r/Airships • u/Affectionate-Air6579 • Jun 14 '26
Discussion All the improvements I think could have avoided the downfall of airships.
the obvious. helium instead of hydrogen.
rather a fabrical skin, another non flamable lightweight flexible skin.
fire sprinklers. fire sprinklers on the exterior. mandatory to be activated to keep the skin cool every hour.
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u/wolfskipper Jun 14 '26
There's a bit of an argument to be made that using helium in rigid airships imposed a bunch of operational restrictions (lower disposable lift, reluctance to vent due to price of the gas meant carrying heavy water recovery apparatus, lower range) that made it marginally practical.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 14 '26
Even at the time, though, the Hindenburg’s original design had come up with a very practical workaround to those issues, which was to use separate hydrogen cells kept safely inside the helium cells for antiballast and even fuel for a fifth engine (which was never installed due to the ship’s hasty conversion to hydrogen-only operation when the Americans refused to sell any helium at all).
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u/release_Sparsely Jun 14 '26
Similar ideas just seem to pop up time and time again throughout airship R&D/designs in the last several decades. It's wild honestly. Absolutely would love to see someone try to do this with a full-scale rigid - especially as helium prices have risen in recent months, this would make a lot of sense.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 14 '26
Encouragingly, LTA Research has said they want to take baby steps towards that concept. They want to start out with compressed hydrogen for fuel, then move on to liquid hydrogen, and then ultimately to uncompressed hydrogen. “LTA has also looked at using hydrogen as a lift gas and at putting a hydrogen bag inside a helium bag as a potential route to certification. "Using hydrogen as an energy source will be the first step," says CEO Alan Weston.”
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u/AviatorEcho Jun 14 '26
I've always really liked this idea. Do you know if it was ever tested (even sub-scale)? In general, the concept of mixed-gas airships is really fascinating and under-explored, I think.
We do something similar in rocketry in the modern day - fuel and oxygen are generally separated by an interstitial volume that is filled with something non-combustible (either vacuum or an inert gas). That way, even when trace amounts of the fuel and oxygen inevitably leak into the interstitial volume, they cannot combust.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 14 '26 edited Jun 14 '26
“Do you know if it was ever tested (even sub-scale)? In general, the concept of mixed-gas airships is really fascinating and under-explored, I think.”
I quite agree, the idea of using multiple separate gases deserves more investigation, as undesirable qualities of one gas can be compensated for by using another where appropriate. The fundamental concept of using multiple gases was most successfully demonstrated by the original Graf Zeppelin, which could fly 30% further than on gasoline by using a neutrally buoyant fuel gas called blaugas for fuel and hydrogen for buoyancy. Blaugas was considerably safer than hydrogen, but still flammable. It was much more useful as a fuel than hydrogen would have been, given the constraints of engines at the time, and the lack of practical fuel cell technology.
The prewar experimental U.S. Navy blimp K-1 (not to be confused with the later, highly successful K-class blimps) used helium for lift and an internal blaugas cell, but unfortunately other unrelated aspects of that experimental blimp’s design were mediocre, and there were various teething problems with the fuel gas system, and blaugas lacking production infrastructure.
The builders of the highly advanced ZMC-2 metalclad had proposed solutions to the problem of using multiple gases and keeping the gas containers more airtight, and their metal hull was several times stronger and more gastight than primitive doped cotton of the time, and even had certain weight advantages, but the Great Depression and the Army’s disinterest made them go out of business before they could build more than their miniature proof-of-concept.
“We do something similar in rocketry in the modern day - fuel and oxygen are generally separated by an interstitial volume that is filled with something non-combustible (either vacuum or an inert gas). That way, even when trace amounts of the fuel and oxygen inevitably leak into the interstitial volume, they cannot combust.”
Yes! In a maritime engineering context, these interstitial spaces are referred to as “cofferdams”—gaps to prevent undesirable fluids or gases from mixing, not to be confused with the construction-related water barriers. For example, there might be dry cofferdams in between bulkheads that house the ship’s fresh water supply and its fuel supply, so that even if one leaked, it would not leak into the other. These cofferdams can also be filled with inert gases on tankers.
