How to Moor a British Rigid Airship: The Cardington Mast [video]
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The R100 is my favourite airship: it had a really fancy dining room (look it up on image search) and viewing lounges - and the lewd designer was Barnes Wallace, later famous for inventing the bouncing bombs in WWII!
Arguably the ground handling infrastructure and manpower requirements to land them safely is one of the main impediments to them making a comeback.
It's a shame, as living within spitting distance of the Cardington sheds and seen the small Airlander hybrid, the actual full size R10* must have been something else. There's some rather nice photos here that gives a glimpse of what that was like for the R100 https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/r-100-airship-pictures/
"A unique example of design. The R101 was fitted with a smoking room on the lower deck able to seat 24 people. The floor and ceiling were made of light asbestos with a thin sheet of metal on the floor. The walls were the same construction as the rest of the ship, being made of cloth. The smoking room was not considered a hazard to the ship as all precautions had been taken with materials in construction. This is where you could retire after dinner and enjoy a cigar and postprandial drink."
What a pity that it got destroyed, we are always so eager to destroy our future history. Such one offs should be preserved by default.
engineerguy (Bill Hammock) is fantastic, check out the rest of his channel while you're there.
Volume increases as the cube of the diameter while weight goes by the square for the ship's structure itself plus a constant for what it can carry laden, and you'll lose a lot of "volumetric lift" as you bring it down in size. What's the difference in lift/density of hydrogen vs hot air, like in a balloon?
I guess we've never seen them marketed so it's probably impractical. Too bad, good tagline for such a company, to indicate the bespoke nature of such personal transport: "Oh, the human!"
About 80 cubic meters of helium.[1]
Also relevant: https://youtu.be/CwABJGzifao (also a blimp)
This doesn't add up since you get ~1 kg per cubic meter.
That design is an inflatable plane.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/443025-sm... - "The particular design of the envelope creates lift as well as buoyancy, which allows the envelope to be smaller than if it solely relied on buoyancy to keep the craft aloft"
Maybe with a small kid and a high tech envelope and hydrogen which is ~ 1.1kg. It would be impressive to get to 80 cubic meters.
[edit] Those aéroplumes are fucking cool in the comment above. They are 110 cubic meters. They also fly them in caves - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Cp_NfdLbE
It was clear that some of the lift came from the airfoil, but, you're right, that's most of the lift. It's similar to the Aereon inflatables of the 1960s and 1970s. Some flew, but were not very useful.
Density data from Wikipedia:
Air @ STP: 1.225 kg/m³
Air @ 100°C (typical for a hot air balloon): 0.9486 kg/m³ → lifting force ~0.2764 kg/m³
Hydrogen: 0.0899 kg/m³ → lifting force ~1.1351 kg/m³
Helium: 0.1786 kg/m³ → lifting force ~1.0464 kg/m³
Subtract the density from air and you get the lift force (mass). i.e. hot air can lift about 24% as much as hydrogen, or conversely, you need 4 times the volume.
There are hot air airships. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_airship