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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.
If they have a future it’ll be moving stuff, not people. If it’s faster than a container ship and can carry more than a plane then it could have a valuable niche.
They also have a potential advantage in moving large things.
For instance wind turbine blades, which are quite difficult to move by trucks. Airships don’t require infrastructure for the transport or delivery and could rope it down to sites with difficult terrain.
I would think a large team of purpose-built remote controlled quadcopters would be cheaper, faster, and more maneuverable than a zeppelin for that kind of application. Assuming we don’t have to go huge distances (say, from an inland port or a railway to final destination).
Maybe better for last-mile. Zeppelin could probably get you close but unless you’re building in a large open field, it’ll be difficult to get it exactly where it needs to be.
Sure that would be a solution too. An airship would have an advantage in not using energy to stay up, so it could theoretically fly very long distances with heavy weight, where drones would need constant energy depending on both the weight and distance.
I’m not saying it is a good idea in practice, but theoretically it might make sense.
That’s actually a fantastic idea, I hadn’t thought of that
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.
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.
The problem is weight. The heavier the load the bigger the gas bag needs to be to carry that load. The whole thing very quickly gets out of proportion and considering they were using hydrogen the heavier the load the riskier it was.
Modern airships are helium-based, but helium is way too expensive to ever be commercially viable on a large scale.
Just go back to using hydrogen. It’ll be a blast!
Some solar panels on top of the balloon, nowadays you can even create your H on the go from the H2O in the air!
You don’t use up the hydrogen in operation, so you don’t need to create it on the vehicle. Attempting to do so would just add weight and probably wouldn’t work anyway as I suspect the amount of energy you would require to convert water into hydrogen is a lot more than a few solar panels could ever provide.
The issue is hydrogen is just inherently dangerous. Compounded by the fact that no one really cares anyway because airships don’t have a purpose to exist in the modern world outside of a very few niche scenarios.
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As far as I know they were somewhat like cruise ships in their luxury.
The (enormous) problem is weight. Everything needs to be as light as possible, it’s a balloon after all.
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You’d think they would have cruise line zeppelins.
Hindenburg only carried 70 passengers at its largest configuration, and it could only carry that many because they were forced to use hydrogen as the lifting gas instead of helium because of American export restrictions. Hydrogen carries more but is significantly more dangerous, and likely would not be used in any modern aircraft because of safety reasons. Perhaps modern advances in lighter materials and other weight saving methods could help, but even 100 paying passengers doesn’t seem commercially viable.
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.
Oh I wasn’t trying to cuss you out, sorry if it came off that way. It’s early and I usually filter out my language a bit before posting but I commonly use curse words for emphasis and stuff. I blame it on being a (former) sailor. And thanks, I may have misread that - that’s what I get for commenting before I even had gotten out of bed.
word up homie no hard feelings 😭 ppl get so mean on here sometimes it’s refreshing to see someone back down
have a lovely morning sailor ☕️ ☀️
You too! And this place could use a bit more chill for sure. People tend to forget the human on the other side of the conversation.
Fair enough. I figured if I threw a random date out, there was like a 99.99% chance that somebody was shot on that day.
Yeah I saw the date and was like “challenge accepted” lol
It’s absolutely true. General aviation aircraft crash all the time, more than once a day.
For some reason I couldn’t find an FAA Administrator’s Fact Book for anything more recent than 2012 (statistics for 2011 on most things, 2010 for some).
In 2011 there were 1450 general aviation accidents, about four a day.
In 2010 there were 450 general aviation fatalities.
Edit: Here are some NTSB numbers for 2022. General aviation had 1205 accidents and 214 were fatal with a total of 339 fatalities.
you changed my opinion, thanks. :)
i had seen this resource in my search too but i guess in my head accident =/= crash (obviously all crashes are accidents but only some accidents are crashes)? but i guess i was wrong in that assumption maybe
Depends on your definition of crash. If you mean it starts in the air, some occurred on the ground. If you click through to the GA tab on the NTSB stats it breaks them down and you can see standing and taxi accidents. Unfortunately it’s a total from 2008-2022, but for those 15 years 457 were in taxi and 276 were standing so on average about 50 a year.