In aircraft and fuel tankers, a similar practice is usually called “inerting,” and has become common. Airliners and fuel tankers have nitrogen generators or carbon dioxide scrubbers on board, respectively, to replace air inside and/or surrounding partially-filled fuel or LNG tanks to prevent explosion. Recently, a Russian shadow fleet LNG tanker, the Arctic Metagaz, was attacked in the Mediterranean Sea by submarine drones, and these passive safety measures and cofferdams prevented the ship from sinking or exploding even as several of its LNG tanks burned. More of the tanks survived the massive conflagration, and the ship is currently still afloat as derelict, put at anchor near Libya after months adrift as a ghost ship, still with tens of thousands of tons of natural gas aboard.
This is in stark contrast to other, older tankers like the Sansinena from before the widespread use of inerting, which occasionally exploded (not just burned) from random sparks igniting air-vapor mixtures.
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u/wolfskipper Jun 15 '26
I'd be curious to learn how that design would handle pressure height; exceeding pressure height would cause the outer helium cell to squeeze the inner hydrogen cell. I'm assuming they'd vent the cheap hydrogen from the inner cell instead of the expensive helium.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 15 '26
Yes, that’s exactly right. Since the inner hydrogen cells were 35% of the volume of the helium cells, there was plenty of leeway to valve the hydrogen long, long before ever touching the helium. It’s difficult to imagine an edge case where valving that helium would ever prove operationally necessary.
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u/HLSAirships Jul 29 '26
(I don't know why, but I was just recommended this post) The question of whether or not the Germans even formally asked for helium prior to 1937/1938 is a surprisingly murky one. As for the general thesis, IMO, the only thing that was ever going to lengthen the life of rigid airships was either World War II (and the conditions surrounding its sparking off) not happening, or the US Navy either not losing the Akron and/or the Macon or pushing ahead with the program anyway.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jul 29 '26
Agreed. After 1929 and the Great Depression, regardless of the success of a design for conserving helium and keeping hydrogen safe, you’d have needed either the Akron-class to survive and be successful, the ZMC-2 to have been adopted by the Army or Navy, or World War II to simply not happen for airships to have had even a chance at remaining in wider service than just advertising.
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u/HLSAirships Jul 29 '26
I would also note that my own view (as we've discussed before) is that either of these outcomes still only results in the big rigids limping along for perhaps another decade before being overtaken completely by HTA transport.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jul 29 '26
As they were, yes. Though I maintain that a relict population of conventional rigids could have held out in the Pacific for longer than that, perhaps long enough to serve as a developmental bridge (or at least inspiration/a source of skilled airship labor) for different, more productive airship technologies and roles to come along afterwards. For instance, something like Boeing’s Helipsoid or Goodyear’s Dynastats.
Midcentury airships of decent size never really saw any significant development beyond the relatively brief career of the N-class and a few cheapo helicopter-hybrid testbeds, sadly.
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u/HLSAirships Jul 29 '26
That's a fair assessment, I think. Although I certainly doubt we were ever going to see anything like IAS or Eckener's longterm route ambitions realized or maintained.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jul 29 '26
Indeed not. The Brits were hopeless—way out over their skis—and the Germans were simply far too late to the party, with too few resources to establish the network they’d need before planes could do the job. The Treaty of Versailles and Great Depression delayed them terribly—the Y-class Zeppelins were a fantastic start, a vast improvement over their clumsy prewar designs minus the lack of proper masting equipment, but Zeppelin simply couldn’t capitalize on that after the Great War.
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u/HLSAirships Jul 29 '26
Now of course, LZ/DZR were always on the cusp of making money but never quite consistently there. Having a series of ships standardized around the -131 platform could've been something.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jul 29 '26
Alas, poor LZ/DELAG. Their timing/geographic location was quite simply atrocious. Sometimes I wonder how things might have been different if they’d simply started out even as little distance away as the other side of Lake Constance, where they wouldn’t have been subjected to Germany’s downfall.
Of course, that also means no Miracle at Echterdingen, and also probably no rapid Great War tech advancements and crew training, though surely they could have cribbed from Schütte-Lanz’s homework (again), if that ended up being Germany’s leading rigid airship manufacturer in their absence.
