Buoyant wants to solve middle-mile delivery with cargo airships

I'm a huge fan of lighter than air craft and have been for many years, decades now. So saying that, I don't see this system ever actually working in the real world.

* If the departure and arrival points currently exist, they likely have roads available. Even the best case autonomous airship isn't going to be cheaper than a truck.

* With a maximum cargo capacity of 650lbs whatever cargo loaded onto an airship will likely have to be broken down. A standard 48"x48" pallet can easily be loaded with two to three times that weight.

* FAA regulations for helicopter landing pads [0] want a final approach, take off (FATO) area to be 1.5x the overall length of a helicopter. For an airship with partially aerodynamic lift I don't see why this wouldn't be larger but if it was the same you'd need a FATO area 90' on a side for a 60' long airship.

* The airship terminals would need their infrastructure and operations to include these huge cleared areas for the airships. A lot of consideration would need to go into vertical clearance for things like fork lifts because of the overhang dimensions of the airship.

* Urban heat islands and microclimates will severely hamper airships in ways that heavier than air craft don't worry about.

While I'm not in love with trucks, they make far more sense than airships for cargo in 99% of all cases. For one trailers and tractors don't need to be handled at the same time. A container(s) can be broken down and pallets moved to trailers and then a tractor called in once that's complete to move it out.

They also don't require some huge land area for loading and unloading. Middle mile terminals will have loading docks and/or forklifts. A mechanical problem with a tractor or trailer can be handled relatively easily on-site. If an autonomous airship has an issue at the terminal it can't be towed away easily unless even more space is dedicated to storage. If it breaks down during transport it can land on all sorts of stuff that doesn't want a half ton of airship landing on it.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...

>the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship

I think that may be a misleading way to put it.

"Most casualties had been caused by drowning and hypothermia, since the crew had not been issued life jackets, and there had not been time to deploy the single life raft"

When a large airplane enters heavy turbulence, stalls and falls into the sea, I don't think that would be the usual scenario.

Hydrogen can be made safe, and is renewable. For something like this to work we need to move past the Hindenburg.

I think to have once read that World War I fights against Zeppelins showed that igniting the hydrogen proved to actually be quite hard. Only when they were able to open significant holes and used special ammunition did that work. Not enough hydrogen would escape and mix with air and remain in one place to accumulate to cause an explosion. There needed to be a big hole first for enough hydrogen to mix with air, plus the spark to ignite it.

That was WWI airplanes over Britain attacking Zeppelins with their machine guns.

There were a lot of compartments too, it was not all one giant space of hydrogen.

EDIT: I found it mentioned in https://www.military-history.org/feature/german-zeppelins-of...

> That autumn, the British pilots deployed a new weapon. No longer dependent on dropping bombs or explosive darts over the side, nor on the standard machine-gun ammunition that appeared to have no effect whatever on the giant gas-bags, the home-defence squadrons now filled their ammunition belts with a mixture of tracer and newly-designed explosive and incendiary bullets. The idea was to blow a hole in the fabric of an airship and then ignite the escaping hydrogen as it mixed with air.

Of course, once successfully blown open and ignited it would go up in flames like a torch. But it wasn't quite that simple to get to that point.

The current design is made to compete with small cargo planes to remote small landlocked cities like many in Alaska with no roads.

To be able to compete with trucks they would need a significantly bigger airship as efficiency scales with size.