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Comment by sputknick | Hacker News Reader

Since they don't dive into economic feasibility, I did about 3 minutes worth of googling, and found this paper https://www.temjournal.com/content/93/TEMJournalAugust_1062_... that basically says its 20% cheaper than an airplane, but takes 5 times as long. where it becomes economically feasible is when carrying heavy cargo, which in my mind would be better handle by rail (they did not give numbers comparing it to rail). My guess is this will turn out to not be economically feasible and only makes sense if the environmental impact is your primary concern, or as another commenter mentioned, if you don't have land infrastructure already built out.

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Assuming these airships are VTOL and can land on non-runway surfaces (e.g. large open fields) you'd think this would beat airplanes by a lot more than 20% overall as you wouldn't have the additional costs of getting the heavy cargo to the final destination, it could be taken straight where it is needed.

So the optimum load would be the long distance delivery of a large, heavy single item in an undeveloped inland area.

The paper doesn't even seem to compare the costs of lifting gasses.

If the airships are completely autonomous and you don't care about a small percentage of them exploding (<0.0001%, away from population centers), then hydrogen is orders of magnitude cheaper than helium.

A fleet of these could replace truckers before autonomous trucking becomes safe enough to put on the road alongside human drivers.

If they're better than rail, you could convert freight trains to commuter or rip up the lines and reclaim the land.

Yeah, a major issue is that there's a shortage of helium with the supplies being rationed so that enough of it can be conserved for medical and other essential needs. Is there going to be enough to supply these airships at a price that makes it viable?

> A fleet of these could replace truckers before autonomous trucking becomes safe enough to put on the road alongside human drivers.

They are already on the roads, especially in states with govs who are willing to be lax on regs in exchange for the jobs.

Um, airplanes also burn now and then. An awful lot of airplane design is expended trying to keep them from catching fire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zeDsSJmcpM&t=211s

One advantage to a hydrogen fire is it burns up and away. A kerosene fire drips and burns down onto whatever the airplane crashed on.

isn't one of the problems of handling airships on open fields that you need a significant ground infrastructure to moor it, tie it down/protect it in stormy/windy weather? unless the airship only operates from certain very large prepared bases and briefly drops off cargo at places, but doesn't have the capability to remain there for any longer period of time unmanned.

Mining, then.

Big machines, remote areas.

Focusing on heavy lift, thats often, and increasingly a niche which incurs massive costs because of increasing urban density, or location of resources needing to move between two points without either canal, or rail, or constraints like bridges and tunnels. Moving parts of aircraft through villages of france, demands an army of planning and consequence for 10cm clearances. If you can lift the same objects you avoid this pain.

If you're doing mining, wind tower deployment or anything similar you're probably negotiating land access and dealing with unexpected problems all the time. Reliable airship lift could reduce costs significantly in this niche.

I'd guess that they're targeting transoceanic freight. A flight from Shanghai to Los Angeles takes ~12 hours, and a cargo ship takes ~30 days. That's a huge gap that could be filled by an intermediate option.

Boundary Layer Technologies (a Y Combinator portfolio company) is trying to fill that intermediate option with small hydrofoil cargo ships. The basic design can probably work, but it's not clear whether a viable market actually exists.

https://www.boundarylayer.tech/

Installing rail is super expensive and limits you to where the rails is and the capacity of the track. Great if you have it but installing more of it involves many billions of dollars.

I could see a use-case for e.g. Amazon using this at scale to move goods around. They currently do this at great expense by flying planes around.

I wonder what the deal is with the economics. People were doing this routinely a century ago and it worked then. What's holding this back now? I've been reading about zeppelins making a comeback for decades now. And somehow it never happens.

I can also see this being used for air cruises.

I could also see it making sense in areas unable to extend the local airport, due to space constraints, for example Singapore.

Wind turbine blades perhaps? Ever increasing blade sizes are a serious limiting factor when moving these.

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