Blimps as freight transport

October 27, 2024 9:54 AM

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a 200-metre-long blimp that could transform freight transport. An aeronautical group wants to create a global airship network to revolutionise freight transport. Outback Queensland has signed up to host the first Australian airship base.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (64 comments total)

Iron Maiden singer (and aircraft enthusiast) Bruce Dickinson was soliciting for investors in a commercial airship venture a few years back.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 10:00 AM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

I don't care if this doesn't make sense. I want blimps!

And they need to look like whales or other whimsical designs!
posted by Acari at 10:06 AM on October 27, 2024 [7 favorites]

“Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales…”
posted by clew at 10:19 AM on October 27, 2024 [7 favorites]

Huh this is from Flying Whales in France and Canada, a different company than Luftschiffbau Zeppelin in Germany. The latter has been trying to commercialize a new version of the Zeppelin for some 30 years now without a lot of success.

I've flown on one of the Zeppelin NTs, it was great fun. But the practicality for passenger travel hit home to me when they explained that for an SF / LA trip they'd drive your luggage (to save fuel in the airship) and it would arrive before the airship. It makes more sense for slow cargo. The Zeppelin in California also had a niche business carrying scientific sensors, apparently it flies uniquely smoothly.

A big problem is the price of helium. Some inevitably escapes and it's remarkably expensive. Also the price is quite volatile. Hydrogen honestly would be cheaper, even if the gas is quite volatile.
posted by Nelson at 10:43 AM on October 27, 2024 [6 favorites]

They're using hydrogen.

Unfortunately, still a bad idea.
posted by phooky at 10:49 AM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

...where the pampered luxury of a cruise ship meets the smoothness of modern air travel!
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 10:53 AM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

But for like... cargo. Rather than people.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 10:53 AM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

But the practicality for passenger travel hit home to me when they explained that for an SF / LA trip they'd drive your luggage (to save fuel in the airship) and it would arrive before the airship.

Sorry, just to clarify: Are you saying this is what the zeppelin company did on your SF/LA trip, or is this something airlines (including fixed-wing regular airlines) do more generally?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:04 AM on October 27, 2024

Idea for reviving lighter-than-air flight have been going on at least 40 years. Back then I was stationed at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, the original dirigible base in the US, and location where the Hindenburg blew up. I was friendly with the bases PR man, and heard a lot about it.
posted by Goofyy at 11:15 AM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

The aviation technology still needs to be approved in Australia, but Cr MacRae is positive the project will get off the ground.

This statement begs for a snarky ripost; however, I am stunned into submission. Anyhow, this would be a great way to watch the Superbowl.
posted by mule98J at 11:15 AM on October 27, 2024

They're using hydrogen.

The pull quote right in the middle of the article: "We don't use any hydrogen in our airships. We use helium, which is safer," he said.

Idea for reviving lighter-than-air flight have been going on at least 40 years.

Right and I'm not seeing what new breakthrough in technology makes this not a "I wonder why we're the first to try this? Oh that's why" situation.

Seems practical for special cases to me, but very niche. For when you absolutely need your shipping container but can't have rail transport. If you can lift it with a dock crane, then just put that dock crane hook on the zeppelin? I wonder how much it can lift. The article says something about "wind farm blades or high-voltage towers for transmission lines" which seem like rigging problems.
posted by ctmf at 11:25 AM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

You're absolutely right. My brain completely swapped "hydrogen" and "helium" in that quote. Yikes, brain.
posted by phooky at 11:38 AM on October 27, 2024 [3 favorites]

So how many shipping containers can it lift? 1?

The problem with lighter-than-air shipping is that freight is heavy.
posted by ryanrs at 11:51 AM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

They are super fuel efficient when going downwind! I wonder if they could lean into that, take freight downwind with the prevailing local currents, then squish it up small and put it on a train back to where it started. I bet there's lots of goods that need to mostly move downwind.
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:53 AM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

Of all the implausible Australian fauna we've seen posted to the front page, these flying whales are the most fake. I assume it's some kind of green-washing boondoggle by a failson steampunk fan.
posted by ryanrs at 12:03 PM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

Are you saying this is what the zeppelin company did on your SF/LA trip, or is this something airlines (including fixed-wing regular airlines) do more generally?