Edit: For the NTSB accident vs. incident is defined by substantial damage, death, or serious injury. I’m not sure exactly what counts as substantial, but I think it meets a generic definition of crash.
ooh i didn’t see that tab. and yep most of the accidents had something to do with being in the air and so even by my non-expert definition i am wrong. big sad that this was one of my most upvoted comments and it was factually incorrect 😭
It’s understandable. When I got into the aviation industry I was very surprised to learn how many GA accidents and fatalities occurred in a year. Unless it’s Kobe, or newsworthy for some other reason, it usually doesn’t get past the local news.
i think also the data is juuuust a bit more inaccessible? like i remember i was able to fact check the derailment stat in a few seconds. anyway. regards! ☕️☀️
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.
But also the technology to make rigid airships relatively safe has existed for decades and there’s no reason we can’t go back to them now except bad PR.
And the fact that they’re only so so. Like, airplanes are just better. Once we had the ability to make cargo planes it was over
Better in many regards but for sure not all. Airships could run a lot more quietly for example, that has some value. Until they explode ofcourse, that’s rather loud.
It’s just a very ineffective mode of transport compared to aeroplane or helicopter, not because the technology isn’t there.
Cruise ships are wildly impractical for getting from point A to B as well. There can be other reasons to do a thing besides efficiency
Cruise ships are based on practical technology though. If the only use for cruise ships was leisure then it wouldn’t be economic to develop them. Airship technology never really got anywhere and it’s certainly never became commercially used, so putting in the money to develop it for recreation just doesn’t make sense.
I see your point, but Cruise ships have significantly diverged technologically from any “practical” ships some time ago. Also, recreation for recreation’s sake is and always has been a driver of technological progress.
Counterpoint: Cruise ship is the best way to get from point A to point B for long distance sea travel. Though cruise ship nowadays aren’t all about going to point A to point B, it’s been replaced by aeroplane, but it’s well and alive because it’s the one proven tech that’s been used for centuries, if not millennia.
Airship however relies on two of the lifting gas: helium and hydrogen. Helium is expensive, scarce, and non-renewable, while hydrogen is the sole reason why airship is not a popular air travel. All that to just lift about 100 people or 10 tonnes of payload for something this big. Sure, you can ride it but it will be expensive.
Also: cruise ship tend to have entertainment on board. Stuff like casino, pool, and mall is the attraction. If airship gonna be the cruise ship of the sky, it gonna bring something to the table than just big flying balloon. The novelty will run out fast for rich folks.
Airships can have a casino and shopping. They just need to use lightweight materials for the fixtures. And if things cost a lot, the ticket price can be increased to match. Billionaires pay a lot of money just to say they’ve been to space, even if their capsule only just barely escaped earth’s atmosphere. I’m not claiming it’s practical or economical, but things being impractical and excessive hasn’t stopped people from making crazy bets on rich people shit before.
I’m not claiming it can’t be done either, i’m just saying unless someone discover or made something that defy the law of physics, airship will never catch up with aeroplane. That’s the reason it fall out of favour against other mode of air transport.
They would still have to contain hydrogen though. Making them rigid doesn’t decrease fire risk.
They have bad PR for a reason. It’s not prejudice it’s practicality.
They can be made with helium
In theory, but not in reality. It’s just far too expensive.
That hasn’t stopped billionaires from building spaceships or submarines. All I’m saying is that we would absolutely see some weird eccentric billionaires building and riding in zeppelins if it weren’t for the bad PR of the Hindenburg.
There are, but nobody really cares to report on it.
It wasn’t just one zeppelin. The US Navy experimented with airship aircraft carriers and both of them were lost in stormy weather. They’re giant bags of gas, which means that turbulent air is a big problem.
The Empire State building had a airship mooring point at the top, but the constant updrafts meant the airship would be pointing nose-down while unloading.
They’re just too unwieldy in all but the most calm conditions that there’s not much use for them beyond writing “Ice Cube is a pimp” in the sky.
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.
Sounds like anti-zeppelin propaganda to me.
Looking at what happened to every Zeppelin that Ferdinand von Zeppelin built you start to get a good picture on why it’s maybe not the best idea. I got to hand it to him though, dudes got dedication.
