Cargo Airships Are Happening

> "But for air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage."

How does an airship solve any of those problems? Its still got to go through customs and such, and still go through local truck delivery

I'm not sure about how they solve customs, but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse (avoiding trucks).

How will the airship and its cargo clear customs at a random warehouse with presumably no staffing of border agents?

Maybe it's still a customs/border facility. It can just be inland now, away from the very expensive waterfront/costal property

Not that I put any credence into the idea in the article, but for your particular question, the same way it occurs now at airports - bonded warehouses.

I guarantee that's not going to be a viable option. No nation, especially China or the USA, is going to allow an aircraft free access to land unknown cargo at a random warehouse without going through customs. It's going to have to land at some kind of airfield just like a cargo plane would.

The article isn't about solving those problems, it's about taking a few days longer to do the actual travel to save a bunch of money, since there's already massive delays on either end.

Implementation details /s

Which airports have bonded warehouses but do not already host customs facilities or agents?

I think that has to come after, not before.

> but the picture shows an airship dropping cargo directly off at a warehouse

Yeah, and that shit isn't going to happen either for a bazillion $very_good_reasons.

Not least safety.

I mean, yeah, let's just turn up at a densely populated environment and use a winch to long-line drop a few tons of cargo.

Whilst the general public and employees are walking around the place ?

When there's overhead cabling around ?

Even in perfect weather, with no wind, no rain, its still a dumb-as-shit idea.

Would that inland facility still have a 100 mile jurisdiction boundary around it as well?

This already happens, has happened for ages, and yet somehow the logistics industry manages to accomplish transshipment without fucking everything up . . . most of the time, anyway.

It doesn’t. The author is dreaming that airships might be able to just drop cargo off anywhere and I guess customs just happens in software somehow.

Nor is it clear how they are refuelled, or how they are immune from the same fluctuations in fuel cost as conventional cargo aircraft.

But what is clear is that you should “possibly invest” in his syndicate which is funding all this…

Customs in software is already a bit of a thing, judging from what postal tracking reports on occasion. I guess that doesn’t obviate the need for physical inspections, but it should make them faster.

A smuggler's dream.

Next article: Transparent Airships Are Happening

I don't know if you're aware, but bonded warehouses are customs facilities. The vast majority of goods never pass through a Government customs facility.

Yes, of course, with a grid of these facilities across the country.

Let's say airfreight takes 7 days, with the flight being one of them. Then his airship would take 11 days, which is not much worse. He was expecting the comparison to be 5:1.

The issue is customs isn’t going to happen at some random factory / job site. International mail looks point to point from and end users perspective but as far as the government in concerned it’s all going throw a small number of locations as it enters the county. At least relative to the number of street addresses.

They don't need to be immune from the same fluctuations in fuel costs. But if they use less fuel per ton, then a rise in fuel prices should benefit them more.

Sadly, the US still receives 95% of all postal imports through 1 of 5 international service centres: Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; New York, NY, and San Francisco, CA

Northwest = NO YUO!

Technically 22 other places are supposed to accept international mail, but in reality, the other 5% go through Newark (for some surface mail), Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa.

This creates some long detours.

https://www.uspsoig.gov/reports/audit-reports/international-...

Easy, put it on a starship instead, and fire it off like a ballistic missile at the target warehouse.

Sure, but why does that only benefit airships and not conventional airplanes?

That's the take I would have made too, but no, the author explicitly claims that airships can be faster than airfreight by somehow magically sidestepping customs, warehousing, and trucking.

> For air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage.

> Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5 days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to look pretty good. If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time.

I don’t expect it will, I’m just surprised whenever my parcel shows it’s been cleared by customs before it has even left the origin country. (And that’s not a timezone bug, it’s explicitly described as a remote authorization, a preauthorization, or something like that.) Customs (partly) in software is not an absurd idea, was my point, I have no opinion on airships other than acknowledging their inherent coolness.

I'd imagine the author knows that you can't just sidestep customs, and it does feel a bit disingenuous that they didn't call that out. But hey, it's a pitch for money first and foremost. I'd imagine that they're just giving a complete list of things that slow down air freight and that internally they have plans for tackling each one, like not having to unload cargo to get it through customs and so using the airship as its own trucking vehicle post-customs.

Yeah my initial reaction was you're comparing today's air freight in a static state with your envisioned optimal airship model; that's not realistic. The alternative to spending big on an entire new industry isn't doing nothing; it's using that investment in some other way, like optimizing air freight, or intra-continental, or addressing the entire overseas manufacturing/shipping model.

Longshoremen, lines at limited numbers of ports, etc., there a lots of problems that airships can solve simply by allowing airship ports to exist in, say, Kansas.