Just the airship company. Flying in a normal jet SF to LA is about one hour takeoff to landing. Driving SFO to LAX is about six hours, best case no traffic. The Zeppelin NT flight was more like ten to twelve hours. It only goes 35-40 mph and of course depends heavily on the winds.

I never flew SF to LA, just a local Bay Area sightseeing tour. It was lovely. Quiet, smooth, low down for a great view. Great for contemplating the landscape go by. Like a train but higher. And slower. Much slower.

For cargo, trains and boats also seem better than airships but these folks have a plausible enough story they got some investors. Maybe it makes sense if you want to bring heavy cargo in somewhere inland that has no rail infrastructure or navigable rivers.

Airships really were a real thing that flew commercially! The Empire State Building had a dirigible dock although it was never practical.
posted by Nelson at 12:14 PM on October 27, 2024 [3 favorites]

Hmm, forget freight, I wonder if it's station-keeping ability and operating cost could make it replace having to build and take down a construction crane. Just schedule all your lifting for a few hours a day, you could share it with other sites.
posted by ctmf at 12:17 PM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Many construction cranes are self-erecting, so they can take themselves down as well. Not all of them, of course, but a lot. Probably a better target would be the sorts of things they use a heavy-lift helicopter for (eg: the S-64E) -- antennas, transmission towers, and so on.

Drawback: your station-keeping has to be reliably dead on or people die.
posted by aramaic at 12:30 PM on October 27, 2024

Maybe it can transport the crane, if the site is really remote. My thinking is if you can get a crane, you use a crane. Rather than fly a massive aircraft at super low altitude over the central business district.

Maybe it competes with heavy lift helicopters? High value, not massively heavy loads like utility construction, wind turbines, logging. They even show pics of turbine blades. But can it compete with heavy lift helicopters in windy conditions? Availability / weather delays are a big deal for that kind of project.
posted by ryanrs at 12:32 PM on October 27, 2024

they've invented an environmentally-friendly transport solution for pipeline construction and helicopter logging, gj guys
posted by ryanrs at 12:41 PM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

From 2016, my previous post on the New Yorker article, "Helium Dreams: A new generation of airships is born" (archived)
posted by ShooBoo at 12:52 PM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

I struggle to imagine how an airship, which presents an immense surface to the wind, would ever be able to maintain position as well as a helicopter.

I can maybe imagine the use case for replacing air freight into remote communities that have no road or sea access for most of the year. The same company is proposing the concept for the Canadian Arctic, where a lot of communities have sea access only in the summer and rely on air for the rest of the year to bring in vegetables and such. But even then, you have tough weather conditions to contend with, you need to keep your cargo climate controlled and you're competing not just against pure air freight, but mixed freight and passenger service.
posted by ssg at 12:56 PM on October 27, 2024

So what happens to one of these things when some ding-dong with a gun shoots it?
posted by slater at 12:59 PM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

~ his path was marked by flight plans in the southern hemisphere ~
~ and he walked his days under Coruscant skies ~
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:01 PM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

So what happens to one of these things when some ding-dong with a gun shoots it?

Basically nothing because the pressure inside the skin is equal to the pressure outside. A very tiny bit of helium will leak out.
posted by ryanrs at 1:02 PM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Also, the Flying Whales airship design features an envelope containing many separate cells of helium, rather than a single big gasbag.
posted by mbrubeck at 1:07 PM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

I wonder if they could lean into that, take freight downwind with the prevailing local currents, then squish it up small and put it on a train back to where it started. I bet there's lots of goods that need to mostly move downwind.