LZ1: damaged during initial flight, repaired and flown two more times before investors backed out causing the ship to be sold for scrap.
LZ2: suffered double engine failure and crashed into a mountain. While anchored to the mountain awaiting repairs a storm destroyed it beyond repair.
LZ3: built from salvaged parts of LZ2. Severally damaged in storm. After LZ4’s destruction LZ3 was repaired and was accepted by the German military who eventually scrapped it.
LZ4: suffered from chronic engine failure. While repairing the engines a gust of wind blew the ship free of its mooring and struck a tree causing the ship to ignite and burn to the ground.
LZ5: destroyed in a storm.
LZ6: destroyed in its hanger by fire.
LZ7: destroyed after crashing in a thunderstorm.
LZ8: destroyed by wind.
LZ9: this one actually worked and survived for three years before being decommissioned.
LZ10: caught on fire and destroyed after a gust of wind blew its mooring line into itself.
LZ11: destroyed while attempting to move the ship into it’s hanger
LZ12 & LZ13: both flew successful careers before being decommissioned a few years later.
LZ14: destroyed in a thunderstorm.
LZ15: destroyed during an emergency landing.
LZ16: was stolen by the French.
LZ17: decommissioned after the war.
LZ18: exploded during its test flight.
LZ19: damaged beyond repair during an emergency landing.
LZ129: the Hindenburg.
LZ127: retired and scrapped after flying over a million miles.
LZ130: flew 30 flights before being dismantled for parts to aid in the war effort.
I would like to know more about LZ16 please!
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.
So what you’re saying is we should expect Elon Musk to start a zeppelin company at some point in the near future.
Yes, that’s correct.
And thus the transformation into Max Zorin is complete.
I’m already buying shares in BlimpX! He’s a visionary, first Hyperloop, now BlimpX! What’ll be the next thing from 80+ year old popular science mags for the real life Tony Stark will invent?
To be honest it’s pretty unfair to compare something built before humans sent anything into space, vs something after we’ve made it to Mars. There is over 60 years of innovation between the Hindenburg and the airbus.
The whole idea was losing out to the DC-3 already.
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
It wouldn’t be light enough. Panels weight about 19kg each for a 1x1.7m panel. This can probably be slimmed down for the application, but probably not by enough. Perovskite promises a lighter weight panel, but they still have longevity issues that are being worked out in the lab.
Why not put those panels on a boat instead? Or in a field and power a train?
"Thin film solar is light weight at 7-10 ounces per square foot. "
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-film_solar_cell
Your 1 panel at less than 2 sqm weighs as much as more than 6 square meters of thin film. The 40 or 50% better relative efficiency doesn’t make up for the increased square footage. What kind of wattage would we even need?
Hindenburg used 4x 735kW diesel engines which need to be powered constantly (almost 3MW overall). That is the output at the shaft, which means we need electric motors that match that. Fortunately, electric motors are pretty efficient.
Thin-film can do 80-120W per m^2. That’s the rating when the sun is shining directly on them. We’ll assume it’s flying above the cloud layer and don’t need to worry about that.
At the top end, it will take 24,500m^2 of panels. Hindenburg had a length of 245.3m and diameter of 41.2m. If it were a cylinder (because I don’t feel like doing the math on its actual shape), it would have a surface area of 35,000m^2, but that includes the underside. It’ll probably pick up some power being reflected off the clouds or the earth’s surface, but you’re probably only getting 60% of the full power averaged over the entire surface.
Which is closer than I thought it would be, but not quite enough to power the motors if they were 100% efficient, and dropping it to the real world 85-90% won’t help. Neither will accounting for its actual shape.
Hindenburg had a cruising speed of 131km/h, so solar electric would just be pegged to a lower top speed assuming we didn’t touch any other parts of the design.
I think efficiency gains in propeller tech, changes in crew and gear requirements, structural materials, and the rest of it would make it feasible.
I think they’d be solar powered with some kind of thin film photovoltaic. You don’t need much battery in that case. While some carbon cost is inevitable, the point is they wouldn’t ever compete with something that burns kerosene.
There are plenty of other options that don’t burn kerosene.