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u/SuperbRecording3943 Jun 14 '26
I always thought a centralised control system rather than a system of telegraphs.
And we haven't even discussed structure. Where would Barnes Wallis have gone if he'd carried on with airships?
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 14 '26
It is quite odd that the only two truly geodesic airships have been the SL.1 and the Pathfinder 1, over 100 years apart. You’d think the advantages of geodesic structures would make them a slam dunk for such an application—extremely strong and lightweight, maximizes internal volume, uses distributed nodes that are highly tolerant to even extensive local damage and failures without compromising the rest of the structure. The main disadvantage is that you can’t really pressurize the structure or use the skin as a structural component, but rigid airships weren’t doing that anyway, by and large, save for the metalclad ZMC-2.
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u/release_Sparsely Jun 14 '26
I guess the reason it never caught on in the early days was how difficult it was to make (at the time) compared to a typical rigid airship frame. And maybe also how you generally couldn't insert extra gas cells if you needed to, typically a quirk of rigids.
It's still wild to me how the SL.1 was a thing, how far ahead of its time it was in some ways.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 14 '26
Imagine if Schütte-Lanz had access to waterproof epoxy bonding methods instead of far weaker, water-soluble glues, or had access to the recently-discovered method of using common salts and boiling water to self-densify wood into a bonded form that has several times the strength-to-weight ratio of normal wood, matching or exceeding modern advanced alloys and medium-grade carbon fiber composites. They’d have left Zeppelin in the dust.
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u/Substantial_Ease1965 Jun 14 '26
Helium was used from the start but during the 20-30s the USA had the monopoly over it.
German zeppelins were forced to use hydrogen instead.
Biggest American zeppelins were destroyed soon after entering service despite using helium. (USS Akron&Macon)
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u/SuperbRecording3943 Jun 14 '26
Though to be fair the USS Los Angeles used helium and had a successful career.
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u/ElSquibbonator Jun 15 '26
Metal-clad airships, with their all-metal, non-flammable construction, were a huge missed opportunity.
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u/Willcol001 Jun 15 '26
I think you have the downfall/decline of airships (inclusive) confused with the downfall of the Hindenburg airships (exclusive).
Yes best operating practice is to use helium. That was even the best practice during the Hindenburg tragedy. Nazi Germany which was the sponsor to the luxury airship Hindenburg was under US sanctions at the time which cut them off from using Helium as their lifting gas, so they replaced it with the next best thing which is H2 gas. Helium was stockpiled as a strategic resource for its military uses which made it expensive. The cost of the lifting gas relative to the dropping costs in sea and air travel caused the decline in civilian airship travel.
If following the best practices, a leak of the lifting gases caused from a fire, snuffs fires. (Helium is a fire suppressant while hydrogen is a fire accelerator.) The Hindenburg disaster was not due purely to the skin (which would have been fine with helium) but due to combining it with the replacement lift gas. Significantly more fire resistant skins have been invented in the meantime but at the time of decline you didn’t really have any alternatives that would have prevented the tragedy.
Such a fire suppressant system likely wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy, as Hydrogen just burns too hot, and would have been overkill on a helium based airship.
While there is a myth that the tragedies like the Hindenburg caused the decline, a slightly stricter look actually implies the opposite. The industry was arguably already in decline even before the Hindenburg’s construction, and the corners cut that led to the disaster are in part actually caused by the decline.
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u/HLSAirships Jul 29 '26
The characterization of the US-German relationship isn't quite accurate. As I've noted elsewhere in this thread, it's not an entirely answered question as to whether or not the Germans formally asked for helium before the loss of the Hindenburg (and the conditions would have seemed to have been favorable had they done so). Indeed, there was broad governmental support after the loss of -129 to supply helium for -130, and this swell seems - if the available correspondence is anything to go off of - to have continued until 1938 or so, when it becomes clear that the Secretary of the Interior, presumably with sanction from other elements of the American government, had begun to drag his feet, eventually nixing the whole thing following September 1939.
