Author Topic: Could the airship be the answer to sustainable air travel – or is it all a load of hot air?  (Read 756 times)

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Offline 240B

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Could the airship be the answer to sustainable air travel – or is it all a load of hot air?

BBC
Laura Hall
December 12, 2024

Technically, the airship is all a load of hot air: a typically cigar-shaped, self-propelled aircraft made of a vast balloon filled with nearly weightless lifting gases, featuring an attached car or gondola for carrying passengers, crew and cargo. If it conjures up a black-and-white image of the past, you're right – airships were popular at the beginning of the 20th Century before the rise of aviation as we know it. And now, they're making a comeback.

Modern technological advances, paired with a need to develop the aviation industry as it struggles slowly towards net zero, have led aeronautical engineers to re-examine the airship. New materials – including new forms of ultralight nylon – developed since its heyday have made a new type of aircraft possible. Replacing flammable hydrogen with helium has allowed for safer development and aims to avoid a repeat of the Hindenburg disaster, the luxury German airship that exploded live on film in 1937. The new advances and stronger aviation standards mean that really the only thing these new airships have in common with the Hindenburg is their shape and the fact that they're using a gas lighter than air.

Though an airship, which typically flies at around 100-130km/h, won't ever reach the speeds of a jet plane, they are being talked about as forms of slow travel like cruise ships and night trains, where the experience makes up for the speed. Airships fly at a lower altitude than a plane, with unpressurised cabins where you can open and look out of the window, making it more comfortable for passengers. The large balloon also takes far less energy to power – and potentially could operate with electric engines powering liftoff and steering, making them a zero-carbon emitting form of air transport.   

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https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20241204-could-the-airship-be-the-answer-to-sustainable-air-travel
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Offline Weird Tolkienish Figure

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We're going from massive almost supersonic jet airliners to blimps... all in the name of sustainability?

Offline DefiantMassRINO

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Time is money ... supersonic jets win.

If you're that concerned about the environment, wait for continental drift to get you to your destination.
« Last Edit: December 12, 2024, 09:21:46 pm by DefiantMassRINO »
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Offline The_Reader_David

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We're going from massive almost supersonic jet airliners to blimps... all in the name of sustainability?

Sustainability, luxury and safety.  Not blimps, airships.  Rigid-framed airships. The Graf Zeppelin and Hindenberg were more like cruise ships than even the first class cabins on today's airliners.  Actually, we should just dust off the specs for those two, update them with modern composite materials, modern engines, fill the new ones with helium (or even a mixture of He and H2 with little enough hydrogen as to be non-flammable).  That and find people with experience sailing to pilot them.  Flying an airship requires the same sort of respect for the weather that piloting a sailing ship does, even though they have engines to power them.  Thinking you could fly them like airplanes and go through storms was how the US lost most of our military airships, and the UK had the one commercial airship disaster besides the Hindenberg.  Yes, safety, airships had fewer fatalities per passenger mile travelled than airliners or automobiles.
« Last Edit: December 12, 2024, 09:31:53 pm by The_Reader_David »
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Offline 240B

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If you are not in a hurry or on vacation, the sheer luxury and roominess of a dirigible would make it worth it.
I would have no problem booking a seat and cruising in comfort for a day or two.
You cannot "COEXIST" with people who want to kill you.
If they kill their own with no conscience, there is nothing to stop them from killing you.
Rational fear and anger at vicious murderous Islamic terrorists is the same as irrational antisemitism, according to the Leftists.