This was nowhere near the only deadly airship disaster, nor was it the last, but that’s not really what ended airship travel. With the advances in airplanes by the end of World War II, lighter-than-air ships just couldn’t compete. Even postwar piston aircraft were cruising at more than 3 times the speed of most airships with range to make nonstop transatlantic crossings, and once the jet age really started to take hold in the ’50s it was all over. I mean, by the ’60s multiple countries had started supersonic passenger aircraft programs. Not a lot of success there, but still there were nowhere near enough customers to support commercial service on airships when faster, cheaper options existed.
Yup, no one is going to hop an airship when they can get somewhere in a fraction of the time. The only difference might be cost, but spinning up a zeppelin industry likely couldn’t compete in terms of ticket price compared to jets.
If they have a future it’ll be moving stuff, not people. If it’s faster than a container ship and can carry more than a plane then it could have a valuable niche.
They also have a potential advantage in moving large things.
For instance wind turbine blades, which are quite difficult to move by trucks. Airships don’t require infrastructure for the transport or delivery and could rope it down to sites with difficult terrain.
I would think a large team of purpose-built remote controlled quadcopters would be cheaper, faster, and more maneuverable than a zeppelin for that kind of application. Assuming we don’t have to go huge distances (say, from an inland port or a railway to final destination).
Maybe better for last-mile. Zeppelin could probably get you close but unless you’re building in a large open field, it’ll be difficult to get it exactly where it needs to be.
Sure that would be a solution too. An airship would have an advantage in not using energy to stay up, so it could theoretically fly very long distances with heavy weight, where drones would need constant energy depending on both the weight and distance.
I’m not saying it is a good idea in practice, but theoretically it might make sense.
That’s actually a fantastic idea, I hadn’t thought of that
There are a handful of Zeppelin NT semi-rigid airships flying around nowadays. If you want to see a landing and start, I recorded this a few years ago.
What airships need to do is become like cruise ships. Put an amusement park and a casino up there, I’m sure nothing bad will happen.
As far as I know they were somewhat like cruise ships in their luxury.
The (enormous) problem is weight. Everything needs to be as light as possible, it’s a balloon after all.
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You’d think they would have cruise line zeppelins.
Hindenburg only carried 70 passengers at its largest configuration, and it could only carry that many because they were forced to use hydrogen as the lifting gas instead of helium because of American export restrictions. Hydrogen carries more but is significantly more dangerous, and likely would not be used in any modern aircraft because of safety reasons. Perhaps modern advances in lighter materials and other weight saving methods could help, but even 100 paying passengers doesn’t seem commercially viable.
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planes crash every day
in 2021 there were 21 commercial* plane crashes, zero fatal.
*couldn’t find data including non-commercial flights. i welcome corrections citing such data :)
edit: i think i am wrong, see roscoe’s comment below
Boeing working hard to fix this
Commercial plane crashes /=/ plane crashes.
358 deaths due to plane crashes in 2022 in the US. Anon included cars so this “commercial” distinction doesn’t necessarily hold weight since the crux of the comparison is that other industries have been allowed to operate despite fatal accidents. And cars are included which are individually operated machines and not mass transit.
still no plane crash every day tho lol
i couldn’t find data including non-commercial crashes. i welcome corrections.
358 crashes in a year is close enough to an average of one per day that it’s pretty fucking pedantic to say "but not every day - especially given that most of the time that people say something happens “every day” it’s being used loosely, not literally.
“People get shot by cops every day” is a phrase that is effectively accurate, even if nobody happened to be shot on, say, February 21st.358 deaths due to crashes*, not the same as crashes themselves as multiple can die per crash
i came into this conversation with a light (pedantic) heart and an open mind. i am still willing to he corrected but cussing me out does nothing buddy.
