Cargo Airships Are Happening

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'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.

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?