This was nowhere near the only deadly airship disaster, nor was it the last, but that’s not really what ended airship travel. With the advances in airplanes by the end of World War II, lighter-than-air ships just couldn’t compete. Even postwar piston aircraft were cruising at more than 3 times the speed of most airships with range to make nonstop transatlantic crossings, and once the jet age really started to take hold in the ’50s it was all over. I mean, by the ’60s multiple countries had started supersonic passenger aircraft programs. Not a lot of success there, but still there were nowhere near enough customers to support commercial service on airships when faster, cheaper options existed.
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.
There are a handful of Zeppelin NT semi-rigid airships flying around nowadays. If you want to see a landing and start, I recorded this a few years ago.
planes crash every day
in 2021 there were 21 commercial* plane crashes, zero fatal.
*couldn’t find data including non-commercial flights. i welcome corrections citing such data :)
edit: i think i am wrong, see roscoe’s comment below
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.
still no plane crash every day tho lol
i couldn’t find data including non-commercial crashes. i welcome corrections.
358 crashes in a year is close enough to an average of one per day that it’s pretty fucking pedantic to say "but not every day - especially given that most of the time that people say something happens “every day” it’s being used loosely, not literally.
“People get shot by cops every day” is a phrase that is effectively accurate, even if nobody happened to be shot on, say, February 21st.358 deaths due to crashes*, not the same as crashes themselves as multiple can die per crash
i came into this conversation with a light (pedantic) heart and an open mind. i am still willing to he corrected but cussing me out does nothing buddy.
This is what happens when your view of history is essentially the historical equivalent of pop culture. You end up saying idiot things on an idiot website for idiots.
Lots of people died in airships, the Hindenburg was the most exploding and dramatic, but it was not the first and only instance. In fact the Hindenburg was made up of parts from a previous airship that had also crashed.
They kinda suck, and this isn’t likely to change.
The Hindenburg was 245m long, carried around 50 crew plus 60 or so passengers. It needs all that length to have enough volume to lift that many people. The laws of physics are a limitation here; even figuring out a vaccum rigid air ship would only slightly improve this (it’s a neat engineering problem, but not very practical for a variety of reasons). Maybe the crew size could shrink somewhat, but the fact is that you’ve got a giant thing for handling around 100 people.
An Airbus a380 is 72m long and carries over 500 passengers and crew.
The Hindenburg made the transatlantic journey in around 100 hours. You could consider it more like a cruise than a flight–you travel there in luxury and don’t care that it takes longer. You would expect it to be priced accordingly. In fact, given the smaller passenger size compared to the crew size, I’d expect it to be priced like a river cruise rather than an ocean cruise. Those tend to be more exclusive and priced even higher.
Being ground crew for blimps was a dangerous job. You’re holding onto a rope, and then the wind shifts and you get pulled with it. This could certainly be done more safely today with the right equipment. Don’t expect the industry to actually do that without stiff regulations stepping in.
Overall, they suck and would only be a luxury travel option. Continental cargo is better done by trains. Trans continental cargo is better done by boats. There isn’t much of a use case anywhere.
Airships only make sense in a world in which the economy takes into account ecodestruction. Kind of like wind-powered ships. If we didn’t know what GHGs do environmentally, which offset any short-term efficiency gains provided by burning hydrocarons, nobody would ever dream of abandoning these miracle fuels. So you can only examine the efficiency of airships with hydrocarbons off the table entirely.
They do plenty of ecodestruction. If we had them now, they’d be fueled by hydrocarbons. That could hypothetically be batteries in the future, but batteries good enough for that could do equally well in airplanes.
The material used in making them rigid also has a carbon cost.
Don’t forget that they are huge, you could fit a lot of solar power on them, given that it would be light enough
Anon could ride a blimp. They’re a thing.
https://zeppelinflug.de/de/zeppelin-fluege/rundfluege-ab-essen/muelheim
The Zeppelin NT is a zeppelin not a blimp because it has a solid structure inside (see FAQ “Zeppelin vs. Blimp”)
I’m not sure trains derail every day.
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.