Same logic applies to nuclear energy. More people fall off of hydroelectric power plants or drown or something, or fall off of wind turbines, than get poisoned by radiation from a nuclear power plant
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.
Wind and Solar are cheaper now, and we won’t have to trade a dependence on oil from foreign countries for a dependence on uranium from foreign countries. We won’t in the future have to hear about how the people of Kazakhstan will greet us liberators when we invade the country to establish freedom and have to pretend it’s merely a coincidence they happen to have the energy resources we’re dependent on.
The danger of nuclear isn’t so much on the daily stats of what actually went wrong, but in the tiny risk of having huge problems. The worst case scenario for a Chernobyl style disaster is actually losing huge parts of Europe. Even in well run plants, if enough things go wrong at the same time, it could still mean losing the nearest city. These “black swan” events are hard for humans to think clearly about, as we are not used to working with incredibly small chances (like deciding to plan for a 1000 year storm or not).
Basically every nuclear disaster has been very very preventable. And even then in incompetency, it was a small chance.
Preventable, but they still happened, even with the crazy security at plants. But what you’re saying is like “we’ve only had small earthquakes so far, so there are likely to be no big ones”. When it’s really absolutely the other way around.
https://cen.acs.org/environment/pollution/nuclear-waste-pilesscientists-seek-best/98/i12
Still haven’t found a good way to get rid of nuclear waste, which remains dangerous for a long time.
Coal produces more toxic waste per MWh than nuclear, and it just spews it into the atmosphere, not into nice neatly packaged barrels you can just store in a hole underground…
Where did I say coal was a good idea?
I would vote for improving the power grid. Create tons of jobs and make the system less prone to blackouts. Remember 2003
We know what to do with it, the same thing countries like France do, deep isolation.
The problem with America, is the same problem we have for any federal level infrastructure. The states have too much control and are prone to NIMBY campaigns.
The problem with America and some other countries like Russia is what you consider a waste is a weapon grade material to these governments. And you don’t want to bury your weapons too deep.
imho “deep isolation” isn’t a solution, it’s kicking the can down the road.
Improving the power grid would increase the available supply without causing problems.
it’s kicking the can down the road.
Why? And what would be the alternative?
Even if we don’t start relying on more nuclear power, nuclear waste is still going to be produced. Even if it’s just maintaining the nuclear power we have right now, or just dealing with an aging nuclear arms cache.
I don’t see how kicking it down the road is really a problem in this scenario, as that’s pretty much all you can do with nuclear waste, wait until it’s not dangerous.
Improving the power grid would increase the available supply without causing problems.
That’s kinda a general statement… Part of improving the power grid could be interpreted as including more nuclear power.
The imperative in this scenario isn’t just making sure we’re not “causing problems”, it’s moving towards a power source that minimizes our dependence on fossil fuels.
It’s “kicking the can down the road” vs ecological collapse.
I don’t see how kicking it down the road is really a problem in this scenario, as that’s pretty much all you can do with nuclear waste, wait until it’s not dangerous.
So, by your own words, there’s no safe way to get rid of nuclear waste besides storing it and hoping things will work out.
Also, nuclear plants would take as long to build as other, safer methods.
by your own words, there’s no safe way to get rid of nuclear waste besides storing it and hoping things will work out.
I think you’re purposely misconstruing the meaning of safe. I think deep isolation is a proven method of safely storing radioactive material until it decays.
You are claiming it’s unsafe, or “kicking the can down the road”, but haven’t explained your reasoning. Perhaps if you had any examples of how deep isolation has failed, or ways you think it will fail, it may strengthen your argument
Also, nuclear plants would take as long to build as other, safer methods.
Again, you are claiming things are safer, but haven’t explained how? All forms of energy production have their positive and negative attributes, however safety isn’t really a problem usually attributed to nuclear energy.
Time is generally an actual criticism of nuclear power, but a lot of length of time isn’t really inherent in the actual construction of the power plant, which can be completed in as little as 3-5 years. It’s usually the same problem as your first claim, the governments inability to deal with NIMBY campaigns and private interest.
private interest.