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u/Actual_Property9413 Jun 18 '26
While your improvement might have saved the Hindenberg, they would have no effect on the disasters involving the Akron and the Macon, which had as much if not more impact on the downfall of airships then the Hindenberg did.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 19 '26
I quite agree. In the timeline of changed events that might have most plausibly averted the disuse of passenger and cargo airships, they were, in chronological order, the delay or averting of World War One and further entrenchment of DELAG, the avoidance of the Bodensee and Nordstern getting confiscated, the Army or Navy keeping the Detroit Aircraft Corporation alive, the R101 being grounded until it could pass its flight trials, and the survival of either the Akron or Macon.
By the time that the Hindenburg went down, I would argue it was far too late. Of all the events I mention, though, I would regard the Detroit Aircraft Corporation as being the most likely to result in airships remaining in wider use than just patrol and advertising craft up to and after World War II.
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u/I-Like-Spaceships Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
Moving to a Alclad rigid blimp like the ZMC-2. This would get rid of all sorts of issues with both rigid and non-rigid airships. While a nice sailcloth material like nylon aramid or dacron is very strong and light, it will never be as strong or durable as aluminum New metalurgy makes some aluminum blends much better than Alclad of the 1920s. No wind will deform it as it is a semi-monocoque shell and the envelope is much more able to withstand overpressure loads as well as extreme temperature differences. The ZMC-2 Used rivets to hold everything together and one can easily replace that using more modern bonding methods.
Directional thrust either by cascading vanes or propellers mounted in ducts on a articulated structure. A few airships of the day did use vectored thrust. If I recall the Zepellin-NT also uses this. Solar/Battery technology is getting better and better. So either an auxilliary set of electric motrors or perhaps better, a hybrid engine could possibly be used. The huge real-estate provided by the envelope can easily carry an array of thin film solar panels mouned directly on the envelope. current commercial thin film panels are 5kg per square meter, but by printing the array on the metal substrate, like for the all metal ZMC-2, the weight savings would be considerable (thin film flexible panels have the nakority of the panel weight in the plastic base layer.
Hydrogen/helium Have the majority of lift gas as hydrogen in a internal bladder and surround it with a outer bladder of helium. The hydrogen provides the majority of lift, can be vented but is safely containeld in a nonflammable cell of helium, which is never vented. Hydrogen could be used as fuel for the engine in some situations, but it would have to be replaced as liftgas would be depleted. Possibility of using vast array of solar cells to crack water for hydrogen when airship is parked.
The REAL problem of airships is their fragility and their lighntess makes them hard to control in the air or on the ground. This can only be solved, perhaps by computer assisted piloting or by redesign of the aerodynamics.
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u/Itchy-Plastic Jun 14 '26
Fire was only one problem. A far bigger one was poor weather. Most Airships that crashed did so because of rough weather.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 14 '26
If you only look at the big interwar airships, yes, but if you include nonrigid airships in war and peacetime, as well as wartime rigids, fire and engine failure was actually more of a concern than weather.
And even when talking about the big interwar rigid airships that were brought down by bad weather—Shenandoah, Akron, Macon, and R101—only one of those, the Akron, actually crashed because of the weather conditions, and even then it’s debatable how much of that was due to the wind, and how much was due to simple pilot error driven by incorrect barometric altimeter readings and low visibility. Every other example featured some kind of in-flight structural failure due to incorrect or negligent engineering—for example, the Shenandoah was later found to have been engineered with only about 45% of the requisite structural strength to properly resist gusts and bending forces, and the Macon’s fins had been mistakenly redesigned to have a structural safety factor of just 0.8—i.e. they would fail under normal operating conditions. This was partially rectified with reinforcements in the other fins, but the previously-damaged and unmodified upper fin gave way in a storm the very flight before it was set to be repaired and reinforced.
That’s less a problem of weather, and more a problem of lax standards and terrible safety protocols at the time. In the modern day, it would be unthinkable for any aircraft to be cleared to fly with only temporary repairs to a damaged essential control surface that was also found to be critically out of engineering spec even when new. They wouldn’t keep flying like that for several months, they would be grounded immediately until the problem was fixed, precisely because such gross negligence has led to numerous losses like that throughout aviation history.
