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Cargo Airships Are Happening

(www.elidourado.com)
220 points elidourado | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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danw1979 ◴[15 Oct 24 14:59 UTC] No.41849317[source]▶
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…

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mananaysiempre ◴[15 Oct 24 15:10 UTC] No.41849440[source]▶
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.
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loeg ◴[15 Oct 24 16:06 UTC] No.41850020[source]▶
Sure, but why does that only benefit airships and not conventional airplanes?
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1. yellowapple ◴[17 Oct 24 03:21 UTC] No.41866128[source]▶
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.