Yup. No big companies campaigning to get nuclear power. Nope, nary a one.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/investors-are-turning-bullish-nuclear-2023-11-16/
I wonder what the costs would be to just literally launch it into the sun. Let it all get recompiled in the big fusion furnace and out of our hands. Of course if the rocket failed during launch you have a real big problem, but that part aside.
The Space Shuttle Challenger has entered the chat.
Not sure anyone would sign off on sending potential dirty bombs into space.
A few years back people were floating the idea of sending up orbital solar farms that would collect power and beam it to the surface.
Even if we had a magic 100% reliable rocket it still wouldn’t be a good idea to send it into space. You’d have to have a stupidly powerful magic 100% reliable rocket to get into a solar intercept orbit, otherwise it would just hang around the Earth for a very long time and eventually come back down as nuclear fire dust.
It’s not as if storing it underground is an unsafe strategy so it seems like a pointless exercise.
Which is much better than not kicking the can down the road, and just spewing emissions into the atmosphere like fossil fuels. Nuclear is not perfect, it’s just better than fossil fuels.
Yes, fission sucks. But still better than fossils.
Recycle it. And the bits you can’t recycle are so negligibly small you can store it in a single dedicated national dump
Compared to other options, including renewables, nuclear produces close to no waste at all.
Dumping it under ground doesn’t seem like a particularly sophisticated strategy but it’s actually perfectly safe. It’s not going to leak out or anything it’s in massive blocks of concrete.
Worrying about it is pointless.
For we know in 50 years someone will come up with a way to recycle it and it’ll be a complete non-issue anyway. This pretty good research on recycling you can a material already so 50 years is not an unreasonable time frame. The current containing solutions are good for thousands of years.
planes crash every day
what?!
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
commercial airlines crash less than once a month.
A lot less if you’re only counting advanced democracies. The last multi-casualty commercial plane crash in the US was in 2009, 15 years ago. I only make that multi-casualty caveat because otherwise you get weird one offs like a guy running into a landing strip and getting run over.
Even the one in 2009 was a fairly small propeller plane.
Let’s be honest. The airline disaster in recent history was when a door fell off and literally no one died.
There was one guy whose iPhone fell out of the plane and he literally got it back intact. He got an iPhone back intact.
Even the worst most unsafe aircraft are pretty reliable
It’s amazing what proper regulations that are designed to prioritize safety over profit can accomplish, and how quickly stark examples of the dangers start happening when those regulations are sidestepped or dismantled…
Fixed wing aircraft, helicopters are abominable and deserve more fear and respect.
I wonder how that changes if we include private planes, helicopters and basically everything that humans fly directly or indirectly.
It seems to rather drastically. When looking it up the average for commercial aircraft is 0.01 fatalities per 100,000 hours of flight time, however when I looked for data that included non commercial craft that figure jumps to 1.19 per 100,000 hours yielding a fatality, and 6.84 per 100,000 yielding a crash of any sort.
I then googled to find the average daily flight hours, and while I couldn’t find that, I did find the total flight hours in 2018, which came out to 91.8 million flight hours, or 251,507 flight hours daily, which should result in an average of 17 crashes per day, and an average of 3 fatalities per day, globally. Also one commercial flight fatality slightly more than every 3 months.
Honestly that’s a remarkably low rate of failure.
Wow, you did the math like a pro! Thanks for crunching the numbers, I had no idea it would be that bad.
They are kind of impractical nowadays. Nobody wants to get somewhere slow.
For recreational “travel for the sake of travel” it’d be kind of cool. I’d wager that a zeppelin “sky cruise” would be more environmentally friendly than a traditional ocean cruise, and offer way more diverse views. That’d be a real sweet vacation, actually.
Some 15-minute explainer channel (maybe HAI) had a video about risk perception recently, and I think this would be a pretty good example.
Sky cruise! Sky cruise!
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”)
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There’s a von zeppelin suite.
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Zeppelins are just expensive and slow.
That particular one exploded because the US had an embargo against Nazi Germany for the much safer helium rather than famously combustible hydrogen
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.
I wonder when hydrogen filled thermite balloon is going to make a comeback as a mode of transportation.
First to fly over the Atlantic?
…anyone?
Is this why Nazis always have such deep voices in the movies?