That's over a million bucks worth of helium, so you can't just vent it.
posted by ryanrs at 1:09 PM on October 27, 2024

More of a Shelbyville idea, I guess
posted by chavenet at 1:09 PM on October 27, 2024 [8 favorites]

> Of all the implausible Australian fauna we've seen posted to the front page, these flying whales are the most fake.

what did you think drop-bears drop from?
posted by Clowder of bats at 1:26 PM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

I don't think airships are particularly good at lifting like a crane is. What they do is neutral buoyancy, you put a certain amount of cargo weight on it, balance the gas, and then you can go up and down with just a little bit of adjustment to the density. I think it would have a hard time lifting heavy concrete or steel objects.

Even loading and unloading 12 people was awkward on my flight. Every time somebody got off the whole thing would start to float and the ground crew had to wait for some helium to be removed before the next person could step off. I suspect it would be very tricky to unload a thousand pound object at a construction site. It's not easy in a helicopter either but I think variable power from an engine is easier than variable lift from gas bags.
posted by Nelson at 1:29 PM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Okay, now can't you add X% of hydrogen to the helium mix? Increase lift weight without increasing volume. Helium is the most neutral chemical/atom possible. Assuming that it doesn't segregate, it could prevent a fire from X% of hydrogen. Or maybe just have some hydrogen bladders deep inside the helium superstructure.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:36 PM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

They just need to figure out how to shrink it down to the size of a regular airplane while maintaining the buoyancy. Maybe if the added some wings and supplemental engines -- either propellors or maybe jets. With a few of those they could even dispense with the helium, which would save a lot of money.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 2:12 PM on October 27, 2024 [5 favorites]

If they really can do this

LCA60T will be able to load and unload up to 60 tonnes of cargo in hovering flight, without the need to land. I was surprised how little is on their site re lift capacity though.

but yes, how will they keep on station, in any sort of wind? Heightwise and buoyancy is probably easily solvable.
posted by unearthed at 2:25 PM on October 27, 2024

A big problem is the price of helium.

I’m assuming they can get it cheaply as a by-product of all the fusion reactors that will be coming online at about the same time.
posted by TedW at 2:26 PM on October 27, 2024 [11 favorites]

So what happens to one of these things when some ding-dong with a gun shoots it?

I think hydrogen might be a little cheaper but.... I believe if you shoot a dirigible it can be repaired rather easily, what I suggest is a bunch of hydrogen bladders that can be released over the avid Marksman. Camera, detachable drones that will home in on the Marksman repeatiing YOU ARE IN VIOLATION"
posted by clavdivs at 2:27 PM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

That's over a million bucks worth of helium, so you can't just vent it.

Just keep going! The jetstreams do.
posted by clew at 3:05 PM on October 27, 2024

Some (mostly) depressing facts about helium and hydrogen for airships:

Hydrogen provides only 8% more buoyancy at STP than helium. The major difference is economic, where helium is about 60x the cost of hydrogen, and growing. It is a significant expense to reclaim gas out of an envelope and compress it for later use. For helium, it costs about 10 megajoules of energy to compress a single kg into a storage cylinder pressure (3000 psi). Typical gas compression methods are about 25% and a ship like the Goodyear blimp has 1000kg of helium. This works out to $1500 in energy just to recover the helium out of an envelope, which will now be degraded by contamination from air (all envelopes have leaks) and ignores the enormous time, manpower and logistical costs. Replacing 1000kg of lost helium costs about $50-70,000. You can't just deflate them and fold them up for storage. Most must be stored INDOORS, for protection of the delicate envelope from the elements. This might give you some idea of the economic and operational constraints that have left airships out of the transportation market.

Mixing hydrogen/helium: Well, you've solved most of the flammability problems with hydrogen, but this was mostly only a problem in the minds of the public after the Hindenburg disaster, which was caused by the coating of the envelope being extremely flammable. While the hydrogen definitely spread the fire along the envelope faster, most escaped and dispersed upwards into the air. Say you have a 50/50 mix, so your gas is now only 30x as expensive as pure hydrogen, but now you have to pay for the logistics and handling of both gases, and your envelope must be made to resist leakage by the much smaller hydrogen molecule. You now have 4% more lifting power.

As for hybrid buoyant/aerodynamic vehicles: Sorry, but no, you'll just have the worst of both methods. You'll now have a slightly less giant, unwieldy vehicle that might be able to travel at 40mph instead of 30mph, but now requires many times the thrust requirements and constant power to hover, and therefore must be equipped to land and takeoff.

