Are Zeppelins the Technology of the Future

Discover the Future of Cargo Shipping: Airships are Back!

Explore the resurgence of airships, the game-changer in freight shipping! Learn how they're eco-friendly, cost-effective, and the future of global logistics.

[Natural_Encounters]

I really appreciate the editor putting Simons face in random places like the front of the airship or on a walking woman.

[iangregory]

I'm from Bedford, the home of British airships, including HAV. I watched the Aitlander 10 prototype make its first flight.
You were correct about the early airship industry being badly run, the R101 crashed not because it was filled with hydrogen, but because it was way too heavy, and flew into a hillside in a storm. Also, the technology wasn't sufficiently advanced back then.
Airships of that era held their gas in bags made from cows innards, and covered the outside in linen, taughtened with cellulose nitrate dope...turning it into a basic type of Gun Cotton...😱, then it was given a coat of dope (cellulose nitrate and iron oxide powder), then a coat of silver dope ( cellulose nitrate with aluminium powder). In essence they built them from aluminium and magnesium, then covered them with gun Cotton and topped it off with a coating of Thermite....I suppose its no wonder they blew up.
Nowadays we have - usually non flammable- polymer fabrics and lightweight composite materials, hydrogen should be a lot safer.

[tosa]

South of Berlin is an airship hangar with a length of 360 meters and a width of 220 meters. It was built by the now insolvent Cargo Lifter AG and now functions as a tropical spa.
The plan was to move heavy goods transports with loads of up to 160 tons from the road to the air. I once thought that was a good idea because it would have simplified the logistics a lot.

[johnoneill]

They tried this back in 2016 with the “Airlander 10” it crashed on it’s second test flight. Something that big and lighter than air is very hard to control in bad weather. I hope these tourist Zeppelins are better built than a certain tourist submarine.

[philliprobinson]

Hi. When I enjoyed my first (and only) ride in a hot air balloon, I waited weeks before the weather was still enough to launch it. The pilot said he spent most of his time coordinating different weather aps trying to slot bookings into the few days when flights were possible. He considered himself to be a meteorologist more than a pilot.

Strong winds are the problem with airships too, the updraughts and downdraughts in a thunderhead cumulo-nimbus can destroy an airship before you can strap on your parachute. Airships cannot outrun the weather or fly above it, so they're always in the same danger as the R101 which went down in France (early 30's) in bad weather.

There will never be a day when someone says, "look, there's the 11:50 am airship from New York, you can set your watch by it". A fleet of airships would need an equal number of hangars to quickly duck into well before the winds rose, because they become unmanageable in any but the lightest zephyr. A transport system cannot be called that unless it delivers the goods on time every time, and airships cannot. I'm sorry to pop someone's balloon, but I don't like to see investors lose their shirts on dream castles in the air. As Simon said, the business figures just don't stack up.

My balloon ride story has a tragic end. A few days afterwards another tourism operator who wasn't so clued up in meteorology as my aviator was blown out to sea in his balloon when a sudden sou'west front struck. One of his passengers drowned. The whole country (NZ) was very sorry. Sincerely yours, P.R.
.

[ggyggg]

Please yesss, i finally found someone who is interested in zeppelins.

[mikesmith]

