliminate trucking goods to the source airport & from the destination airport. A 3 hour dirigible flight is slower than a 45 minute cargo plane flight, but buffering at a warehouse to loading / unload a truck (twice) could easily add 2-3 days latency.
That makes it make more sense. Thanks.
You're right that there are big regulatory issues still.
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. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/weeksville-dirigible-han...
This. Anybody remember cargolifter?
For anyone not familiar with Cargolifter, this might be a useful start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
I remember when i had a students job, some older colleague told me he sunk a nice sum into this. Foolishly, maybe!
I still remember seeing the big hall in a Galileo broadcast https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter-Luftschiffhalle
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.
Unrealized futurism predating both in magazine form was Popular Mechanics and Popular Science hype of Moller skycars as the original goat, and virtual reality being a close second.
Jet packs seem to be getting actually closer, maybe perpetually 5 years off instead of perpetually 10 years away.
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. AND 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.
The CargoLifter-Conendrum:
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.
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.
Today the CargoLifter hangar is the biggest indoor water park.
The article said nothing about weather hazards or the fact that it’s a big fat target for a war drone to bring down.
It’s not just an easy target to hit, it’s a symbolic target.
Airships were abandoned because very large objects falling out of the sky did not appeal to the public… and too many of them fell.
Extremely severe weather brings down relatively tough aircraft, but once on the ground or in hangars they are relatively safe. Airships are flying cheesepuffs.
Luckily, we have much better weather forecasting than we did last time we tried airships for realsies.
But even then, forecasted storms mean more delay to the already-slow airship.
Also the airship is simply too slow to dodge any sudden severe weather, even if they saw it coming hours before.
Perhaps. Airships will likely want to travel along jet streams since the wind speeds can outpace the airspeed of the airship. The neat thing here is that weather that will be problematic can be predicted days in advance, not just hours. Even 2 hours gets you pretty far in an airship in wind-calm, especially compared to (say) container ships. When you aren't in wind-calm, you can probably take advantage of winds by choosing your altitude wisely.
Severe turbulence in clear conditions is increasing due to climate change: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-severe-turbulenc...
There has been no increase in air turbulence accidents per passenger mile over the past 30 years despite a quadrupling of air traffic (so more chances to encounter turbulence).
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS2101....
After normalizing the data by annual flight hours, there was no obvious trend over time for turbulence-related Part 121 accidents during this period [1989-2018].
The BBC article cites a modelling paper. In a conflict between real data and a simulation, real data should win.
Turbulence for an airliner is going to be experienced differently for an airship. I'm not sure what to expect, TBH, but the difference between a plane moving at Mach 0.8 and an airship moving at 80 mph will definitely be real.
> too many of them fell
How many of them fell? Tried searching this up and barely any fell. Very few deaths too.
A partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents.
The list of Zepplins is also enlightening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zeppelins
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
This list is quite comprehensive I think
That’s a good article. I found this one:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-8
The L-8/Ghost Blimp took off with a crew of two from San Francisco in 1942. They found an oil slick (which was the last time either crew member was known to be alive) and then drifted before it crash landed in front of a home in Daly City.
I had never heard of this event before now and it’s a heck of an interesting late night rabbit hole. Thanks for the link!
Time to order a leather hat, goggles and a scarf.
To summarize: "It'll surely work this time. Please invest."
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.
According to AI, there have been 5 historical attempts to make airships work before the modern resurgence:
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).
Sailing ships are happening.
I think this has actually great potential for fruit transports.
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.
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.
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.
I just want to say that fruits need a ripening time because they are picked too early to accommodate transportation.
Fruits picked ripe from the tree are significantly tastier and probably healthier.
Meet ethylene.
> "if they could invent a storage space .. offshore above the water"
like, a boat?
On water: More like atlantis, with a harbor and a loading dock.
Above water: maybe rope-anchored airships.
What I wanted to point out is that taxes are ground based, meaning the volume that's available above the ground usually is not used because of physical limitations of buildings and construction.
You could increase that efficiency of recurring costs for land vs storage space with airships.
I don’t see how storage space in airships could come anywhere as cheap as storage space on land even taking land taxes into account. Airships are not cheap and would need regular maintenance. I guess the water analog of a warehouse would be a barge to get perhaps you’re thinking more of an airbarge concept. Even still, warehouses are cheap in a way that flying things are not.
Well, this discussion is in the context of airships, so there's no question that everything that doesn't require potential energy to defeat gravity and to stay in position is more efficient.
