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The Second Age of Airships
The Telegraph has a story about a new generation of airships. It says "It's a new vehicle. It's a hybrid because we're combining helium lift, aerodynamic lift, a hovercraft landing system, and vectored thrust... If you can get beyond the word airship — because that has a lot of history — people think about them differently."
We should save it for heart shaped balloons and making funny voices at parties?
So, it's like a cruise ship, but faster. And that's a bad thing? Obviously it doesn't compare favorably to a jet airliner if your only objective is to get from A to B, but if your objective is to enjoy the ride (kinda like on a cruise) then it seems pretty awesome.
Half as dense as helium (so twice the lifting power),
Uh, no? It's being lifted by air pressure caused by air density of about 1.2 g/L; helium has a density of 0.1786g/L, so a vacuum would at most supply 14% more lift. Hydrogen at .08988g/L supplies 7.5% more lift-- hardly twice the lifting power.
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What, exactly, makes it a dumb idea?
I've been on 5hr flights -- they're no fun. I can only imagine some of the really long flights must be friggin' brutal. Give it hotel amenities, a bar, a dance floor -- whatever -- and send people on a more leisurely trip without jamming them in like cattle and shoving them through airports. I can see it being a popular mode of travel.
Heck, just the romantic notion of it is kind of cool. I'd *love* to go on an airship voyage. It would be just plain old cool.
For leisure travel, it would be absolutely awesome way to see the world. I can see people paying to travel on one, if nothing else, for the novelty of it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hydrogen is the correct answer, but people don't want to hear it because of the images of the Hindenburg crash.
This is ridiculous. The Hindenburg crash isn't 9/11: it was nigh 80 years ago and I'm not even distantly related to anyone who died on it. I have no emotional connection to the disaster whatsodamnedever. I reject hydrogen in airships because it's dangerous as hell. There are just too many potential sources of ignition (sparks from machinery, static discharge) for it ever to be safe enough for flight, if we hold it to the same standards of safety that commercial jets are.
Gasoline burns hotter than hydrogen, but thanks to the Hindenburg crash video, we don't have hydrogen cars either.
Gasoline burns, hydrogen explodes. There's a difference. And the issues with hydrogen cars are a multi-paragraph post that I don't feel like writing right now, but (lousy energy density, present impossibility of storage, no infrastructure) are the main reasons, not lingering Hindenburg memories. Who on earth modded GP Insightful?
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Now imagine the costs if the thing must always take off at constant load. It would be like old sailing ships that had to fill up with gravel ballast to make safe return trips (because if they returned empty the wind could simply push them over.) Currently an Airbus 380 can transport about 150t of freight one way, and if it makes the return journey empty, OK it is a wasted trip but it requires less fuel for takeoff, which is significant on short hauls.
If you try to solve the problem by having pumps to transfer gas from the envelope to storage tanks, to control the buoyancy, you have to factor in the cost of ferrying around the pumps and the tanks. It is not impossible, but it would be complicated and expensive and require extensive safety testing before it could be certified. Much of the simplicity relative to an airplane would be lost - and you still end up with something that requires as much or more room as a 380 - a helicopter replacement this is not.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
From TFA:
"Currently, the lighter-than-air market uses only two per cent of all the helium bought in the world. Most of that is used to blow up party balloons. "
Based on that I would expect the demand for party balloons would drop very quickly as the price of helium rises. That would allow plenty of helium to shift to airships.
The claims of thermite paint being the cause of the explosion has been debunked. Mythbusters featured one of the better known debunking.
The main determinants of fuel consumption are: 1) speed; and 2) the surface area of the front of the vehicle (since that determines how much air must be pushed out of the way). Since airships are very large, they will never be fuel efficient unless they travel very slowly. If they travel very slowly, then we must ask: why not use a train or a ship? Trains and ships will always have vastly greater carrying capacity, because they don't require helium to lift their cargo which has modest lift for a given volume.
In short: if speed is not important, then trains and ships will always be far cheaper and carry far more; and if speed is important, then airplanes will always be faster and more fuel-efficient at high speeds.
Airships are neglected because they suffer from fundamental limitations and therefore have few uses.
Granted, airships may find niche uses. Airships do have several advantages: first, they can hover for long periods; and second, they require little infrastructure (like long landing strips, ports, or train tracks). Since they can hover for long periods, they have found a use as floating advertisements, and they may find a use as floating observation vehicles for the military. Since they don't require infrastructure, they may find a use in transporting cargo to areas which lack airports, train tracks, or ports. But they will never take over the bulk of transport between major areas, because of fundamental limitations of the technology.
Every few years, someone starts a company to revive the airship. The venture always fails, because o
f fundamental limitations of airships that will always prevent widespread adoption. Perhaps some com
pany will eventually succeed, but they will succeed in a niche market, not widely.