I have a fondness for airships so I am slightly biased. The idea of travelling that way, with all the space you could wish for, appeals (I don't fit in aeroplanes, too tall so legs are cramped).
British Airships (latterly Hybrid Airships) has managed to do a lot, at one point there was a deeply dubious attempt by the British government to 'gift' it to the USA (there was a panorama programme on that, British businessmen bought it and brought it back). A later attempt also failed when it was discovered that the patents were held by the engineers not the company, so all that had been acquired was the company name (so two nil to the engineers). In the end the Americans had to hire the company to build them an airship and when the project was terminated (due to the reduced need for military surveillance as the Cold War was winding up) the prototype was brought back to the UK.
In terms of fuel an airship transporting a given load across the USA from LA to New York would use as much fuel as an aircraft carrying a similar load uses just to take off. Manchester Liners, a British shipping company based unsurprisingly in Manchester, looked into this in the early 1970s as a way of shipping containerised traffic across the Atlantic (airships are more like fast ships than slow aeroplanes). They calculated that it would become viable if fuel costs increased by 70-100%. Then came the 1970s fuel crisis, but the company was bought by C Y Tung and the project was dropped. Why invest in new technology using exotic materials when we have something that works well enough, said the makers of wax cylinders for Edison recorders.
The use of hydrogen is slightly problematic, it is a matter of the 'explosive range' (the range of hydrogen to air mixes that will burn), there again we seem comfortable with the risks posed by batteries and it took a while for the Ford Pinto to be taken off the market. For example the Russians looked at using helicopters to supply remote oilfields and found they would use more fuel than the well would produce, at which point they began work on a plan for a 3, 000 ton airship using hydrogen (that was in the 1980s if memory serves). Helium is irreplaceable and limited in supply so it is expensive, hydrogen is (comparatively) cheap and does not suffer from the same level of 'creep' (the ability to pass through things like steel containers, or indeed any container). There are supplies of helium available in space, but given the increasing likelihood of a Kessler event in the not too distant future that is likely to be unobtainable for a few thousand years, so hydrogen it is then.
We currently have about 120 deaths among the worlds 900, 000 seafarers every year and a similar number of significant injuries (not including passengers) but with only two crew on non automated airships that figure would be unlikely to rise by much and would probably fall. As Manchester Liners pointed out you do not need extensive port facilities with dredged waterways, the airship can deliver to a distribution point inland or even direct to a customer.
A major problem for airships is the investment already made in ships and aeroplanes (trains are another matter, vastly more efficient but requiring expensive infrastructure), as a result there will be (ahem) pressure from the existing firms to avoid the potentially ruinous competition (it is all a matter of priorities and I suspect 'donations' to political parties and those lucrative non executive directorships take priority over things like 'national interest', multi national corporations do not by definition relate to 'national' anything). The Godless Corporates also have other issues (look up Enshittification on Wikipedia), so progress will be slow.
The airship industry has produced useful stuff, geodetic construction came from the R100 project (the correct technical term is geodesic, Mr Barnes Wallis, a lead engineer, asked a mathematician friend if there was any mathematical way of distributing a load over a curved surface (the gas bags) and was told of this but he then misspelled it and his name stuck). The R100 worked fine but the R101, a rival sponsored by the government and hastily put together, crashed so the government (as they are wont to do) declared the whole idea impractical and insisted that all the tooling for the R100 be destroyed (political face saving also routinely outweighs abstractions like national interest).

[Jnovy]

Great video may want to dial back the special effects and backgrounds

[Jjames]

Factual correction: it doesn’t take an airship a week to cross the Atlantic. It takes 2-3 days.

[LazloVimes]

Concerning the lift in loading/unloading, couldn’t they use tethers to hold the airship down when loading/unloading?

[Swampwild]

If you have lift when you unload cargo then you have a source of power to compress the helium. Engineers could devise a mechanism that converts the linear pull upwards to a rotating flywheel that would drive the pump.

[Guitarty]

Aero gel technology could mean a fast progress for air ships. The design needs to be Delta wing rather than the big tube variety. Delta wing would make it easier to build and printed solar panels on top could provide all the energy they need.

[harpercmp]

I wonder if it is possible to create a zeppelin/airship filled with gas ions in a vessel that were repelled by a centrally located electrode thus creating a artificial gas pressure that exceeds the limits of the ideal gas law in regards to density and displacement. I am not knowledgeable enough to know if it would work though.

[kapperbeastYT]

Could anchors drilled into the ground not be used to pull the ship down to ground level? Ignoring the costs, would it be at all feasible?

[George-kot]

I am all for airships BUT we have to remember that airships, by their very nature, are unable to cut through storms and wild weather in the same way that heavier-than-air planes are able to. Perhaps, with modern radar systems, airships can AVOID wild weather ahead of them but bear in mind that they are still susceptible to the vagaries of wind and weather.
On the "plus side", airships can provide touring passengers with unparalleled views of landscapes below them at leisure just like ocean liners are able to do that for passengers who are not in any hurry to get anywhere and the journey is more important than the destination themselves. Of course, like any airline, avoiding places were there are conflicts and wars would be a "must".

[dark-lovesoni]

What about rotary wing hybrid zepplins (the "Rotastat" system)? They allow hovering, as well as vertical and multiaxis movement.

Alternatively, you can vent helium without wasting it, just vent it into a separate container permanently fixed to the ground, literally just a large helium tank.

[mrNw]

OMG the intro... ROFL!
Puked a little in my mouth - thanks!

[douglassauvageau]

'Ground-Infrastructure' is indeed a consideration. Please continue to follow and report developments.

[Jatheus]

Another advantage to hydrogen is that you can offload it by burning it (controlled burn) to make water. It is endlessly recyclable, so long as there is energy put into it elsewhere to separate it back to gasses.

[Rich-fryv]

For landing/docking, couldn't you just chain it to the ground at multiple points like we do ships?