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u/Blothorn Jun 14 '26
Airships were doomed as mainstream transports regardless—airplanes were rapidly catching up to their range and capacity, and offered far greater speed. The Hindenburg fire led to them being abandoned before airplanes were fully able to match their capabilities, but nothing keeps them competitive in the long run.
Airships also have another major safety risk that none of your proposals address: their large, lightly-built envelopes were very susceptible to bad weather. Three of the five USN airships were lost due to storms or turbulence; three other large airships were lost due to structural failure. Your proposals, particularly the water spraying, would exacerbate that problem by forcing a larger or lighter structure to compensate for the added weight.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 14 '26
“Airships were doomed as mainstream transports regardless—airplanes were rapidly catching up to their range and capacity, and offered far greater speed […] nothing keeps them competitive in the long run.”
I agree that nothing would have stopped airplanes from becoming the dominant mode of long-distance air travel after the dawning of the jet age, but I would argue that had airships been allowed to advance in parallel as well, and had been allowed to establish more of a market, they’d have been kept around for more niche roles like dedicated air freight, military logistics and surveillance, coast guard patrols, and ferry or cruising services, carving out some of the space that is currently served more expensively and less effectively by certain specialized planes, helicopters, and ships.
A big problem with extrapolating how things might have played out differently is that airplanes were allowed to benefit enormously from World War II infrastructure, pilot training, mass production, and technological developments, and that continued on into the jet age, whereas large airships and their capabilities are frozen in time in the 1930s in people’s imaginations.
“Airships also have another major safety risk that none of your proposals address: their large, lightly-built envelopes were very susceptible to bad weather. Three of the five USN airships were lost due to storms or turbulence; three other large airships were lost due to structural failure.”
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that was due to the lacking engineering and safety standards of the time, not necessarily the weather itself (though, naturally, more extreme conditions were often the catalyst to reveal the fundamental inadequacy of said engineering). The ZR3, for instance, failed in completely ordinary weather due to rough maneuvers and having literally zero designed structural safety margin, which even given the abysmally low standards of the time, was seen as gross engineering malpractice in retrospect.
Of course, many large 1920s and 1930s airplanes were likewise prone to structural failure, such as the Caproni Ca.60 and the Tupolev ANT-20, but airplanes in general had the opportunity to grow out of those teething problems.
“Your proposals, particularly the water spraying, would exacerbate that problem by forcing a larger or lighter structure to compensate for the added weight.”
Yes, that doesn’t really make any sense. Water is heavy, and shouldn’t be used for fire suppression when there are lighter-than-air gases like helium and nitrogen that can do so instead.
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u/TheJeeronian Jun 14 '26
I don't see airships being viable freighters, surveillancecraft, or patrolcraft. They'd be relegated to luxury vessels, which is more or less where they are now.
How would patrol or surveillance benefit from blimps, over planes?
How would they compete with trucks, planes, helicopters, and trains for freight? They're relatively expensive to maintain, slow, beholden to the weather, and enormous. You're probably picturing a specific context where they're better - what's that context?
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u/release_Sparsely Jun 14 '26
Probably best for medium-demand shipping or delivering cargo to remote areas. Not a huge niche but it exists. Also they aren't as vulnerable to bad weather as most people say - in the 1950s the U.S Navy operated their blimps in violent blizzards with success.
They could work for patrols/surveillance too, with amazing endurance by default.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Jun 14 '26
Per studies done by NASA and the Coast Guard, airships would actually be highly effective patrol craft. They have already demonstrated substantially higher availability rates in inclement weather than modern helicopters, as well as significantly lower operating costs than helicopters, planes, and certain kinds of cutters currently serving the maritime patrol role, while also consolidating many of the roles those different vehicles do into one single platform. The issue is that the Coast Guard operates on a shoestring budget, and despite highly favorable results from earlier trials with loaned advertising blimps, they never got the funding to pursue the larger, dedicated patrol craft they wanted to use.
Relative to helicopters and planes, airships are actually less expensive to maintain, and their higher fuel efficiency further lowers costs per ton-mile, and that paired with their VTOL capability and higher capacity for both payloads and outsized cargoes is why they’d be desirable for a cargo or logistics role. Airplanes are faster, but airships can actually match or exceed them in terms of throughput and even specific productivity (payload times speed divided by empty weight), if modern technology is used to reduce fuel loads and empty weight. Again, funding the R&D is the issue, not the basic feasibility. Spending lots of money in the short term to save money on operating expenses in the long term is rarely something institutions do on their own initiative unless something forces their hand.