As for sky cranes:
Every kg of lift requires about 1 cubic meter of envelope volume (helium or hydrogen), roughly accounting for the increased mass of the envelope. The weight of a typical person requires the volume of about 7-10 passenger cars just to lift. A checked bag, another 2-3 cars. The Hindenburg could lift about as much as a smallish construction crane. This ignores the fact that airships can't add and shed load while they're operating without taking on and dropping ballast. Hot air balloons are less constrained by this because they have multiple ways to adjust their buoyancy.

Airships will remain a solution looking for a problem. Maybe on Venus!
posted by WaylandSmith at 3:06 PM on October 27, 2024 [14 favorites]

mostly only a problem in the minds of the public after the Hindenburg disaster, which was caused by the coating of the envelope being extremely flammable

Wait, what, it was NOT the Hydrogen? Can we make safe envelopes and do a bunch of flame thrower tests to prove the huge fun floaty thing is save? Make the skys slow, quiet and pleasant.
posted by sammyo at 4:04 PM on October 27, 2024 [1 favorite]

Airships featured in the latter stages of the book The Ministry for the Future (discussed here).

I can see some advantages in specific freight in specific places, which is no doubt why they're looking at Mount Isa. It's more or less at the end of any reasonable roads and there are lots of places within easy flying range that are good possibilities for solar and wind generation facilities. Wind generators in particular present significant challenges for transporting components anywhere, but more so (albeit different challenges) in remote areas with no bitumen roads and few roads of any description.

The payload is not great, though, at 60 tonnes and it's hard to see how these are going to pay for themselves without inventing new reasons for them to exist. Such a shame, because airships are way cool.
posted by dg at 4:15 PM on October 27, 2024

Airship freight transforming shipping markets is an absurb idea. Lol. Good joke, sir.

Unless it's specifically targeted at routes not connected by rail or port. Which maybe this is.

I haven't read the article
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 4:34 PM on October 27, 2024

Wait, what, it was NOT the Hydrogen?

Well, don't take my opinion as conclusive at all. People have been arguing about the cause for over a century. There's even a Mythbusters episode about it. The coating over the fabric of the envelope is certainly flammable, though perhaps less flammable than the bare fabric at low temperatures, but the Mythbusters episode shows that it showed a thermite-like reaction once things heated up. The problem with coming up with a conclusion is that the plausibility of the fabric coating being the cause is dependent on the initial cause of the fire, which is unknown. If it was static electricity, no, it's unlikely the coating caused the fire. If it was sabotage, it becomes much more likely. What CAN be said pretty certainly is that if it had contained helium it would not have been much more difficult to sabotage it and the envelope would still have burned rapidly, though less rapidly than with the hydrogen fuelling it too.

There were certainly other airship fires that were undoubtedly caused by hydrogen ignition, so by the time of the Hindenburg, the writing was on the wall. For manned aircraft, the safety concern is probably insurmountable, but for an unmanned craft, I think hydrogen is a plausible alternative, but is only one piece of a large set of problems.
posted by WaylandSmith at 4:43 PM on October 27, 2024

A concept worth pursuing, one that winds and occasional high winds make more complex.
posted by ovvl at 5:17 PM on October 27, 2024

Helium is, effectively, a non- renewable resource. Using it for almost anything other than cooling MRI machines is stealing from the future. Every time I see a helium balloon, I am sad. I don't understand why we haven't passed laws about this. Maybe Congress thinks they'll all be dead by the time they need a MRI and can't get one?
posted by novalis_dt at 5:40 PM on October 27, 2024 [6 favorites]

So what happens to one of these things when some ding-dong with a gun shoots it?

A regular bullet likely wouldn’t do much damage as outlined above; but replace “some ding-dong with a gun” with “some stupid with a flare gun” and you could burn the place to the ground.
posted by TedW at 6:02 PM on October 27, 2024 [2 favorites]

airships are way cool

They so are. "Ride in an airship" is one of the items on my bucket list.
posted by orange swan at 6:09 PM on October 27, 2024

Every time I see a helium balloon, I am sad.

