The (biggest) problem that keeps airships from practical use is that they are huge sails. Big sails mean even small amounts of wind can be powerful forces acting on the airship. In the air a big push from the wind might be safely managed, but if you're near anything solid such as the ground, you can get smashed to bits.
To safely operate a suitably efficient (large) airship, we'd need both huge specialized docks with extremely strong mooring structures to keep wind from smashing the airship into whatever is near it, and a system (such as a 3-axis propulsion system on the airship) that is capable of counteracting wind force acting on the airship when it's near the ground or other solid objects and not docked.
Despite the many attractive advantages of airships, there's yet been anything like a good solution to this problem. There are other challenges too (what do you do when you drop off your cargo and the airship wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly compress your gas?), this is just the biggest.
> There are other challenges too (what do you do when you drop off your cargo and the airship wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly compress your gas?)
Not to detract from your overall point, but you do the same thing you do when burning fuel while cruising: Add ballast.
Yes, but how do you add ballast to an airship while it is underway? Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the zeppelins did.
I think they're aware of all these problems because they do mention almost everything you said in the linked post thinking through the idea: https://www.elidourado.com/p/cargo-airships
Obviously that was simply a post thinking through everything hypothetically and I didn't read anything that seemed like they actually had the best solution, but at least they seem to be aware of the challenges to landing and off-loading cargo efficiently.
Just cover the thing in solar, and run it on electric. Add a couple of wind turbines too. I mean, the whole concept is preposterous, so why not just lean into it?
I think if that was the biggest problem, they'd be used much more. There are a lot of places with light and regular winds, and we're also pretty good at predicting winds in the 1 day forward timescale. And of course there's the regular and predictable high winds that were traditionally used by sail ships.
What makes you think "docks with extremely strong mooring structures" is a particularly difficult problem to solve? A giant metal hook anchored in concrete attached to the ship with some steel cables doesn't seem like it would be that difficult for a team of smart engineers with a multi-million dollar budget to figure out a good design for. Certainly not so difficult or expensive as to threaten to make the entire concept nonviable.
> what do you do when you drop off your cargo and the airship wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly compress your gas?
As long as it's just one small bubble with hydrogen, you can flare it off or combine with oxygen from the air outside to reduce lift.
Couldn't the sail factor be reduced by ionizing wind coming at the vehicle who then keeps away from the vehicle while going around it, depositing little energy?
Is there any evidence that this is really a problem? Zeppelins were in use for decades completely safely, as are modern airships.
> "But for air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage."
How does an airship solve any of those problems? Its still got to go through customs and such, and still go through local truck delivery
It doesn’t. The author is dreaming that airships might be able to just drop cargo off anywhere and I guess customs just happens in software somehow.
Nor is it clear how they are refuelled, or how they are immune from the same fluctuations in fuel cost as conventional cargo aircraft.
But what is clear is that you should “possibly invest” in his syndicate which is funding all this…
Longshoremen, lines at limited numbers of ports, etc., there a lots of problems that airships can solve simply by allowing airship ports to exist in, say, Kansas.
The need for specific geological features dramatically limits the amount of ports we can have, which seriously affects costs. If you could build a single, tiny airship point in every major city, you could save a bundle, and likely be close enough to the destination to unload directly to the customer at the port.
The article isn't about solving those problems, it's about taking a few days longer to do the actual travel to save a bunch of money, since there's already massive delays on either end.
I'm not sure about how they solve customs, but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse (avoiding trucks).
Let's say airfreight takes 7 days, with the flight being one of them. Then his airship would take 11 days, which is not much worse. He was expecting the comparison to be 5:1.
This already happens, has happened for ages, and yet somehow the logistics industry manages to accomplish transshipment without fucking everything up . . . most of the time, anyway.
His argument is not quite correct. Let's try to steelman it.
If an airplane takes 12 hours to cross the ocean, and it takes 2 days on both sides with customs, warehouses, trucking and the last mile delivery, then it's a total of 4.5 days. If the airship takes 5 days to take the ocean, and the same 2 days on both sides, the total is 9 days. Despite being 10 times as slow in flight, the end-to-end delivery time is only two times slower than the one for the airplane.
