Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Low carbon enthusiasts are promoting the idea of airships. But there is a sound reason why this form of travel was abandoned, other than the a few famous accidents.
How airships could provide the future of green transport
The UK is a leader in the airship revival, going head to head with France in an escalating global race
AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD
23 August 2020 • 8:00pmZeppelins and dirigible airships are with us again after eighty years out of favour – faster and hopefully much safer than in the inter-War era – promising ultra-low carbon air transport for the net-zero age.
It may not be long before we can start eating air-flown vegetables from Peru or blueberries from Kenya without feeling pangs of guilt. Fresh food may reach us in cargo Hindenburgs without the unconscionable CO2 footprint of jet freight.
If all goes well, we will be able to hop virtuously from Liverpool to Belfast in point-to-point travel, or Stockholm to Helsinki, almost in the time it takes for a regular flight from door to door. We can hope to lift off quietly from a field close to London in the early evening, retreat to a couchette after dinner and wake up in Barcelona, Rome or Val d’Isere.
As it happens, Britain is a throbbing centre of the airship revival, going head to head with France for global leadership. It could arguably capture part of the $120bn air freight market and displace a slice of the vastly greater truck haulage business in congested zones or regions with poor infrastructure.
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Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/08/23/britain-could-lead-carbon-free-transport-create-booming-green/
Quite apart from famous accidents like the Hindenburg, Airships were abandoned because they are more vulnerable to weather than airplanes. That gigantic gas bag is a lot of surface area for updrafts or clear air turbulence to push on.
Proponents claim their new designs are capable of handling substantial bad weather, and they generate less wake turbulence than traditional aircraft. Wake turbulence is tornado like vortices generated by aircraft wings, which are sometimes blamed for damaging the roofs of people living near airports.
Hybrid Airships Could Change the Economics of Asia and Africa
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The historic airship has a lot going for it. It can carry a large payload faster than a passenger liner. There is very little turbulence and it has an impressive range. They can hover or turn in place. Flying low, they don’t typically require pressurization.
And it has some serious drawbacks. It requires attentive ground crews to keep it near the ground when loading and unloading. It is vulnerable to wind gusts on the ground and in the air, where it must avoid bad weather at all costs. Hangar space has to be huge and, therefore, expensive. They are so huge, an old German airship hangar was converted into a large, covered waterpark. Using hydrogen in conjunction with flammable construction material is bad, bad, bad.
Because a lot of these bad things are surmountable, a company has decided to bring back the airship. It is a hybrid airship called Airlander. It is hybrid because it gets its lift from three sources; helium-filled bag, wing-shaped lifting body, and thrusters. Using these in combination allows the ship to land like a plane but with a much shorter runway. It can also hover and come straight down, doing a vertical landing or takeoff like a helicopter. It carries its own anchor mast and can withstand 80 kilometer winds without a hangar. Which is the point. It doesn’t need a hangar and requires only a two-person ground crew for the Airlander 10 with a 10 metric ton capacity and none for the Airlander 50 with a 50 ton capacity. Production models are expected to be in the air by 2020.
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Read more: https://medium.com/@glenhendrix50/hybrid-airships-could-change-the-economics-of-asia-and-africa-748603da92d7
Note (to add to the confusion), the article above mentions turbulence, but means wake turbulence (generated by the movement of aircraft). I mentioned clear air turbulence, which is a dangerous weather condition.
There is another serious problem airships would have to address.
There are three gasses which have been used to loft commercial airships, hydrogen, helium and hot air.
Hot air requires a lot of heat to produce and maintain. While there are designs which involve solar heating (making the gas bag very dark, to absorb sunshine), nobody seems to be discussing this as an option, so let’s leave it for now.
Hydrogen is cheap, plentiful and extremely dangerous. It forms a flammable mixture with air at a wide range of concentrations, and can be ignited by the slightest spark. While there are debates about what caused the Hindenburg to burn so rapidly, there is no doubt the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas contributed to the fire.
Helium is inert, it cannot be set on fire. But the global supply of helium is extremely limited. For now helium is available for frivolous purposes like party balloons because there is also a limited set of uses for helium, but this would change very rapidly if commercial airships took to the sky. In addition, the world’s very limited supply of helium is very much tied to fossil fuel extraction – Qatar is a leading global supplier of Helium. If fossil fuel extraction is scaled back, no more helium.
There are other gasses which could conceivably be used, such as Argon. Argon can be extracted from the air, just under one percent of the atmosphere is Argon. But while Argon is lighter than air, Argon is a lot heavier than Hydrogen or Helium, so a much larger gas bag would be required to lift the same payload using Argon, if such an airship could be built at all.