Yes, this also resulted in the Germans having no sense of humour due to no funni voice gas
Do we even have enough helium to be using it in zeppelins though? I thought it was in shortage which is bad because it’s needed for medical and scientific purposes. Like we shouldn’t even be using it in balloons bad.
The whole helium shortage thing was a misunderstanding that got blown up by the Internet.
Actually Helium doesn’t blow up.
Except on the internet.
I’m not sure trains derail every day.
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.
I’ve got to assume most of those are things like single cars falling off the track in the switching yard or something, not major service-interrupting, cargo-damaging, or injury-causing incidents.
That’s a fair assumption as a non industry expert. Nevertheless OOP was technically correct there. 😅
That’s wild, I really never would have thought it was that common; thank you.
What the frickity fuck?
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.
Never. They’re just too impractical. Now solid-frame airships on the other hand? They’ll probably never get off the drawing board.
Why not use helium instead of hydrogen, and also maybe don’t coat the skin in thermite? 🤷♂️
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
On the optimistic side, helium is a product of nuclear fusion, so we will eventually be able to produce it.
I’m too lazy to work through the numbers but I think helium production would be very small — which is another way of saying fusion (as envisioned for energy use) produces a huge amount of energy.
fusion produces a huge amount of energy.
That’s the kind of claim that’ll age like “640k ought to be enough for anyone.”
Googling around, you get about 1e11 kJ/gram of He produced (source.
Wikipedia says Hindenburg volume is 200,000 m cubed . Multiply by density of He at stp and you get north of 1e7 grams.
Multiply and you get 1e21 J. Estimate for worldwide energy consumption in 2010, from Wolfram Alpha, is half of that.
So, if all energy were from local fusion, it would take about two years of production to fill a single Hindenburg-sized Zeppelin. That is a huge amount of energy.
I don’t think it’s equivalent to compare energy with RAM like this. Energy is the realm of thermodynamics; things like boiling water don’t care about technology, they just need a certain amount of energy. Unless we’re talking about fundamentally new uses of energy, like floating cities or something whacky, I think the amount of energy here is really, really big.
If it’s so “expensive and valuable” then why have we been using it for decades to fill balloons here in the US? It costs like a few bucks to buy a bunch of balloons and get them filled. I just looked it up and Dollar Tree (a dollar store) will fill them for free as long as the balloons are purchased there.
You can buy a 14.9 cubic foot tank from Amazon for $80 (unfilled of course), which is enough to fill 50 balloons.
If it’s so “expensive and valuable” then why have we been using it for decades to fill balloons here in the US?
good question! lots of people actually lobby to wither ban this (unlikely that it will happen) or at least make it more expensive.
Helium is increadibly important in the medical and science field. Having it “wasted” in party balloons is honestly, well, wasteful (if fun).
Helium is already getting more expensive, and it will only rise in the future
The reason it was so cheap in the last couple decades is, that the US basically sold off most, if not almost all of its stockpile, dumping the price on the market.
And now with very few sources for helium worldwide, the price will go up massively in the next couple years
Where do I buy this helium thing
I thought I read that the helium used in party balloons was a grade that wasn’t useful for medical devices. For example, this link. They of course are a company that is selling party balloon helium, so… This link might be more reliable.
You know whats basically free, lighter than helium and not dangerous: Vacuum! /s
Quick, someone give me Elons private number, i know how to revolutionize air travel!!1!
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.
So MRI helium is scarce because the required purity is very high to get the 4 Kelvin superfluid behavior. Helium for filling balloons (of the party type) is a lot, lot cheaper. I don’t know exactly how that translates into airship envelope helium, but you can’t take balloon-grade helium and put it in your MRI machine.
Huh, Today I Learn
Look at the Akron and Macon. Big advanced helium filled. Zeppelins don’t handle weather well.
Helium is twice as heavy as Hydrogen, much harder to find on earth (it’s literally named Helium because until recently it was believed to only exist on the Sun)
So more expensive and you gotta use a lot more of it for the same lifting power, also Hydrogen can be used for this safely, the Nazis just were cutting corners to not have to give any credit to the Americans who at the time had a monopoly on the resources that would have let them go with helium or that would have let them coat the ship safely.