My reading is that it doesn't solve it, it just indicates there is a market for non-urgent freight in which airships could compete.
Yeah my initial reaction was you're comparing today's air freight in a static state with your envisioned optimal airship model; that's not realistic. The alternative to spending big on an entire new industry isn't doing nothing; it's using that investment in some other way, like optimizing air freight, or intra-continental, or addressing the entire overseas manufacturing/shipping model.
Maybe a smaller issue than wind, but something is wrong with this claim:
"If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other..."
How do you handle customs inspections and duties on imports? As TFA states, in current air freight, "there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker..." Freight has to go through the warehouse on arrival in-country so the customs inspectors can look at it and assess duties. The article seems to envision the airship dropping down directly at the destination address, which would be that nation's customs agency's worst nightmare.
> How do you handle customs inspections and duties on imports?
Probably no different from private airfields, you have to file customs paperwork before arriving, and they can send inspectors out.
Not sure how realistic, but could the inspectors go to the airship instead? They are not planes: Not only can they "park" while airborne, but at least there were concepts of boarding/unboarding in the air as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/realestate/26scapes.html
Also the customs exist at both ends. Usually, you have to do preliminary enforcement too. That’s what DHL does at least. Still, most of your time “wastage” will happen at customs and there is no technological innovation for that. There is no way any (or most) governments will allow you to by pass them.
It's down to the laws of the country and the government could make an exception to go direct if they want for special items. One of the things the airships might make sense for is huge wind turbine blades that are too large to go by road. The government might well do it for that kind of thing.
But for regular freight I doubt it. I use to fly from England to France in a single engine plane, pre Brexit, and you might think just stick stuff in the plane in an airfield in the UK, fly to a field in France drop it off, vive the single market and that. But no you have to fly to a customs airport in the UK, queue up with your passport as usual, do the same in France then fly on to your field. Probably France to Germany say would be ok. It all depends on the local laws.
Yeah--I came here to highlight this too. I think all the legacy systems around international shipping won't permit direct to consumer pick up and delivery. Unless someone can show me an existing example?
No. They absolutely are NOT happening. In fact, this is one of the very few technical solutions I'm very confident to state is never happening.
1) The economic model is unproven so even initial costs will be far too high to pay of debt incurred to manufacture, market, and maintain and they're not competitive with extant mass-market alternatives on cost & time out-of-the-gate with no clear pathway to even being niche competitive, let alone having mass-market adoption. And no, the Airship cruise industry is never going to take-off (heh) because there wouldn't be any extant "ports of call" (unlike with sea-going cruise ships) and no way to economically stimulate their construction.
2) Inclement weather mitigations (aside from docking, re-routing (delaying), or rescheduling (also delaying)) are virtually non-existent so there's a much higher trip variance which eats into fuel, time, labor, and ultimately a far higher cost variance which (as a 2nd order effect) leads to an overall MUCH higher cost to operate ANY route compared to conventional cargo or mixed-mode transportation. As a historic model, look at the air cargo transport costs in the transition from mandated multi-stop piston engine refueling and in-weather flying in the late 1930s to single-hop above-the-weather flying in the gas turbine "jet age" of the late 1940s. It's not JUST that jets were much faster, they were also far more predictable to service routes AND had far lower maintenance costs. A lower, slower, and less predictable airship with higher maintenance costs and, at best, a handful of percentage points off of the dollars/mile/ton figure with a higher initial cost outlay doesn't merit investment.
3) Safety is still a huge issue for any airship attempting station-keeping or full-authority-navigation close to any ground-effect altitude which is, unfortunately, also the airspace where any accident is likely to cause the most collateral damage. No other form of transport has this problem and, with current tech, would seem insolvable without turning the airship into a poorly performing version of a plane or rotor-craft.
As it turns out, ships are just really good at shipping. People keep trying airships with no fundamental tech or economic breakthroughs and they should all expect the same result.
