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Cargo Airships Are Happening

(www.elidourado.com)
220 points elidourado | 2 comments | 14 Oct 24 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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voidUpdate ◴[15 Oct 24 13:00 UTC] No.41848119[source]▶
> "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

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credit_guy ◴[16 Oct 24 03:11 UTC] No.41855240[source]▶
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.

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1. perilunar ◴[16 Oct 24 04:18 UTC] No.41855563[source]▶
I think the idea is to pickup at the source and deliver direct to the destination, eliminating the warehousing and trucking completely.
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2. credit_guy ◴[16 Oct 24 23:45 UTC] No.41865035[source]▶
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.