Me too. Not just MRIs, but there are fundamental physics experiments that can only be done with helium. And once released it escapes to space, earth's gravity cannot hold it. We are indeed stealing from the future.

We used to have a Strategic National Reserve storing helium, but no! we can't have nice things! It must be sold off and privatized! Bill Clinton signed the Helium Privatization Act of 1996. I actually remember that day.
posted by phliar at 6:20 PM on October 27, 2024 [7 favorites]

I've wondered for ages if a vacuum airship would be possible, but how to hold the vacuum? Turns out there are several groups looking at aerogel structures where the bubbles hold vacuum

Seems it started out as thinking of aerogel-based thin-shell spheres with a vacuum void within, like this at NASA [.pdf] , and Los Alamos [w3 link, far more understandable]., and this from Vacuum balloon -- a 350-year-old dream [arxiv .pdf] with much better graphics

And there seem to be a few people thinking about solid aerogel structures where the bubbles hold vacuum and the solid is lighter than air, and maybe lighter than Helium, but some sites also look too hopium so maybe a it's all about nothing.
posted by unearthed at 6:42 PM on October 27, 2024

vacuum airship would be possible, but how to hold the vacuum?

I’ve been told that rock crystal is strong enough to float in Earth atmosphere if it was grown as a single hollow bubble in vacuum. This seems so unlikely but so wonderful that I’m reluctant to look it up.
posted by clew at 6:57 PM on October 27, 2024

People shot at the Goodyear blimp now and then back in the day. Yes it had lots of chambers even then, and it was never fazed.

I rode in it once as a kid and this is what they told me then.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:29 PM on October 27, 2024

The War in the Air: And Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted

like a Kubrick film. I saw the Goodyear blimp up close inside the pilot compartment (I don't know but it takes a bit of courage to walk under a blimp) when it was going to appear at a Michigan game for which someone got the bright idea of lighting a pretty powerful bottle rocket at it.

ever seen a blimp get mad.
posted by clavdivs at 8:52 PM on October 27, 2024

I’m assuming they can get it cheaply as a by-product of all the fusion reactors that will be coming online at about the same time.
The amount of helium produced as a by-product of fusion is minuscule. And helium is a highly non-renewable resource. It escapes the atmosphere, and once we run out, it's all over. We need it (in it's liquid form) for superconducting magnets, like we use in MRI machines and particle accelerators. It's the coldest liquid possible, and there's really no substitute. Use of helium for things like party balloons is quite irresponsible and should be banned - last week was my birthday, somebody gave me a helium balloon and I wish I could return the helium to the Federal Helium Reserve... which just got sold to the highest bidder in what I consider a truly awful decision. So I'm not so enthusiastic about the rise (sorry) of helium airships.
posted by crazy_yeti at 5:18 AM on October 28, 2024 [2 favorites]

some sites also look too hopium

To be fair, hopium is even more buoyant than hydrogen.
posted by flabdablet at 5:59 AM on October 28, 2024 [5 favorites]

This was a great article I read in Popular Science back in the 90's. It's kind of sad to keep seeing it pop up and up and up again, like flying cars (don't worry, what's his name will have his flying car to market any time now!).

I'll be over here watching the giant cargo ships using sails again to save on fuel.
posted by Atreides at 8:20 AM on October 28, 2024 [2 favorites]

I hope Queensland at least gets an excellent indoor water park out of the deal.
posted by grahamparks at 9:09 AM on October 28, 2024

There's also AT2 Aerospace, spun off from a Lockheed Martin division. While it says that they are powered by hydrogen on their website, that actually refers to hydrogen fuel cells powering the motors... The bladders are all filled with helium just like all the dirigibles...
posted by Snowflake at 9:50 AM on October 28, 2024

You can fly a model airplane and learn a lot about the characteristics of a full-size airplane. But lighter-than-air flight characteristics depend on the ratio of surface area to volume. So you have to build big. The Zeppelin NT, at 75 meters long and over 8,000 cubic meters of helium, is the minimum size of a viable airship prototype. That’s why it can’t lift much.