Agreed. I've been reading about the return of airships since I was a kids in the 1980s. The fundamentals haven't changed.
This reads as a technologist that has absolutely no clue about anything regarding the shipping or the logistics industry. I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction.
"I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction."
What IS spent on new ships globally, and what direction does it point in?
I used to have intermodal carriers as customers, so for an IT guy I know a good bit about it. I went to comment on his post and it said only paid subscribers can comment. I'm not going to pay him to point out issues he'd need to deal with.
Yeah, it seems like every attempt at an airship company for the last 70 years or so just ends up speed-running the development of modern travel/logistics that makes airships obsolete. Same way crypto is/was speed-running the need for modern financial regulation.
On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the industrial revolution the average pace of technological advance was extremely slow. The Mongols conquered Asia with weaponry that would have been instantly familiar to people living 2000 years earlier. Perhaps our descendants 1000 years from now will still be using refrigerators virtually identical to our own.
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This effort is just starting up? Flying Whales expect to have an airship in 2025 and be operational in 2028 per https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-11/outback-town-launches... . Not that this is a race; better if several companies succeed.
I'm old enough to remember Airship Industries (1979):
>The AD500 was "a new-generation airship making use of advanced materials and technology." It was 164 feet (50 m) long and contained 181,200 cubic feet (5,130 m3) of helium.
>Unfortunately, on 8 March 1979, the month-old AD500 was seriously damaged when the nosecone failed while the ship was moored in high winds.
And various other things not really working till they went bust in 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries
I wonder if Airship Industries (2024) will do any better?
Their ships don't looks very different - old co https://www.airliners.net/photo/Airship-Industries/Airship-I...
New co https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
Cargo airships will not happen,in any land based area where wind happens,ie :anywhere this has been hammered flat on numerous aviation engineering forums the only way around the guaranteed ground handling debaucle is to engineer mega structur masts for anchoring,which will need to have a circular pad underneath,where the cargo would have to follow the LTA,as it pivots in the wind so back to a debaucle,with lots of smashing stuff one possibility is airship to ocean ship transfers where wind drift can be managed.....sort of could be made to work for passengers snd small cargo that loads through the central pivot in the mast still the anchoring phase will always be very high risk
It absolutely can happen, but not for routine goods where being on schedule is highly important. But for outsize goods, waiting for a favorable weather forecast is a much smaller concern than strengthening roads or perhaps even removing a bridge or two. For how wind turbine deployment, freight airship would be a gamechanger and there's a long (but truly narrow) tail of more niche use cases. Including any "unknown unkowns" that really can't exist before matching transportation.
The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling containers between China and the rest of the world that's still tiny.
Modern airships are semi-rigid. They have a keel and a rigid structure to support the empennage. The rest of the structure can be deflated and collapsed just like a non-rigid blimp.
I'd bet a bunch of former SpaceX engineers will figure out a solution.
The article on the site is vague, but if you go to the company's site, and examine the images, you can get a close look at the airship design. The image on the web site [1] is higher resolution than the web site needs, and you can zoom in if you open the image directly.
The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU. This is comparable to a B-747 freighter. Current new price of a B-747 freighter is about US$400 million. Trips per unit time would be less but fuel cost would be lower.
Large container ships are now in the 20,000 TEU range.
It's not clear there's much demand for faster container shipping. Container ships tend to run slower than they can, to save fuel. Maersk has some 4,000 TEU high speed container ships capable of 29 knots, but due to lack of a market and huge fuel costs, they're mothballed in a loch in Scotland.
[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66b24fc3f58cf0...
> The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU.
Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo", not "500 ton total mass". And 500 tons of cargo are at minimum 25 TEU.
If they are competing with 747 freighters, those containers will almost always be "cubed out" (the container volume is full long before reaching its maximum legal weight), meaning the airship would load several times as many containers.
This is another advantage they have against air freight. Those 747s are frequently cubed out themselves, flying lighter than they would like. And you can't easily build much more volume into jet aircraft (well, you can, that's what the Airbus Beluga XL is, and apparently several air freight companies are pestering Airbus to re-open a production line for those). Airships, on the other hand, will be practicably impossible to cube out.
