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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

The USS Akron, USS Shenandoah, and USS Macon all failed due to bad weather. That's 3 of the US's 4 operational airships. (Another airship was constructed for the US, but was destroyed by poor handling before it was delivered to the US.)

Of the British experience with airships, R101 outright failed due to bad weather, and three more were scrapped after suffering accidents during bad weather, out of a total of 16 completed.

I don't feel like totting up the record of the Zeppelins, but the Wikipedia page does indicate that several of them failed due to weather incidents. One of the big lessons from the most notable airship failures is that airships don't really work in poor weather, and safety in such conditions means "don't even attempt to fly," which is a pretty different rule than the one for airplanes or other modes of transportation.

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I mean if the alternative transports also don't work in bad weather I'm not sure you can use some failures to disqualify airships.

So long as they work "more" days of the year it's a better solution. Weather doesn't really sneak up on us anymore.

Aircraft are substantially more resistant to bad weather: you can fly an airplane into a hurricane.

Aircraft are also a lot faster -- it's unlikely that a thunderstorm will catch up with you (max speed of a storm is something like 50-80 mph) and trips are a lot shorter.

Airships are much closer to the storm speed and may need to stay aloft for several days. That makes it more likely that they'll hit unexpected weather and give them fewer options to avoid anything.

It's true that someone could do some shipping with airships and just eat the downtime due to weather. So far nobody has done that. And not for lack of trying: CargoLifter (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) went bankrupt on this idea.

Its not unexpected that a california resident, one accustomed to fairly temperate weather, would invest heavily into airships.

Airships aren't aircraft?

> I mean if the alternative transports also don't work in bad weather

But they do.

Imagine the kind of storm that can stop a freight train. Or the kind that would give the captain of a large container ship pause.

Now imagine airships facing the same storm.

This thread started because somebody was talking about towns where the weather prohibited rails from being built [1].

Let me know what freight train can run without rails ... All I have to find is 1 day the airship can travel and its better than your trail.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34579915

R101 failed because it was a dreadful design.

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