Zeppelin Travel

This one strikes me as a little bit odd, but it caught my imagination. There’s been quite a bit of interest in the Hindenburg recently – I guess because it’s the 70th anniversary of the famous disaster. Not exactly the best advert for zeppelin travel, is it? But, perhaps on the back of this, there seems to have been a bit of an increase in the idea of actually making zeppelin travel work again.

Can you imagine that? Airships soaring in over London or New York, gracefully drifting over land and sea? I’ve read somewhere that the spire on top of the Empire State Building was originally intended to be an airship mooring mast… I’d love to see that actually happen

Just last week I read an article by a reporter who had been taken on an airship flight, and for the life of me I can’t find it again! I thought it was on the BBC website, but it’s not there. So much of this is going to be from memory and I hope you’ll go easy on me if I get something wrong. What advantages are there to travelling by airship?

• 400m vs 35,000ft – flying at a height of only four hundred metres, it is much easier to see what’s going on below you. Whilst that means you don’t see quite as far as you would in an airliner, you do see more detail. I would imaging that you get much more of a sense of “travelling” at that altitude as well, as my own experience of high-altitude flight has been that we’re hardly moving.
• Stability – airships don’t “bank” as they turn and are apparently quite stable. I don’t know how they would hold up in a storm, but having been on a few very turbulent flights, anything that reduces that has to be a good thing.
• Unpressurised cabins – since you aren’t flying at a very high altitude, the cabin doesn’t have to be pressurised. So you can open the window if you want a bit of extra air. Your ears don’t pop as you climb or descend. And you don’t feel dried out by the recycled and conditioned air.
• Space – with a large enough gas-bag, you can gain enough lift to include a dining-room, “promenade”, observation deck etc. The thought of no longer being stuck in a cramped, flying cylinder is pretty appealing.
• Eco-friendly? – Now, this one is pure speculation on my part, so I’m not so sure about this. The engines on an airship don’t have to generate lift… that’s done by the balloon. So since they are only generating thrust, are they more fuel-efficient? If so, would that make the airship a more eco-friendly method of flight?

Of course, the high-profile Hindenburg disaster would more than likely loom large on people’s minds, but modern airships (and there are some around) use Helium – not Hydrogen. Helium is inert and so, even if similar circumstances did arise again, the worst that would happen is that the ship would develop a leak and the crew might start speaking like Mickey Mouse. It wouldn’t explode in the same way and, with the fire-retardant materials we now have, I would be willing to bet that any fire that did somehow start (say there was an electrical fault) would be contained before it did significant damage.

But in the interest of balance, let’s think about some disadvantages to travelling by airship.

• Helium is a non-renewable resource. Apparently the USA is still the largest stockist of Helium, and has reserves to last around 25 years. If we started having to fill airships with the stuff, I would imagine that estimate would drop sharply.
• It’s SLOW! That’s kind of the point, since you want to be able to see what you’re flying over, but travelling by airship isn’t for those who want to get somewhere quickly.

I’m sure there are more downsides, but I can’t think of any right now. Some people say it’ll be expensive, but is there a reason that HAS to be the case? Perhaps the long journey times would necessitate that?

Who knows? But I would certainly love to see airships used much more than they currently are.

~ by geekspeek on October 18, 2007.