For the curious the search string you want is "Maersk cargo ships in Loch Striven".
At some point in the future the real cost of operating with fossil fuels will catch up.
One challenge I've heard of is: If you carry 100 tons of cargo from point A to point B in an airship, for the airship to return to point A, it needs to take on another 100 tons of new cargo (or ballast), or it needs to vent (or compress) lifting gas, in order to maintain the correct buoyancy. I wonder what the best approach is here, & how it affects the economics? Is water ballast safe & cheap enough, or is there a better way?
Rather than taking a huge shipment, delivering it, and having to deal with an empty airship, maybe it's better to think of it as a slowly drifting warehouse. Drones can handle delivery and restock across short distances, and the airship doesn't land at all. This would let you maintain a more or less consistent mass.
Yeah although typically they used water ballast, which is cheap and easy to find.
One thing worth considering is going back to hydrogen as a lifting gas. Not only is it a better lifting gas than helium and much cheaper, it could be used as fuel.
An airship that burned its own lifting gas would have the curious property of getting heavier the further it traveled. This could be countered by dual-fueling it and also have engines that burned heavier-than-air fuel like kerosene or propane. The hydrogen engines could burn the lifting gas at the same rate as the kerosene engines burn the ballast-fuel.
> it needs to take on another 100 tons of new cargo (or ballast) ... in order to maintain the correct buoyancy.
Sounds perfect for a cargo situation. Add new cargo as old cargo is removed.
> Over the summer, Jim incorporated Airship Industries. He hired a team of cracked ex-SpaceX engineers. And he raised a large pre-seed round...
This typo is perfect.
I don’t think it’s a typo. There’s an emergent usage of “cracked” meaning “awesome”.
They did survive SpaceX, after all. You'd expect a few scars.
Nothing says fun times like a mad rocket scientist!
I am blind. What typo?
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If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time.
I didn't understand this part, specifically how you could beat today's air freight. Why wouldn't airships be subject to the same (ahem) overhead at either end?
Competitive enough on speed while being less expensive makes sense, though.
Airships don't require a runway; a century ago they could moor to skyscrapers, or ships at sea.
If (big regulatory issues here) you can deliver directly from one site to another, you eliminate trucking goods to the source airport & from the destination airport. A 3 hour dirigible flight is slower than a 45 minute cargo plane flight, but buffering at a warehouse to loading / unload a truck (twice) could easily add 2-3 days latency.
I see this brought up every few years but nothing ever seems to happen. I used to live not far from the Weeksville station in NC and would occasionally see flights from there. Would love to see these all over. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/weeksville-dirigible-han...
This. Anybody remember cargolifter?
Articles about airship dreambuilding have been a mainstay of HN and Reddit since the early days. The tech has always been super inspiring, yet "just around the corner". It would be almost sad to see them actually become a reality.
Unrealized futurism predating both in magazine form was Popular Mechanics and Popular Science hype of Moller skycars as the original goat, and virtual reality being a close second.
Jet packs seem to be getting actually closer, maybe perpetually 5 years off instead of perpetually 10 years away.
The article said nothing about weather hazards or the fact that it’s a big fat target for a war drone to bring down.
It’s not just an easy target to hit, it’s a symbolic target.
Airships were abandoned because very large objects falling out of the sky did not appeal to the public… and too many of them fell.
Extremely severe weather brings down relatively tough aircraft, but once on the ground or in hangars they are relatively safe. Airships are flying cheesepuffs.
Luckily, we have much better weather forecasting than we did last time we tried airships for realsies.
> too many of them fell
How many of them fell? Tried searching this up and barely any fell. Very few deaths too.
I think this has actually great potential for fruit transports.
Many countries export and import fruits from neighboring countries, because goods like fruits need a riping process and time, and storage space locally is more expensive than transporting them via container ship.
For example, almost the same fruits that are exported from Hawaii are simultaneously imported from Chile, and vice versa. Both nations grow those natively, but storage space on the ground is more expensive than shipment.