The most efficient solution is btw not doing anything, and just leave the goods where they are produced, and stop producing too much for the own population. I'm pointing out that the concepts of finance and economies don't necessarily come hand in hand with what's more efficient to build. Otherwise people would use trains and not cars and planes.
Color me confused. I do not understand what point you're making - it appears to be all over the map until the end where it makes no point at all.
I guess what I was trying to say is that we first have to kind of agree on a common description of what we describe as the best solution for the problem of storage space.
Is it financial costs only? Is it energy costs over time? Is it taxes over time? Is it physical space vs ground area ratio? Is it popularity and convenience (like in the car vs train case)?
You were arguing that warehouses are cheap to build, but that only works far outside densely populated areas.
A lot of countries are settled more densely than the US due to sheer lack of available land. So if we want to describe this problem correctly, we'd also have to account for South-East Asian, or South-American, or Polynesian, or European countries in my opinion.
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.
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:
"When Zeppelins Ruled The Earth" (6m47s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU&ab_channel=Simon...
It is a wonderful solution looking for a problem. I imagine there must be at least one landlocked country interested in the adventure.
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?
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
Cargo airships are not going to replace container ships, but they may well have their niche. One such use-case is prompt delivery of supplies that are urgently needed in high quantity in underdeveloped areas. For example, delivering some grammar to the parent comment.
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.
Nice! I guess one of the side effects is that air pirates are finally going to be a thing! Yay!
Is your crew hiring?
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).
> They are missing out on a golden opportunity, North Carolina disaster could be where they shine and show the world what they can do
They currently are showing the world what cargo airships can do (ie nothing). The world just perpetually doesn't want to listen.
I wonder what
>Lighter Than Air, a company owned by Google's co-founder, begins testing Pathfinder 1, a next-generation airship that could revolutionize air travel, cargo transport, and the movement of humanitarian aid.
are doing with their ship? I think it's built and sitting around. (https://www.domusweb.it/en/sustainable-cities/gallery/2023/1...)
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.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter
What has changed?
Cargo airships are like nuclear fusion, just a few years away for the last sixty years.
> He hired a team of cracked ex-SpaceX engineers.
A team of what??
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.
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.
Vaporware hype.
Even grifters seem to run out of new ideas...
Sounds good does not work.
Reminds me of CargoLifter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
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.
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.
Also "current FAA guidance disallows the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas". So good luck with that.
As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.
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).
Venting helium is way to expensive and one of the reasons CargoLifter failed, was that they never managed to get water collection running.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Now imagine a 388x78 m giant filled with hydrogen, with hordes of engines everywhere, dropping of a bunch of containers at some delivery center...
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.
Then cargo gets loaded off and ballast of the same weight must be moved onto the ship.
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?).
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!
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.
> As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.
Can't you just compress lifting gas to reduce it's volume?
No really because the gas helium or oxygen, is super low density (in fact the lowest 2 density gasses there are). This means that you would need a compressor which can on one end suck super large volumes of gas but sill achieve high compression. Those are heavy and need lots of energy which you don't have on an airship.
I looked up some compressor manufacturers. And got roughly the following:
Large helium compressors, which compress like 2000 liters of helium per minute to 200bar, weight around 2 tons and consume power in the order of 60kw.
Not sure if 2000 liters per minute is the right amount but you get the idea.
So even if you can fit that thing on your airship, the 60kw power plant and all its accompanying fuel does not fit.
And remember you are doing this because of fuel usage the first place! So you would be using fuel to compress gas which you have to compress because you are using fuel...
Usually gasses like this are compressed (and liquified) via something like the Linde process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampson%E2%80%93Linde_cycle
That is industrial scale and does not go onto anything that moves...
And you would need to store your compressed gasses somewhere too.
All of this is super complex, heavy, requires stupid amounts of energy and thus is way to costly to do on something that flies.
Yes, if you do the mechanical adjusts on the vessel. What may be much harder than expected.
But compressing the gas takes time. If you intend to leave the ship parked there until you finish this, you will need a lot more of space.
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?
What is the target operating speed considering cargo weight?
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?
Read the article dude
Yes, this seems like the best paragraph from the article related to those questions:
Airship Industries is designing its vehicle to dominate transoceanic air freight. It checks all the right boxes. It shortens end-to-end freight delivery time. It lowers freight handling costs, delays, and breakage. It’s highly profitable on a unit basis. It lowers fuel burn and carbon emissions by 75 percent without any sustainable fuel breakthroughs.
How many shipping container can a single airship carry?