Oh I wasn’t trying to cuss you out, sorry if it came off that way. It’s early and I usually filter out my language a bit before posting but I commonly use curse words for emphasis and stuff. I blame it on being a (former) sailor. And thanks, I may have misread that - that’s what I get for commenting before I even had gotten out of bed.
word up homie no hard feelings 😭 ppl get so mean on here sometimes it’s refreshing to see someone back down
have a lovely morning sailor ☕️ ☀️
You too! And this place could use a bit more chill for sure. People tend to forget the human on the other side of the conversation.
Fair enough. I figured if I threw a random date out, there was like a 99.99% chance that somebody was shot on that day.
Yeah I saw the date and was like “challenge accepted” lol
It’s absolutely true. General aviation aircraft crash all the time, more than once a day.
For some reason I couldn’t find an FAA Administrator’s Fact Book for anything more recent than 2012 (statistics for 2011 on most things, 2010 for some).
In 2011 there were 1450 general aviation accidents, about four a day.
In 2010 there were 450 general aviation fatalities.
Edit: Here are some NTSB numbers for 2022. General aviation had 1205 accidents and 214 were fatal with a total of 339 fatalities.
you changed my opinion, thanks. :)
i had seen this resource in my search too but i guess in my head accident =/= crash (obviously all crashes are accidents but only some accidents are crashes)? but i guess i was wrong in that assumption maybe
Depends on your definition of crash. If you mean it starts in the air, some occurred on the ground. If you click through to the GA tab on the NTSB stats it breaks them down and you can see standing and taxi accidents. Unfortunately it’s a total from 2008-2022, but for those 15 years 457 were in taxi and 276 were standing so on average about 50 a year.
Edit: For the NTSB accident vs. incident is defined by substantial damage, death, or serious injury. I’m not sure exactly what counts as substantial, but I think it meets a generic definition of crash.
ooh i didn’t see that tab. and yep most of the accidents had something to do with being in the air and so even by my non-expert definition i am wrong. big sad that this was one of my most upvoted comments and it was factually incorrect 😭
It’s understandable. When I got into the aviation industry I was very surprised to learn how many GA accidents and fatalities occurred in a year. Unless it’s Kobe, or newsworthy for some other reason, it usually doesn’t get past the local news.
i think also the data is juuuust a bit more inaccessible? like i remember i was able to fact check the derailment stat in a few seconds. anyway. regards! ☕️☀️
It wasn’t just one zeppelin. The US Navy experimented with airship aircraft carriers and both of them were lost in stormy weather. They’re giant bags of gas, which means that turbulent air is a big problem.
The Empire State building had a airship mooring point at the top, but the constant updrafts meant the airship would be pointing nose-down while unloading.
They’re just too unwieldy in all but the most calm conditions that there’s not much use for them beyond writing “Ice Cube is a pimp” in the sky.
It wasn’t just one zeppelin.
It’s more the case that back then, nearly every airship ever made ended up crashing in bad weather. Nowadays they’re sort of safe since we have much more powerful engines and weather services that can help them avoid the rough stuff, but even then they still can’t lift very useful loads.
Sounds like anti-zeppelin propaganda to me.
Looking at what happened to every Zeppelin that Ferdinand von Zeppelin built you start to get a good picture on why it’s maybe not the best idea. I got to hand it to him though, dudes got dedication.
LZ1: damaged during initial flight, repaired and flown two more times before investors backed out causing the ship to be sold for scrap.
LZ2: suffered double engine failure and crashed into a mountain. While anchored to the mountain awaiting repairs a storm destroyed it beyond repair.
LZ3: built from salvaged parts of LZ2. Severally damaged in storm. After LZ4’s destruction LZ3 was repaired and was accepted by the German military who eventually scrapped it.
LZ4: suffered from chronic engine failure. While repairing the engines a gust of wind blew the ship free of its mooring and struck a tree causing the ship to ignite and burn to the ground.
LZ5: destroyed in a storm.
LZ6: destroyed in its hanger by fire.
LZ7: destroyed after crashing in a thunderstorm.
LZ8: destroyed by wind.
LZ9: this one actually worked and survived for three years before being decommissioned.