So it seems inevitable that a commercial airship operation would have to eventually embrace flammable hydrogen as a lifting gas.
Lets just say I wouldn’t be keen to set foot on one.
Correction (EW): h/t Roger Taguchi – I got Argon and Neon mixed up, Neon is lighter than air, but does not occur at sufficient abundance on Earth to make it a viable option. Argon is heavier than air, so despite its relative abundance it is not an option as a lifting gas. Note to self check the periodic table next time…
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If private capital can somehow make these work and worthwhile, What is there to complain about?
If they fail, only the investors have anything to complain about.
Of course, in today’s world, there are likely to be some politicans that will successfully push through legislation mandating these things be built and used, wasting untellable amounts of public money, while finding 10,000 aspects of daily private life to direct in pursuit of their projects. It is politicians, not inventors and business venture, that needed to be throttled.
Yes, so much cheaper than a bullet!
In Germany the Cargolifter is insolvent since years, the money flew sway, the Cargolifter didn’t left the ground.
My good friend actually ran the Cargolifter program. He said the biggest problem was actually the Germans. They could never make a decision. They would have meeting after meeting. They had a good design and it would have worked but was best applied for shorter trips, not long oceanic ones.
The biggest issue was transferring ballast loading and unloading freight. You have to offload exactly the same weight of ballast when you load the freight and the opposite unloading.
For those not knowing Cargolifter
And that’s what Wiki telss us
What they made of
PS
The result of the Cargolifter dream, 38 Mio € taxmoney blown in the air.
The interest to transport with airships was nul, zéro.
Can’t imagine growing interest now.
When back on my PC, I will look for more details.
Speed is the main problem.
Assuming a cruising speed of say, 60 mph, into a 60 mph headwind (which is not unusual) its range is zero.
Or to put it another way, it’s fuel consumption is infinite.
Look, they managed to fly across the Atlantic in these things 70 years ago, lets focus on real problems to criticize, not imaginary ones. They crossed in about 30 hours I think, slower than a plane, but faster than a boat.
But will folk really want to take 10 hours for an airship journey, which would take one hour by jet?
I already acknowledged it is slower. It is slower to bike instead of taking a car, doesn’t make it a bad idea. The point is that a lot of the comments are attacking the idea as if it would not work. fact is it would work just fine, but working does not make it the best way to do something. If you cared and wanted to reduce carbon footprints from flying make jet fuel from electricity obtained via nuclear fission, fast and clean. That might be the better solution economically if we as a species say no to kerosene extracted from crude. And by that statement I am not saying we should say no to kerosene from crude. But you do need to look at things fairly when you make decisions and not be blinded by a desire for something to be wrong, when it is actually perfectly correct.
One intelligent commentator among lots of idiots. Well said.
Ground effect air craft are a much better solution if you want more economy from air travel.
surface effect boats as well, they are like `wow`
Hooking up a tube and extraction system to AOC’s enormous mouth would provide enough hot air to lift entire galaxies.
Yes, but unfortunately It’d never pass local ordinances as it carries with it too much noise pollution.
The reaction of the New World Aircraft corporation:
When all our power comes from fusion reactors there will be an abundance of helium.
Love to hear AOC broadcasting in ‘helium speech’. (Divers will understand).
Only dogs would hear her. Poor dogs.
There’s already a concern about helium shortages for medical diagnostic and other essential equipment.
Glen Hendrix writes;
“They can hover or turn in place.”
Yes and no.
Look up ‘Static Lift’ and ‘Dynamic Lift’. Short summary is that not all of an airships lift comes from the gasbag. Airships are not magic. The rules of physics still apply.
The Telegraph writes:
“…blueberries from Kenya”
Extremely dubious about this. Not that I eat blueberries, but I am assuming they have an unrefrigerated shelf life of a few days. Hence one assumes that anything berry related that is transported is going to require some sort of cool storage, so there goes some of your airship’s mass budget for a start.
Anyway, assuming they can deal with that how many blueberries are we going to carry in real terms?
Well in Australia a quick supermarket online search suggests blueberries are $20/kg
Another quick search suggests the relatively modern Zeppelin NT can carry a payload of 1900kg. So $38000 final price (not profit) for your mid sized airship filled with blueberries.
So… anyway with a bit more experience in supply chain management like to correct me if I was to say ‘not going to pay the bills’??
Sorry, I have some massive love for airships – already spent several hours with my new resin printer at home trying to print myself a 1:1200 Mayfly… for… reasons… don’t judge me – but unfortunately reality is a harsh mistress.
