Should Airships Make a Comeback?
Airships seem like a bad idea. Exhibit A: the Hindenburg. It was filled with over 200 million liters of hydrogen and had a coating that contained iron oxide and aluminum powder, two ingredients used to make thermite. Thermite is highly reactive and is used to weld train tracks together. Even if airships weren’t filled with flammable gas and questionable coatings, they would still be slow and inefficient. However, there are companies around the world competing to build a new generation of airships.
Why are they doing it? The argument presented by Eli Dourado is that airships could provide a new method of transporting goods. Currently, a large amount of money is spent on air transportation, but it does not translate into a high volume of goods. Air transport is expensive but fast. On the other hand, transporting goods by ship is slower but significantly cheaper, resulting in more goods being transported overall. Rail is an even better option, being faster than ships and cheaper than planes. However, the most common method of transporting goods in the US is by truck, which is not as fast as planes but is cheaper than ships. Trucks are considered the ideal balance of cost and speed.
Internationally, the only options for transporting goods are planes and ships. Air transport is expensive, so the volume of goods transported by air is low. Most goods are sent via ocean freight. But what if there was a third option: faster than ships and cheaper than planes? This is where airships come in. They could be a truck-like method of transport, carrying cargo across oceans in around a week instead of a month. Theoretically, they would also be several times cheaper than sending goods by plane and emit significantly less emissions.
Airships have the advantage of utilizing the buoyancy of lighter-than-air gas to stay aloft, whereas planes require a lot of jet fuel to stay in the air. Modern airship manufacturers estimate that airships can reduce carbon emissions by 90% or more. However, historically, airships have struggled with carrying a lot of weight. The lift of an airship depends on the volume of gas it contains, while drag depends on the surface area of the craft. This means that larger airships are more efficient, as lift increases proportionally to the cube of the radius, while drag only increases proportionally to the square of the radius.
The three types of airships are blimps, semirigid airships, and rigid body airships. Blimps are essentially balloons with a gondola and motors attached, and their size is limited by the tension on their skin. Semirigid airships have added structural support, but they still have limitations in scaling up. Rigid body airships have an internal structure to maintain their shape and can be scaled up easily. They are the best option for the cargo market.
Eli Dourado proposes building a 388-meter long rigid airship capable of carrying 500 tons of goods at a speed of 90 kilometers per hour. To take a significant piece of the cargo market, a fleet of thousands of airships would be needed. If they were able to capture over half of the ocean freight container market at a price comparable to trucks, it could generate $650 billion of revenue per year, making it the biggest company in the world by revenue.
Currently, no one is building these monster airships, but the potential for them to revolutionize the cargo market is significant.
This passage has been paraphrased and condensed to highlight the main points. For the original text, please refer to the source.
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While transporting cargo is probably the largest market for airships, it’s also one that’s driven by fierce competition and low margins. And that’s not ideal when you need to spend a lot of money to first build, develop, and certify your airship. What you want is a market with less competition and better margins.
This is the Airlander 10, and it’s built by the U.K. company Hybrid Air Vehicles. Can you tell me about the envisioned use of the Airlander?
They’ll be going on extraordinary experiential holidays. So going to the North Pole, going on a safari, going over the Amazon, knowing that they’re making almost no environmental impact, being able to travel in some luxury and see things that you just can’t do another way. The first trips are scheduled for no later than 2026. Want to go on this trip, well, you’d better start saving because getting a cabin for two will cost you about $200,000.
And while a few companies are focusing on the luxury travel markets, others plan to make use of another unique advantage of airships. Think about what it normally takes to move things around. Trucks need roads, ships need water and ports, trains need railways and stations and planes need long runways and airports. Airships on the other hand, require very little infrastructure. The most important thing they need is a reasonably flat surface to land on, like grass, sand, ice or even water. And it’s this unique ability that allows them to deliver goods where no truck, boat, train, or plane can go. Airships can connect parts of the world that have been disconnected forever such as remote villages in Canada or Alaska and they can do this with little to no infrastructure.
Or what if the roads, rails and ports have been destroyed by a natural disaster. Help is urgently needed to find and support the survivors but there seems to be no way to get there and no methods of communications once you are there. Well, then airships could quickly rush to the scene to deliver rescue workers and supplies or to provide cellular service from the sky. Disaster relief missions like these are what LTA Research, which is backed by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, is focusing on and they’re making great progress. Their current prototype, the Pathfinder 1, has completed multiple indoor flight tests and it’s scheduled to fly outside sometime in the next few months. They plan to take the lessons they learn from these tests and build a series of airships that can provide help to disaster-stricken areas.
Other times, roads may be available but what you’re transporting just isn’t that compatible with roads like long, clunky and fragile turbine blades. To get them from the factory to the destination requires careful planning and perfectly choreographed maneuvers and this process is what often limits the size of wind turbines. Airships don’t have that problem, they can simply mount turbine blades of any size to the bottom and carry them to the destination. So it’s much faster, easier and it allows you to build more powerful wind turbines. Plus, airships can also easily transport other structures that are hard to move.
But sometimes instead of delivering goods, you need to pick them up. France is full of natural resources like wood, yet many of their forests can’t be reached by truck so they can’t actually extract the wood they’ve chopped down. The French company Flying Whales, backed by the French government, is hoping to change that. They are developing this 200-meter long cargo ship that’s capable of carrying a 60-ton payload. It was designed to be able to hover above remote forests and pick up logs which could then be carried off and turned into timber. But loading and unloading from the sky comes with significant problems. For starters, you need to make sure that during this process your airship stays still which is more difficult than it sounds.