LZ10: caught on fire and destroyed after a gust of wind blew its mooring line into itself.
LZ11: destroyed while attempting to move the ship into it’s hanger
LZ12 & LZ13: both flew successful careers before being decommissioned a few years later.
LZ14: destroyed in a thunderstorm.
LZ15: destroyed during an emergency landing.
LZ16: was stolen by the French.
LZ17: decommissioned after the war.
LZ18: exploded during its test flight.
LZ19: damaged beyond repair during an emergency landing.
LZ129: the Hindenburg.
LZ127: retired and scrapped after flying over a million miles.
LZ130: flew 30 flights before being dismantled for parts to aid in the war effort.
I would like to know more about LZ16 please!
They kinda suck, and this isn’t likely to change.
The Hindenburg was 245m long, carried around 50 crew plus 60 or so passengers. It needs all that length to have enough volume to lift that many people. The laws of physics are a limitation here; even figuring out a vaccum rigid air ship would only slightly improve this (it’s a neat engineering problem, but not very practical for a variety of reasons). Maybe the crew size could shrink somewhat, but the fact is that you’ve got a giant thing for handling around 100 people.
An Airbus a380 is 72m long and carries over 500 passengers and crew.
The Hindenburg made the transatlantic journey in around 100 hours. You could consider it more like a cruise than a flight–you travel there in luxury and don’t care that it takes longer. You would expect it to be priced accordingly. In fact, given the smaller passenger size compared to the crew size, I’d expect it to be priced like a river cruise rather than an ocean cruise. Those tend to be more exclusive and priced even higher.
Being ground crew for blimps was a dangerous job. You’re holding onto a rope, and then the wind shifts and you get pulled with it. This could certainly be done more safely today with the right equipment. Don’t expect the industry to actually do that without stiff regulations stepping in.
Overall, they suck and would only be a luxury travel option. Continental cargo is better done by trains. Trans continental cargo is better done by boats. There isn’t much of a use case anywhere.
So what you’re saying is we should expect Elon Musk to start a zeppelin company at some point in the near future.
Yes, that’s correct.
I’m already buying shares in BlimpX! He’s a visionary, first Hyperloop, now BlimpX! What’ll be the next thing from 80+ year old popular science mags for the real life Tony Stark will invent?
To be honest it’s pretty unfair to compare something built before humans sent anything into space, vs something after we’ve made it to Mars. There is over 60 years of innovation between the Hindenburg and the airbus.
The whole idea was losing out to the DC-3 already.
Airships only make sense in a world in which the economy takes into account ecodestruction. Kind of like wind-powered ships. If we didn’t know what GHGs do environmentally, which offset any short-term efficiency gains provided by burning hydrocarons, nobody would ever dream of abandoning these miracle fuels. So you can only examine the efficiency of airships with hydrocarbons off the table entirely.
They do plenty of ecodestruction. If we had them now, they’d be fueled by hydrocarbons. That could hypothetically be batteries in the future, but batteries good enough for that could do equally well in airplanes.
The material used in making them rigid also has a carbon cost.
Don’t forget that they are huge, you could fit a lot of solar power on them, given that it would be light enough
It wouldn’t be light enough. Panels weight about 19kg each for a 1x1.7m panel. This can probably be slimmed down for the application, but probably not by enough. Perovskite promises a lighter weight panel, but they still have longevity issues that are being worked out in the lab.
Why not put those panels on a boat instead? Or in a field and power a train?
"Thin film solar is light weight at 7-10 ounces per square foot. "
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film_solar_cell
Your 1 panel at less than 2 sqm weighs as much as more than 6 square meters of thin film. The 40 or 50% better relative efficiency doesn’t make up for the increased square footage. What kind of wattage would we even need?
Hindenburg used 4x 735kW diesel engines which need to be powered constantly (almost 3MW overall). That is the output at the shaft, which means we need electric motors that match that. Fortunately, electric motors are pretty efficient.