This was also picked up by Jo at Jonova :
http://joannenova.com.au/2020/08/caravans-of-airships-riding-jetstreams-for-freight/
I hope that she will not mind me quoting from her summary , because it explains that one part of the proposal is to replace container ships, using the jet stream as the energy source for transport :
“An academic paper from the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis In Austria proposes using the Jet Stream to transport cargo on transcontinental routes without any need for power beyond the initial lift and descent. The cargo ships would float on high winds above 40,000 feet at an average speed of 160 km/h, displacing fleets of container shipping at sea. The study claims that they would cut fuel use by 96pc.
The circular flow would always be from West to East – Shanghai to Los Angeles, New York to London, or Frankfurt to Mumbai – rotating in a perennial circuit. It would take eight days to cross half the world by the northern Jet Stream, and seven days by the southern route, beating maritime shipping on time as well as emissions.
These unmanned super-Hindenburgs controlled by artificial intelligence could be over a mile long, spectral airships passing far overhead in caravans along regulated bands near the troposphere, emitting no sound or CO2.”
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is a journalist difficult to characterise. On his “home ground” of economics he can
produce very intelligent and conservative (unusual these days in a paper that has gone totally to the dark side) analyses – although he did predict the collapse of the euro “in days” at the time of the Greek fnancial crisis. However he produces complete nonsense once he gets onto the subject of renewables and climate change . Pity really.
A normal container ship carries about 50,000 tons worth of containers, delivers electrical power to refrigerated containers and are seldom delayed by bad weather.
The article talks about a 50 ton airship, but let’s assume it is possible to handle production and infra structure for 500 ton airships, then compared to a single container ship, you need 100 gigantic airships and diesels to provide electricity for the refrigerated containers.
Secondly a lot of freight, currently going with ship, will not do well with the low air pressure at jet stream altitude.
Thirdly you have issues combating fire in the freight of these high altitude airships, whereas on a container ship you have sea water nearby.
Fourthly the is the usual CO2 crab. a standard 4,500 container capacity ship contributes 40 times less plant food than an aircraft, on a per container bases.
http://www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/liner-ships/container-ship-design
My superficial conclusion would be that big freight airships, if not impossible, then at least not remotely a competitor to modern container ships.
While I agree that airships just aren’t feasible, It should be pointed out that your analysis only looking at half the picture. freighter ships, no matter how much cargo they can carry, can’t carry cargo across land, Airships can. So the competition isn’t just with freighters (which you covered very well) but with trucks & trains. Not to mention airplanes (which, like airships, can transport goods over both land and sea).
While I haven’t run the numbers, I suspect airships fall considerably short against those other competitors as well. In short they’re a “solution” that has long since been passed over by better solutions.
An airship capable of carrying a 500 tonne load and flying at 40,000 feet would need to displace at least 2 million cubic metres of air in order to float/fly. That is about 10 times the size of the largest oil supertankers – all just to carry a mere 500 tonnes. Basic Archimedes’ principle.
We used Ammonia at work and it had it’s own building with thick concrete walls and roof with special roof vents with large blow out panels as at the right mix with air it was extremely explosive. Strange to say the company ditched it as soon as it could.
James Bull
This idea is regurgitating for ages.
The main problem: it depends on weather too much.
A bit of wind and it flies in a wrong direction.
Or crashes.
The nazis had a network that worked for transportation, the idea works, it just is not necessarily the best idea is all, but to pretend it does not work is ridiculous, they can be used for transport full stop.
Must be a slow news day …. this old chestnut has been making the rounds for crack pot investors since WWI
As Germans like to built the greatest, best what ever (Growian, Airschip, ren. energies), why not try to construct the biggest hot air balloon for traffic and transport ?
/s
Is this Evans-Pritchard guy from Balnibari?…..Did he meet Gulliver??
Some of the projects of the Grand Academy of Lagado bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the
fatuous designs of the world according to Greens. Most noticeably perhaps in the comments from the distinguished professors of that august institution that with just a bit more money it will all work .
I have a nice book,
one of many strangely enough in this electronic world,
its called Airshipwreck and details/covers all airshipwrecks up to date of publication in 1978
I hope I do not have to buy any updated version
Um.
Any practical commercial airship will have to be quite large. That probably means a rigid body, which places a number of limits on the machine. For instance, the current altitude record for rigid airships is 24,000 feet. So we are talking about flying slap-bang middle of the weather zone.
Also, ground handling problems increase geometrically with airship size…..
Obviously if AOC manages to push a weather compliance legislation or convinces Zeus with free beers, chances are…
For as long as weather exists, with nice things such as 90+mph updrafts, equally friendly downdrafts, mountain top rotors and cumulus-nimbus, winter-ops and icing, to quote a few, this is not going to happen sooner than the awaited flying car upgrade of my TDI.