So a very large airship has what we call sail effect. Even a relatively light current of wind when multiplied by a really, really large area is going to have a huge effect, that makes airships difficult to control especially close to the ground and at low speeds. So they are a little bit unwieldy. To overcome this, the airship is fitted with propellers all around the hull that can stabilize it. But still, this limits the use of most airships to places with stable weather.
A bigger problem comes from the fundamental reason why airships work in the first place. And this issue is particularly bad for large cargo airships. See, when an airship is carrying a heavy load, the combined weight of the load and the airship are offset by the lift. The problem arises when you release that heavy load because now the airship is suddenly much lighter and so it wants to shoot up into the sky. So you need some way to stop that from happening.
A few methods have been proposed to solve this problem. The easiest one is to decrease lift by venting lifting gas. The only issue is that most modern airships use helium. And to offset say 60 tons of weight, you would need to release about 54,000 cubic meters of helium which costs a few hundred thousand dollars. Not to mention that helium is scarce, so venting it isn’t really a practical option. Now, you could use propellers to push the airship down but that ends up burning so much fuel, it negates much of the advantage of using airships in the first place.
The real dream has been to compress and decompress lifting gas because you take a lifting gas and when it is in gaseous form, it lifts. When it is compressed, it’s ballast, it’s heavy, but there are some real problems with that. So you’re talking about a very large airship with a very large volume of lifting gas, now you need a compressor that’s capable of compressing a tremendous amount of gas very quickly and that is just a technological problem we haven’t really developed them.
Until then, the short-term solution is to replace the weight you’re releasing. So if you’re dropping 60 tons of supplies, you need to pick up 60 tons of ballast. If you want to pick up 60 tons of wood, you’d carry 60 tons of say water on board and release it at the pickup location. But there’s another innovative way to solve this problem and it’s the secret behind how the Airlander 10 works. It relies on a combination of lift from helium and aerodynamic lift created by its hull.
We can lift the whole weight of the aircraft with the helium inside so that effectively, when you’re flying, that weighs nothing. And the aerodynamic lift is just there to lift the payload. So if we’ve, say, got 100 people on board, we take off like a conventional aircraft, just at very low speed and we generate the aerodynamic lift to lift those people. The advantage then is that when we come down on the ground and those people get off, we don’t float away ’cause we used aerodynamic lift which you can turn on and off.
While hybrid airships work well for relatively light payloads, they’re not ideal for carrying heavy payloads over long distances because you would lose the advantage of
Using free lift to carry all that weight. For large cargo airships, the current best solution to the load exchange problem is to replace the weight you’re releasing. However, there are harder problems that need to be overcome to make airships the trucks of the sky.
No one has ever built a 388-meter long airship before. So how do you do it? Normally, airships are built in humongous hangars to protect them from the elements. But the largest airship hangar that has ever been built was only 360 meters long, so it wouldn’t even fit.
Since you need to build thousands of these airships, you either have to find a way to magically construct scores of fragile airships outside or build lots and lots of the world’s largest hangars.
There’s also another problem that needs to be solved. Each one of those airships must be filled with over one million cubic meters of lifting gas. The age-old question arises: Do you use hydrogen or helium? Helium is expensive and has a lower lifting ability, while hydrogen is cheap but highly flammable. After the Hindenburg burned down in less than 40 seconds, the choice seemed obvious: only inert helium should be used for airships. The Federal Aviation Administration agreed and hydrogen as a lifting gas has been banned for many years now.
However, what many people don’t realize is that of the 97 people on board the Hindenburg, more than 60 miraculously survived. Just a few years earlier, another airship, the USS Akron, crashed off the coast of New Jersey, killing 73 of the 76 people on board. And that airship was filled with helium. So perhaps the issue wasn’t that hydrogen airships were inherently unsafe; maybe we just didn’t know how to build safe airships. After all, we also didn’t know how to build safe planes, and now they’re one of the safest ways to travel.
For any plan that includes building and filling thousands of large-scale airships, hydrogen is the only realistic option because helium is too scarce and expensive. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is easy to produce, cheap, and provides about 8% more lift.
Another issue is certification. Certificating any new aircraft is a lengthy and expensive process. Certificating an airship is even more challenging because it’s not just a brand new aircraft, but a brand new type of aircraft. No one has ever certificated a large rigid airship before. Combine that with building the largest aircraft the world has ever seen and filling it with tremendous amounts of a highly flammable gas, and you’ve got yourself another significant challenge.
However, all of these problems may not even matter because it might not be possible to build a 500-ton cargo ship of that size. The most important thing about an airship structure is that it needs to be light, robust, strong, and have good structural integrity. But it also needs to be light enough to get off the ground. At a certain point of size, the weight you need to add to create the necessary structural integrity intersects with the ability to lift off safely. There is a structural size limitation due to weight issues, although the exact size is uncertain.
Right now, several companies around the world are developing and building the next generation of airships. However, none of them are setting out to develop the trucks of the sky. Instead, they are focusing on areas where airships have a distinct advantage: markets with less competition and decent margins. Perhaps as airships mature, one company will take the leap and set out to develop these trucks of the sky. It won’t be easy, but the reward could be huge.
Do you think we’ll see a future where we have airships roaming all over our skies? It may sound crazy, but it’s possible. It won’t be long before we get to see some incredible things in the sky that will bring back nostalgia for the great airships of the past. Breaking into the world with a new thing that the world is not ready for is challenging, but there’s no reason why it can’t become normal with time. I hope that when that day comes, someone will invite me to come along and at least take a look, if not have a ride in it.
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