This makes the development cycle of airships very long and expensive. The extreme difficulty of this development cycle meant airships couldn’t keep up with the rapid development of airplanes in the early 20th century.

Now that airplanes are not changing rapidly and airship flight can be simulated on computers, airship development is somewhat more favorable than it was in the 1930s.

But at this point, there’s no airship industry: no regulatory regime (Goodyear basically self-certifies), almost no pilots, very few experienced engineers, and a handful of large hangars that are 100 years old and falling apart.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a market. It just means that addressing that market requires nation-state level resources.
posted by Headfullofair at 2:05 PM on October 28, 2024

Airships, you are the Lucy Van Pelt of transportational tech. You talk me into believing and then I come running, and you pull it away.
posted by storybored at 2:46 PM on October 28, 2024 [1 favorite]

I would love to have all lf the people commenting on this thread on a live zoom call to discuss this more.

Sure, lighter-than-air airships might be somewhat of a steampunk pipedream - but man, it would be so interesting.
posted by Rabarberofficer at 2:53 PM on October 28, 2024 [2 favorites]

I've probably shared this in every Metafilter discussion of airships but if you want a romantic view of passenger airship travel, Around the World by Zeppelin is good fun. It's a 2010 movie that's a semi-fictional documentary about a 1929 Graf Zeppelin trip around the world. Parts of the story are purely fiction for dramatic purposes but the core of it is real documentary footage from historical voyages and the diaries of a British journalist. It's a story to conjure with.
posted by Nelson at 3:33 PM on October 28, 2024 [3 favorites]

Their website shows installation of towers for a new high voltage power line.

This is the best use-case for airships, since the towers only weigh a few tonnes each and need to be placed in remote sites. Lightweight towers don't alter the airship's buoyancy when they are picked up or set down.

Setting down a 100+ tonne load is a major challenge for airship buoyancy control!
posted by monotreme at 5:08 PM on October 28, 2024 [1 favorite]

The interesting thing is the peculiar quirk of human cognition that means airships keep being proposed. Something to do with an inability to grasp that a huge vehicle doesn’t automatically have a huge carrying capacity? I don’t know, but I predict that in the thirtieth century, if we’re still around, someone will still be suggesting we bring back airships.
posted by Phanx at 1:31 AM on October 29, 2024

Maybe Congress thinks they'll all be dead by the time they need a MRI and can't get one?

The good news is that MRI machines are now designed to conserve helium and only need a one-time fill of a few litres.
posted by Phanx at 3:02 AM on October 29, 2024 [1 favorite]

Is this really "freight transport" per se? Electric trains make far more sense over land. Boats need fossil fuels, or nuclear, or else take considerably longer using wind. Aren't their examples more competition for heavy lift helicopters? That's a market, but more niche than "freight".

Airships are inherently less flexible than helicopters, and have shitty downsides like huge hangers, so they need some major advantage over heavy lift helicopters.

An Mil Mi-26 is rated for 20,000 kg, although one managed 56,768 kg for an airshow, but mostly heavy lift helicopters lift between 4000 kg and 12000 kg, enough for wind turbine blades, etc. Airships would not exceed this without being really huge.

I also wonder if hydrogen makes sense for this heavy lift role, like yeah you'll have some spectacular crashes, but an industrial special purpose craft could tollerate considerable risk, and helicopters are not that safe.

I suppose "freight" suggests much longer range than a heavy lift helicopter, but afaik heavy lift helicopters have enough range, except maybe wind turbine blades might be annoying to transport on the ground? If they chase the wind turbine blade market, then maybe they could stay afloat financially until jet fuel costs double or tripple?
posted by jeffburdges at 1:02 PM on October 29, 2024

flabdablet

To be fair, hopium is even more buoyant than hydrogen.

Fortunately I wasn't drinking tea at the time as that's seriously funny.
posted by unearthed at 3:06 PM on October 29, 2024 [2 favorites]