Thin-film can do 80-120W per m^2. That’s the rating when the sun is shining directly on them. We’ll assume it’s flying above the cloud layer and don’t need to worry about that.
At the top end, it will take 24,500m^2 of panels. Hindenburg had a length of 245.3m and diameter of 41.2m. If it were a cylinder (because I don’t feel like doing the math on its actual shape), it would have a surface area of 35,000m^2, but that includes the underside. It’ll probably pick up some power being reflected off the clouds or the earth’s surface, but you’re probably only getting 60% of the full power averaged over the entire surface.
Which is closer than I thought it would be, but not quite enough to power the motors if they were 100% efficient, and dropping it to the real world 85-90% won’t help. Neither will accounting for its actual shape.
Hindenburg had a cruising speed of 131km/h, so solar electric would just be pegged to a lower top speed assuming we didn’t touch any other parts of the design.
I think efficiency gains in propeller tech, changes in crew and gear requirements, structural materials, and the rest of it would make it feasible.
I think they’d be solar powered with some kind of thin film photovoltaic. You don’t need much battery in that case. While some carbon cost is inevitable, the point is they wouldn’t ever compete with something that burns kerosene.
There are plenty of other options that don’t burn kerosene.
planes crash every day
what?!
only if you count general aviation, commercial airlines crash less than once a month. OP is clearly just an agent of Big Blimp trying to destroy the reputation of the honorable aviation industry
commercial airlines crash less than once a month.
A lot less if you’re only counting advanced democracies. The last multi-casualty commercial plane crash in the US was in 2009, 15 years ago. I only make that multi-casualty caveat because otherwise you get weird one offs like a guy running into a landing strip and getting run over.
Even the one in 2009 was a fairly small propeller plane.
I wonder how that changes if we include private planes, helicopters and basically everything that humans fly directly or indirectly.
It seems to rather drastically. When looking it up the average for commercial aircraft is 0.01 fatalities per 100,000 hours of flight time, however when I looked for data that included non commercial craft that figure jumps to 1.19 per 100,000 hours yielding a fatality, and 6.84 per 100,000 yielding a crash of any sort.
I then googled to find the average daily flight hours, and while I couldn’t find that, I did find the total flight hours in 2018, which came out to 91.8 million flight hours, or 251,507 flight hours daily, which should result in an average of 17 crashes per day, and an average of 3 fatalities per day, globally. Also one commercial flight fatality slightly more than every 3 months.
Honestly that’s a remarkably low rate of failure.
Wow, you did the math like a pro! Thanks for crunching the numbers, I had no idea it would be that bad.
They are kind of impractical nowadays. Nobody wants to get somewhere slow.
For recreational “travel for the sake of travel” it’d be kind of cool. I’d wager that a zeppelin “sky cruise” would be more environmentally friendly than a traditional ocean cruise, and offer way more diverse views. That’d be a real sweet vacation, actually.
Some 15-minute explainer channel (maybe HAI) had a video about risk perception recently, and I think this would be a pretty good example.
Sky cruise! Sky cruise!
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There’s a von zeppelin suite.
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Zeppelins are just expensive and slow.
That particular one exploded because the US had an embargo against Nazi Germany for the much safer helium rather than famously combustible hydrogen
It also had an aluminium skin, protected by an iron oxide paint. Those 2 are also the main ingredients in thermite. The skin burnt even faster and more impressively than the hydrogen.
I wonder when hydrogen filled thermite balloon is going to make a comeback as a mode of transportation.
First to fly over the Atlantic?
…anyone?
Is this why Nazis always have such deep voices in the movies?
Yes, this also resulted in the Germans having no sense of humour due to no funni voice gas
Do we even have enough helium to be using it in zeppelins though? I thought it was in shortage which is bad because it’s needed for medical and scientific purposes. Like we shouldn’t even be using it in balloons bad.
The whole helium shortage thing was a misunderstanding that got blown up by the Internet.