The need for specific geological features dramatically limits the amount of ports we can have, which seriously affects costs. If you could build a single, tiny airship point in every major city, you could save a bundle, and likely be close enough to the destination to unload directly to the customer at the port.

the reason that property is so expensive is because that's where the people are. There's no point in avoiding the biggest cost of air freight - getting goods to consumers who don't live near the limited freight hubs, if you land it in the middle of nowhere and now need to ship by rail or truck AND last mile delivery

Is it for bulkier but lightweight stuff that trains can't handle or something?

Airships could potentially be electric and solar powered. That would insulate it from fuel cost fluctuations. It would also resolve the issue with refueling.

In which countries are they legally identical, or even mostly identical, to the customs facilities commonly found in international airports?

I am not sure what US law on the matter is, but many countries have what are known as "bonded warehouses", which store uncleared goods within the destination country. Are you a customs expert? If so, please comment on whether the US has an equivalent.

I am not the parent, but they did not say bonded warehouses were identical to government customs facilities at airports.

>"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There are lots of people inland and away from sea ports. Many hubs of industry (such as Wisconsin which makes many mechanics' tools) could take advantage of this if it were available.

My reading is that it doesn't solve it, it just indicates there is a market for non-urgent freight in which airships could compete.

Hence why I also said ‘or even mostly identical’?

If it’s only vaguely similar in fact, then that seems hardly convincing.

Manifest approvals has been a reality for a while. But that works because, not despite, the bottlenecks.

Countries know goods must flow through certain choke points so they can essentially quality control the manifests.

Remove that and pre-authorised customs will go again.

There's also 'free trade' areas within China that allow transfer without import and export tax and other innovations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Free-Trade_Zone

No, the article is saying "actually I was wrong about being longer and slotting in between airplane and cargo ship; we can be as fast as planes, but cheaper, and take a big slice of that whole huge market". Which is why they need to explain why airships won't also have customs etc.

Maybe the key phrase here is "If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other". So he's imagining that big enough companies will have their own airship port, and presumably plug in customs to that.... So then the next question is, how big does an airship port have to be? Presumably it doesn't need huge runways?

I mean, the US just lets Chinese spy balloons wander aimlessly through its airspace :-P

Or you could just have a Terraform fuel plant synthesizing fuel colocated with every landing site.

I would assume that heavier stuff would be where the demand is. Air freight is expensive, because weight is expensive, because fuel is expensive, and it's obviously an environmental disaster.

Yeah, doesn't it kida turn anything under it into a heavy cargo crane safety zone ? Like, you not let people walk at random under suspended loads & thats what a loading/unloading operation for this turns into.

That exists and it's called ocean freight. Air freight is where you pay a premium to get a small amount of stuff there NOW. Ocean freight is what you use when you need 15 shipping containers of stuff there in a couple of weeks.

Whether there is any market for an "in between" mode is an open question, and it's the business case of these airships for better or worse.

Not a customs expert, but a short research suggests bonded warehouses do indeed exist in the United States: https://openjurist.org/title-19/us-code/section-1311/bonded-...

His argument is not quite correct. Let's try to steelman it.

If an airplane takes 12 hours to cross the ocean, and it takes 2 days on both sides with customs, warehouses, trucking and the last mile delivery, then it's a total of 4.5 days. If the airship takes 5 days to take the ocean, and the same 2 days on both sides, the total is 9 days. Despite being 10 times as slow in flight, the end-to-end delivery time is only two times slower than the one for the airplane.

The fuel plant doesn't have to be colocated with the pickup/delivery sites — you can do a fuel stop en-route if needed.

I think the idea is to pickup at the source and deliver direct to the destination, eliminating the warehousing and trucking completely.

Is that you Casey? If so, though we disagree on the future of Airships, I love what Terraform is doing.

Drones for end customers make more sense then

Maybe that's the idea, but it deserves some polishing.

The main observation that this guy made one year ago was that airships benefit from the square-cube law. A truly gigantic airship can carry a load proportional to its volume, but experiences drag proportional to its cross-sectional area, so it ends up having very good fuel economy. But to get to this scale you need to be at least as big as the Hindenburg, preferably much larger.

But then it's difficult to see how you can deliver loads of a few hundred tons from point to point.

I think the guy would have a much better pitch if he sticks to the idea that the speed disadvantage is significantly reduced by the first and last mile overhead that impact equally both cargo jets and airships.

Cargo planes require dedicated airports and runways and all that jazz, whereas the selling point of cargo airships seems to be to not need any of that; the article depicts one such airship handling a shipping container directly at a warehouse, for example. The need to go through some sort of customs process complicates things, but being able to put customs checkpoints further inland (closer to the end-destination) seems like it'd be appealing.

My concern is around the space an airship takes up; coordinating traffic for maximum throughput is going to be a nightmare.

Gotta give those F-22s target practice to keep their bloodlust sated. Otherwise they start snacking on commercial traffic and that can get real awkward real fast.