Greentext

Yup, no one is going to hop an airship when they can get somewhere in a fraction of the time. The only difference might be cost, but spinning up a zeppelin industry likely couldn't compete in terms of ticket price compared to jets.

What airships need to do is become like cruise ships. Put an amusement park and a casino up there, I'm sure nothing bad will happen.

Boeing working hard to fix this

Commercial plane crashes /=/ plane crashes.

358 deaths due to plane crashes in 2022 in the US. Anon included cars so this "commercial" distinction doesn't necessarily hold weight since the crux of the comparison is that other industries have been allowed to operate despite fatal accidents. And cars are included which are individually operated machines and not mass transit.

It wasn’t just one zeppelin.

It's more the case that back then, nearly every airship ever made ended up crashing in bad weather. Nowadays they're sort of safe since we have much more powerful engines and weather services that can help them avoid the rough stuff, but even then they still can't lift very useful loads.

So what you’re saying is we should expect Elon Musk to start a zeppelin company at some point in the near future.

Nuclear just isn't a good short-term value proposition so most people are dismissive of it. Plants take along time to create and are generally expensive. Not to mention the NIMBYs who would rather dump tons of chemicals into local riverways, air, and land with coal than have a clean-burning nuclear plant within 10 miles of their city.

only if you count general aviation, commercial airlines crash less than once a month. OP is clearly just an agent of Big Blimp trying to destroy the reputation of the honorable aviation industry

It also had an aluminium skin, protected by an iron oxide paint. Those 2 are also the main ingredients in thermite. The skin burnt even faster and more impressively than the hydrogen.

This one caught me off guard:

As of October, the FRA has recorded 742 incident reports for train derailments in 2023. Additionally, railroads reported 59 collisions, 12 fires, and 138 highway-rail-crossing incidents, which could include cars or any other vehicles or people at the crossing site.

Since 1975, an average of 2,808 trains have derailed each year, with a peak of 9,400 derailments in 1978.

For the EU it’s hard to find the numbers on derailment, but in 2022 20 train travelers died due to an accident in total in all of the EU.

While i would love to travel by airship, I dont think there would be a commercial success in airship passenger travel in the near future:

• travel times of multiple days means you probably need 2-3x the crew, compared with a plane on a 8h flight
• this also means a plane that is 4x as fast can make the same trip 4x more often, bringing in more money for the airline in the same amount of time
• you probably can't land on existing airports, because an airship the size of a large building would be crawling accross your airspace blocking all flight traffic, or shaken by the turbulences behind a large jet powered airliner
• new technology without any existing infrastructure is much more expensive than building on top of existing things
• tickets would be much more expensive than a commercial plane because of the reasons above, the lower passenger capacity and the fact that you have to carry more supplies (water + food for days multiplied by people on board) for a longer trip. Each passenger with cabin and supplies was calculated as 300kg weight on a transatlantic flight on the hindenburg
• Hindenburg could not fly in a direct straight line, because it travels at a height of only 400-600m. This means you had to go around high mountain ranges, because people and the combustion engines need oxygen which you dont have much above 4000m. However i dont know if this is still a problem with modern pressurized cabins, or if there is another limitation from the lifting gas...

because helium is f'ing expensive an valuable. Once used, it's basically gone. There's a reason that countries have strategic helium reserves.

Also on the topic, modern day companies that try to resurrect airships exist. Just every single one of them goes bust, as it's just not really a viable solution for modern transport

You may know this, but the Nazis were forced into using hydrogen instead of helium because the only commercial sources at the time were in he USA and we wouldn't sell it to them. But also, since the ship was built for German propaganda they would have wanted it to be a fully German endeavor.

The Hindenburg was painted with silvery powdered aluminium, to better show off the giant Nazi swastikas on the tail section. When it flew over cities, the on-board loudspeakers broadcast Nazi propaganda announcements, and the crew dropped thousands of small Nazi flags for the school children below. This is not surprising, because the Nazi Minister of Propaganda funded the Hindenburg.

At that time, the US government controlled the only significant supplies of helium (a non-flammable lifting gas), and refused to supply it to the Nazi government. So the Hindenburg had to use flammable hydrogen.

As the Hindenburg came in to Lakehurst on May 6, 1937, there was a storm brewing, and so there was much static electricity in the air - which charged up the aircraft. When the crew dropped the mooring ropes down to the ground, the static electricity was earthed, which set off sparks on the Hindenburg.

The Hindenburg was covered with cotton fabric, that had to be waterproof. So it had been swabbed with cellulose acetate (which happened to be very inflammable) that was then covered with aluminium powder (which is used as rocket fuel to propel the Space Shuttle into orbit). Indeed, the aluminium powder was in tiny flakes, which made them very susceptible to sparking. It was inevitable that a charged atmosphere would ignite the flammable skin.

In all of this, the hydrogen was innocent. In the terrible disaster, the Hindenburg burnt with a red flame. But hydrogen burns with an almost invisible bluish flame. In the Hindenburg disaster, as soon as the hydrogen bladders were opened by the flames, the hydrogen inside would have escaped up and away from the burning airship - and it would not have not contributed to the ensuing fire. The hydrogen was totally innocent. In fact, in 1935, a helium-filled airship with an acetate-aluminium skin burned near Point Sur in California with equal ferocity. The Hindenberg disaster was not caused by the hydrogen.

The lesson is obvious - the next time you build an airship, don't paint the inflammable acetate skin with aluminium rocket fuel.

https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2004/02/26/1052864.htm

To add on the point of helium being expensive and valuable, it's also extremely important for supercooling MRI's and supercomputers.

I'd rather have more MRI's than zeppelins.