Wake turbulences are defined as the trail of turbulences our equipment leaves in it’s wake. Hence the radio communications of “heavy” to qualify aircraft heavier than 300’000 pounds and inform ATC to manage further separation from those following at identical or slightly lower altitudes.
Like an anchored balloon, a hypothetical stationary fixed wings A/C does not produce any of those.
Wake turbulences originate mostly at the wing tips, where air can abruptly escape upwards and rotate towards the fuselage. Hence the “winglets”, actually quite huge vertical extensions of modern machines.
Therefore, comparing a lighter than air A/C that does not rely on airspeed around it’s wings for essential lift to a heavier than air machine that achieves lift because air moves around it’s wings, is a proof of baloney ignorance.
Last but not least, the drag, be it motion or wind, of something moving in air is also proportional to its exposed surface area. Good luck with that when even firewalling the throttles, “gunning it”, leaves you only a marginal chance of hope for authority before sheer systems start to disassemble your office in midair.
For the reasons already mentioned many times, this would have to use helium.
The total global production of helium is about 24,000 tons per year.
Helium is about one sixth the density of air so 1 kg has a buoyancy of approx 5 kg – before allowing for gas enveloppe, etc., so call it 4 kg lift.
Conclusion: if the whole world output was dedicated to filling airships it would provide about 100,000 tons of new transport capacity per year. Total world shipping capacity: many millions, even billions of tons??
Conclusion: complete hogwash.
I’d like to see one trying to land on a very windy day!
I’m surprised no-one else has spotted this, but it really could be the answer to global warming. If they make the top surface of the envelope out of that shiny mylar stuff, it will reflect the incoming solar energy, and as it would probably need about ten airships to do the work of one medium sized airliner there would be enough of them to reduce the global average temp beyond the pre-industrial age, maybe even back to the last glaciation. Problem solved! Which way to the patent office?
The author of the Telegraph article, one Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is your typical innumerate green-goggled journo. He has ‘previous’ as regards this sort of bilge. The Telegraph ought to help us lower our blood pressure and relieve him of the obligation to write anything for them.
Oh, the inanity!
Someone had to say it.
The weight of the gas determines what you can lift, the only contenders are hydrogen and helium, ignore everything else put forward. and between the two, hydrogen wins. In a green economy, a solar cell clad hydrogen zeppelin would require no fuel, and be essentially free( aside the up front expense and maintenance). It would have many advantages for access to undeveloped areas making us more flexible, and with smart control linked to weather satellites should be able to avoid the bad weather. What’s the downside? The real problem with hydrogen is terrorist attack, it is not a difficult task to make the hydrogen bag safe, but it is vulnerable to attack. That would be my only concern. They are also much slower than planes for transatlantic s etc. But they are actually pretty green assuming the solar cells are not environmentally damaging 10 years down the road. If people were actually serious about getting rid of fossil fuels, then ditching planes and upping zeppelins could be a way forward, albeit slowly and with the odd explosion.
How do you make hydrogen safe? The molecule is so small that it even leaks through metal.
They managed to make it work 70 years ago, a lot of progress has been made in engineering, and it is trivial to contain hydrogen for this purpose. It is the explosion risk that has to be engineered around, and I think it is risky technology, but totally viable
Whom “they”, on which planet/galaxy ? Because on ours, it actually burned quite well.
Whats the point of a discussion when people are blind to the obvious? It worked, 70 years, after a disaster they decided to can it. Luckily the earliest plane crashes where everyone died were not captured on film, so people did not get scared and can that technology too. This is a technical question people, and it is clear and obvious that it technically works so stop trying to claim zeppelins would not work for bizarre fatuous reasons.
Just to be equally fatuous, a zeppelin flying in to the world trade center would have bounced off and not been a bomb. There is not that much difference as regards danger.
I reiterate that just because they work it does not make it the right thing for society to do, that is more complicated question than does it work.
William, fire and explosions were common events affecting a significant part of the few airships that ever “took sail”…
http://www.zeppelinhistory.com/zeppelin-facts/airship-accidents/
Define “worked”. Because all those decades ago it ended in disaster and tragedy in large part because Hydrogen wasn’t safe.
Many years ago, I read an article about a company that was designing a blimp to lift logs from remote logging sites.
They were currently using helicopters to do this.
The design got most of it’s lift from the helium, with 4 large fans providing the rest.
Piasecki PA97 Helistat.
Destroyed with casualties by ground resonance during attempted maiden flight.