Anon could ride a blimp. They’re a thing.
https://zeppelinflug.de/de/zeppelin-fluege/rundfluege-ab-essen/muelheim
The Zeppelin NT is a zeppelin not a blimp because it has a solid structure inside (see FAQ “Zeppelin vs. Blimp”)
Never. They’re just too impractical. Now solid-frame airships on the other hand? They’ll probably never get off the drawing board.
I’m not sure trains derail every day.
This one caught me off guard:
As of October, the FRA has recorded 742 incident reports for train derailments in 2023. Additionally, railroads reported 59 collisions, 12 fires, and 138 highway-rail-crossing incidents, which could include cars or any other vehicles or people at the crossing site.
Since 1975, an average of 2,808 trains have derailed each year, with a peak of 9,400 derailments in 1978.
I’ve got to assume most of those are things like single cars falling off the track in the switching yard or something, not major service-interrupting, cargo-damaging, or injury-causing incidents.
That’s a fair assumption as a non industry expert. Nevertheless OOP was technically correct there. 😅
That’s wild, I really never would have thought it was that common; thank you.
What the frickity fuck?
For the EU it’s hard to find the numbers on derailment, but in 2022 20 train travelers died due to an accident in total in all of the EU.
There are companies trying to bring airships back. The Airlander 10 is expected to be flying flights over Spain in 2026.
While i would love to travel by airship, I dont think there would be a commercial success in airship passenger travel in the near future:
- travel times of multiple days means you probably need 2-3x the crew, compared with a plane on a 8h flight
- this also means a plane that is 4x as fast can make the same trip 4x more often, bringing in more money for the airline in the same amount of time
- you probably can’t land on existing airports, because an airship the size of a large building would be crawling accross your airspace blocking all flight traffic, or shaken by the turbulences behind a large jet powered airliner
- new technology without any existing infrastructure is much more expensive than building on top of existing things
- tickets would be much more expensive than a commercial plane because of the reasons above, the lower passenger capacity and the fact that you have to carry more supplies (water + food for days multiplied by people on board) for a longer trip. Each passenger with cabin and supplies was calculated as 300kg weight on a transatlantic flight on the hindenburg
- Hindenburg could not fly in a direct straight line, because it travels at a height of only 400-600m. This means you had to go around high mountain ranges, because people and the combustion engines need oxygen which you dont have much above 4000m. However i dont know if this is still a problem with modern pressurized cabins, or if there is another limitation from the lifting gas…
Could work more along the lines of a cruise ship though. Not as an efficient way to get somewhere but just to go float around doing vacation stuff.
Well, you can have a lot of space for casinos, shops and pools with waterslides on a cruise ship to entertain passengers because weight is not important. But on an airship…?
Not impractical really, according to Wikipedia even the old Hindenburg: “held 200,000 cubic metres (7,062,000 cu ft) of gas in 16 bags or cells with a useful lift of approximately 232 t (511,000 lb). This provided a margin above the 215 t (474,000 lb) average gross weight of the ship with fuel, equipment, 10,000 kg (22,000 lb) of mail and cargo, about 90 passengers and crew and their luggage.”
So if it has a capacity of 40,000+ lb beyond all the needed crew, passengers, fuel, and whatever cargo with a 100 year old design using diesel engines I imagine you throw a small nuclear reactor for power in a modern design you could probably float around for a while with some pretty comfy accomodations.
There was a Wendigo video about how it could be used as a way of transporting goods as cargo since it isn’t too time sensitive and it could be quite cheap compared to trucks and ships because of fuel iirc. Also for tourism since they can land vertically
Airlander 10
Nice.
now thats what I call a PAWG
One of the google guys is building a blimp company:
Zepplins were also the first major aerial recon device and they were experimental bombers in WW1 in the same way tractors were fitted with armor forming the first experimental tanks.
The USS Akron was a bigger (repeat) disaster, and was also the first zepplin aircraft carrier.
*edit: corrected like half a dozen fat finger typos I missed the first go. Eesh.