If this was part or focus of the airship freighting company, I'd see great potential there. Not even that, they wouldn't even need to transport anything, if they could invent a storage space in the air that's tax free, or maybe even offshore above the water.
I just want to say that fruits need a ripening time because they are picked too early to accommodate transportation.
Fruits picked ripe from the tree are significantly tastier and probably healthier.
> "if they could invent a storage space .. offshore above the water"
like, a boat?
The CargoLifter-Conendrum:
If you're want to use your cargo airship for point to point transport, you'll need ballast at the target point so that the buoyancy of the airship doesn’t change too much. CargoLifter back then used water. Their prototype could lift an armoured vehicle and lower it – while maintaining buoyancy through pumping water with an high speed pump. They planned cargo services for very remote points.
But if you’ll can transport water and a high speed pump and a mobile mooring tower to the very remote target, chances are, you’ll already can transport the cargo itself to that target.
Today the CargoLifter hangar is the biggest indoor water park.
Time to order a leather hat, goggles and a scarf.
To summarize: "It'll surely work this time. Please invest."
I feel there were very good reasons that airships were abandoned. I don't know what those reasons were, but unless they enumerate the reasons and explain why they have now solved them, I will assume they are also going to fail.
According to AI, there have been 5 historical attempts to make airships work before the modern resurgence:
The early experimental phase (1780s–1850s), The pioneering era (1850s–1900s), The golden age (1900s–1930s), A post-Hindenburg decline (1930s), Cold War military uses (1940s–1970s), and A modern resurgence (1990s–present).
On a related note, I recommend this short presentation by Hacker News regular @simonw on the history of airships, including a look at the future of airships:
"When Zeppelins Ruled The Earth" (6m47s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omobajJmyIU&ab_channel=Simon...
It is a wonderful solution looking for a problem. I imagine there must be at least one landlocked country interested in the adventure.
Someone long ago did a napkin calculation for me showing a hard vacuum airship made of reinforced concrete can work if you make it big enough. What are a few miles on the cosmic scale?
In the render it shows the airship directly loading while hovering above a warehouse. This is currently not allowed under FAA regulations and would require a regulatory change. Not being able to do that makes a lot of the business model assumptions questionable.
Nice! I guess one of the side effects is that air pirates are finally going to be a thing! Yay!
Is your crew hiring?
They are missing out on a golden opportunity, North Carolina disaster could be where they shine and show the world what they can do!!! Someone needs to advise these folks, they are desperate for non-road transportation up there... (western NC AND Eastern TN).
> They are missing out on a golden opportunity, North Carolina disaster could be where they shine and show the world what they can do
They currently are showing the world what cargo airships can do (ie nothing). The world just perpetually doesn't want to listen.
I wonder what
>Lighter Than Air, a company owned by Google's co-founder, begins testing Pathfinder 1, a next-generation airship that could revolutionize air travel, cargo transport, and the movement of humanitarian aid.
are doing with their ship? I think it's built and sitting around. (https://www.domusweb.it/en/sustainable-cities/gallery/2023/1...)
There's oversimplification of how logistic is working. For example it's not gonna happening solving last mile delivery using this airship, not even mentioning the pickup.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter
What has changed?
Is there an actual problem here that airships solve? Is getting cargo across the Pacific one or two days faster (and that's presumably a best case, since airships are heavily weather and wind dependent) actually that valuable? I would have though the scale of international shipping would anyway mean its pretty cheap to set up a continuous stream of cargo, which airships would struggle to replicate in any efficient way.
Honestly, it sounds like a cool thing to work on, but this article is not convincing about the potential market. I can easily imagine former SpaceX and Hyperloop engineers thinking a cool technology will simply find a market, but that's not really what Elon Musk did with SpaceX.
cargo airships are not ever gona happen pure unobtainium we are domehow glosding over the imposibility of combining a transport ship with a built in mega crane,that has no fixed base or solid anchoring system all bulk cargo operations are dangerouse enough already cargo airships can not be engineered to work zeeeero
Cargo airships are not going to replace container ships, but they may well have their niche. One such use-case is prompt delivery of supplies that are urgently needed in high quantity in underdeveloped areas. For example, delivering some grammar to the parent comment.
