Cargo Airships Are Happening

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.

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.

https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS2101....

After normalizing the data by annual flight hours, there was no obvious trend over time for turbulence-related Part 121 accidents during this period [1989-2018].

The BBC article cites a modelling paper. In a conflict between real data and a simulation, real data should win.