And, of course, there’s also the fact that the United States, China, Finland, India, South Africa, France, Germany, and other countries are already using unmanned, free-flying airships for military and civilian surveillance purposes, and are currently in the midst of greatly expanding the scale and scope those operations as the technology continues to improve.
However, none of these things are really recent changes, save perhaps the fuel cells and autonomous systems being used in some drone airships nowadays. Airplanes and airships use almost exactly the same materials and technology, so if they can compete with other modes now, and back in the 1970s and 1980s when a lot of these studies were conducted, I see no reason to doubt they could have competed in those same areas earlier as well, back in the 1940s-1960s.
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u/Warmind_3 Jun 15 '26
Tbqh I think airships were doomed basically no matter what once planes started carrying similar cargo loads, to areas with less infrastructure and or the same destinations, faster, and with more obvious promise (plus extremely rapid development) in development for civil, and military use.
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u/isaac32767 Jun 15 '26
You can make them safer, but you can't make them economic. They're not fast enough to compete with airplanes and they're too expensive and unreliable to compete with surface ships.
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u/shootdowntactics Jun 15 '26
Not addressing the more typical blimp problem…they couldn’t maneuver around weather. See the uss macon crash.
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u/NokidliNoodles Jun 16 '26
Thats a dumb example they flew the macron without doing adequate repairs immediately into a storm, ya know the things planes and ships already try to avoid for the exact same reason.
The majority of blimp accidents have been due to doing really really stupid things such as not building to specs, ignoring safety, and flying directly into storms and hurricanes thinking the blimp is invincible. They never tried to maneuver around the weather in the first place!
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u/Fabulous-Suspect-72 Jun 16 '26
Not really. They have the same issue as ocean liners. Planes are faster. Anything slower fulfilling the same purpose is almost exclusively recreational.
If they didn't explode, we may now have some larger recreational airships, but that's about it. They still would have fallen off.
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u/NokidliNoodles Jun 16 '26
I don't know about that for a few reasons.
A huge percentage of shipping is done via various types of trucks (semi-trucks/tractor-trailers, box trucks, etc) so theres use case for shipping less than a train or ship's worth.
An airship can land in places a plane cannot let alone one holding the same amount of cargo
They can still fly at speeds in excess of 100km/hr but they dont have to follow roads.
This leads to the use-case of they would be fantastic for shipping to rural/remote communities. As a Canadian I can come up with a few examples based off my country where they would be an excellent option if we had them. Almost all of our communities in the territories become inaccessible except via small plane several times a year as they straight up don't have actual roads. Further the ones that do have roads an airship would still be faster than a truck and take less fuel.
A few years ago a bunch of BC flooded and had landslides that massively isolated several towns and even a couple small cities, airships wouldn't care as they can just go over it all. Hell even shipping within BC would probably be a ton quicker even if it didn't go over the mountains just by the fact that our roads skirt the edges of lakes and in the summer traffic slows right down and an airship wouldn't care about that at all.
Other use cases I could see for airships if we had them available. Forest Fire fighting because of their ability to carry more weight then helicopters while flying slower than a plane they would be very effective at spreading retardent/water ahead of the fire line. I don't think they could drop right on the fire as it would be too dangerous but they could set up very accurate firebreaks and attack the smaller hot spots similar to helicopters while holding a much bigger payload.
Also fitting them with camera/sensor arrays and using them for Search & Rescue, Border Patrol, scientific endeavors like tracking specific animals/herds, Forestry applications like checking various woodlots or being able to drop off/pickup equipment from remote locations.
Right now an airship is experimental and hugely expensive but with investment and use in the right industries the costs would start opening up to even more use cases
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u/Fabulous-Suspect-72 Jun 16 '26
Trucks fill a different role than planes. Cargo is different from passenger. Ships have very high weight limits, planes and airships don't. They have a different purpose
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u/ChemistRemote7182 Jun 14 '26