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Cargo Airships Are Happening

(www.elidourado.com)
220 points elidourado | 3 comments | 14 Oct 24 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.625s | source
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Animats ◴[15 Oct 24 06:56 UTC] No.41845699[source]▶
The article on the site is vague, but if you go to the company's site, and examine the images, you can get a close look at the airship design. The image on the web site [1] is higher resolution than the web site needs, and you can zoom in if you open the image directly.

The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU. This is comparable to a B-747 freighter. Current new price of a B-747 freighter is about US$400 million. Trips per unit time would be less but fuel cost would be lower.

Large container ships are now in the 20,000 TEU range.

It's not clear there's much demand for faster container shipping. Container ships tend to run slower than they can, to save fuel. Maersk has some 4,000 TEU high speed container ships capable of 29 knots, but due to lack of a market and huge fuel costs, they're mothballed in a loch in Scotland.

[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66b24fc3f58cf0...

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1. pbmonster ◴[15 Oct 24 14:16 UTC] No.41848866[source]▶
> The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU.

Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo", not "500 ton total mass". And 500 tons of cargo are at minimum 25 TEU.

If they are competing with 747 freighters, those containers will almost always be "cubed out" (the container volume is full long before reaching its maximum legal weight), meaning the airship would load several times as many containers.

This is another advantage they have against air freight. Those 747s are frequently cubed out themselves, flying lighter than they would like. And you can't easily build much more volume into jet aircraft (well, you can, that's what the Airbus Beluga XL is, and apparently several air freight companies are pestering Airbus to re-open a production line for those). Airships, on the other hand, will be practicably impossible to cube out.

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2. Animats ◴[15 Oct 24 17:56 UTC] No.41851171[source]▶
> Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo".

From their images, the airship is about 30 containers long. That's only 600 feet, shorter than the Macon or the Hindenburg. Useful lift of the Hindenburg was 232,000 kg.

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3. anticensor ◴[18 Oct 24 10:55 UTC] No.41878188[source]▶
15 FEU is indeed very small.