Cargo airships are like nuclear fusion, just a few years away for the last sixty years.
> He hired a team of cracked ex-SpaceX engineers.
A team of what??
Sailing ships are happening.
Vaporware hype.
Even grifters seem to run out of new ideas...
Sounds good does not work.
Reminds me of CargoLifter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter
The german article states that the price the Zeppelin GmbH (yes those guys) calculated, that the costs of transportation via airship, would be about 10 times as high as conventional methods.
CargoLifter used helium which is stupidly expensive, this is supposed to use hydrogen and more modern materials but i think that does not make a factor of 10.
Also "current FAA guidance disallows the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas". So good luck with that.
As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.
Old Airships had either rain collectors (yep really) or piston engines which burned gas with a similar density to air (which digs a lot into your carrying capacity and volume).
Venting helium is way to expensive and one of the reasons CargoLifter failed, was that they never managed to get water collection running.
This article and the linked website have no idea how to solve the propulsion problem. There is some stuff about turbines going with the the old Zeppelin approach, of burning gas. Or something about solar cells, which obviously would not work because solar cells are rigid and heavy but this is supposed to be semi rigid. And you would need heavy batteries too.
Also airships sink when they get wet. And it gets warm the gas expands and it rises. You need ballast to account for that; this is large so it will do that a lot.
Don't forget how stupidly large these things are and thus how much wind is a problem. The linked website claims a predicted length of 388 and width of 78 Meters minimum!
So maneuverability is going to be a large problem, you can overcome this by adding lots of propellers everywhere but that add weight and uses fuel.
Now imagine a 388x78 m giant filled with hydrogen, with hordes of engines everywhere, dropping of a bunch of containers at some delivery center...
Since wind might be coming from every direction you need a landing circle (!) of roughly a km in diameter. This is why old Zeppelins landed at large (!) airstrips or sometimes on masts attached to skyscrapers.
Then cargo gets loaded off and ballast of the same weight must be moved onto the ship.
That ballast has to go somewhere, so the ship either needs water tanks (again loss of carrying capacity). Or the landing strip has some attachable ballast (how do you transport that back and forth?).
If you have the infrastructure to accommodate this thing you can be reached by truck or rail, which is cheaper, not depended on weather and so on... And weirdly enough you can be reached by cargo aircraft which is a solved problem!
Door to door delivery was exactly what CargoLifter was supposed to do. But it was basically a more expensive and clunky helicopter. Thus it failed.
> As you burn fuel you must either gain weight or vent gas.
Can't you just compress lifting gas to reduce it's volume?
Consider a cargo airship operated remotely. The propulsion would be based on solar powered fans. Even if it took weeks to cross the ocean it would need essentially no cost to operate (or incredibly little) compared to operating a ship. If one blows up (hydrogen is volatile) you'd dump all the cargo on the ocean but you wouldn't be dumping tons of diesel fuel and the frame of the the ship is smaller than a ship. If you can do it without a crew you've essentially made shipping almost free except for loading and unloading at ports. AND you can put ports in areas that don't have access to inlets to the oceans or good shorelines. The most difficult part is the volatility of the lifting gas. You might have to load and unload cargo on platforms away from the coastline to prevent explosions. As for the hydrogen itself, the balloon can create it's own lifting gas by separating hydrogen from the atmosphere with an onboard chemical electric apparatus (presumably) if it ends up leaking hydrogen on its voyage. Lifting gas volatility has always been the biggest problem.
Serious question out of curiosity. Has anyone solved the lifting gas volatility problem (is the lighter the gas the more volatile)? That's the main deal breaker with all zeppelin proposals.
What is the current target use-case for this company's airships, the use-case that will get them a consistent business that will allow them to grow?
What is the target operating speed considering cargo weight?
How much cargo can such an airship carry at its target operating speed such that this is more efficient than air-freight and land-freight?
Read the article dude
