It’s 2020. We have self-driving vehicles, we’re bringing back supersonic flight, and drones are getting us closer to flying cars. Material innovations like carbon fiber, new social norms like ridesharing, and advancements in energy storage are changing how we can choose to move, but what happened to Zeppelins? The epic era of airships–when you could fly around Sky Captain-style from city to city–was almost a century ago, but it seems like that era is long gone and may have simply disappeared forever.
Future-1930s vibes. Maybe there’s another opportunity in those bat-like robot wing things...
What would it take to bring these iconic vehicles back? Are they too dangerous? Are there no applications for Zeppelins in modern mobility? How can we vindicate the Zeppelin from its ancient and complicated past?
Balloons of fire
You can’t mention airships without picturing horrendous images of airships slowly crashing to the ground engulfed in flames, so let’s get safety out of the way. Zeppelins need ultralight gas to float above the slightly heavier mix of air we breathe. Original Zeppelins used hydrogen gas to produce lift, but hydrogen is unfortunately extremely flammable.
Sounds like a bad idea to fill colossal balloons with flammable gas–why not pick something light and actually safe? If you look at The Periodic Table, you can choose from a number of light elements at the top, and slightly heavier elements as you move down and to the right. On the far left are volatile elements, and you generally get more stable elements as you move to the right.
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Helium, the second lightest element on the upper far right and a gas not susceptible to blowing up would be a great option–it’s safe, light, and makes you talk funny. Helium is so safe in fact, that you could install an onboard smoking lounge to a helium-filled airship and kick off a lucrative market of floating sky-casinos without putting anyone at risk of flying a giant balloon of fire.
Helium is now what contemporary airships use, but back in the airship era Zeppelin manufacturers couldn’t get helium – the U.S. had a monopoly on the gas, banning its export to prevent the militarization of foreign airships during WWI. That monopoly alone could have been the reason why the airship era failed.
Gas isn’t the only reason why airships may be difficult to get back in the skies. Airships are still fancy sacks of floating air, and if you’ve ever been in a hot air balloon you know that they moreso coast with the wind than fly on a controlled route. Airships are a bit more sophisticated than hot air balloons, but they still have a tendency to float according to the wind, and it can be difficult to control them. In any event, flying a Zeppelin is a weather dependent decision, but modern electric engines and efficient battery management tech could revolutionize our ability to control an airship.
What are Zeppelins even good for?
Zeppelins have a lot of advantages besides their aesthetic appeal:
Zeppelins don’t need a runway, so they can operate with little to no infrastructure. Unlike helicopters or flying cars, Zeppelins can float over landing spots, so you don’t need to reinforce buildings to hold the weight of an airship. This is a big advantage over the argument for flying cars, because Zeppelins can weightlessly dock to structures.
You can carry a lot with a Zeppelin – actual tons of stuff with certain designs.
They’re not crazy fast, but can still go about 75mph. Some models have the potential to top-out at 100mph, and with the added benefit of no traffic or obstacles to get in the way, that could make for some quick commuting.
They are cheap to build and operate. Once you fill a balloon up with gas, it largely holds the gas in place save for the occasional ultra-small leak, so you don’t need to refill it often. In terms of operations, most of the difficulty of operating an airship comes from pushing it around on the ground and making sure it doesn’t float away.
You don’t need to refuel them, and they can stay in the air for a really long time. There are some consumables related to operations, but generally they could fly for days.
It’s an odd lineup of features, but they translate well to a few interesting applications:
Cargo
Mining excavations, midrange heavy-item travel, lumber… anything that is stuck in a place without a runway or a road to access. Lockheed advertises their airship for helping excavate material from difficult-to-access mining operations and for humanitarian aid in remote regions around the world.
AAAS - Airships As A Service
Military: Surveillance, transport, weaponry.
Raytheon had built a surveillance balloon that could detect cruise missiles, drones, and other air and ground threats just from being higher off the ground. With cargo and personnel transport capabilities, it’s easy to see how a Zeppelin could fulfill military operations and supply runs in remote areas. Surprisingly, airships can be impervious to small-arms gunfire – the UK literally shot one to test this and it was still able to complete its mission.
Luxury Travel
Zeppelin NT, the OG company, pursues a more tourist-driven business model with 00’s airship designs, offering scenic flights from a couple of cities across Germany for anywhere from €375 to €860. Seems like they modestly stick with tourist flights and nostalgic experiences where you can pretend you’re in a different decade, but decide for yourself with their live airfield webcam.
Advertising
The most famous airship in the skies today is probably the Goodyear blimp, an iconic image of the tire company seen frequently at Golf tournaments and sporting events. An airship's ability to float in the skies for days could make for interesting advertising opportunities over dense urban areas, although it may be better to tether the in-air-advertising opportunities to Lindstrand Technologies, a company that specializes in less mobile balloons.
Commuting
It doesn’t seem like anyone has cracked a regular schedule of commuting for Zeppelins, but two potentially perpendicular–NOT parallel–trends going on could help fit the possibility of getting around with an airship:
Coronavirus encourages people to leave cities and move to the outskirts of urban areas. Airships, not needing landing infrastructure and being cheap to operate, could service more remote locations for transporting people, but demand for this type of transportation would need to be substantial.
Cities continue to become more populous, increasing the chance of regular overlapping commute patterns going in the same direction at about the same time. As subways take forever to dig, airships could fly over traffic and landscape obstacles to bring people from one part of an urban region to another–all without the infrastructure demands that come with flying cars. Think Oakland to San Francisco, or Burbank to Santa Monica.
Ominous but timeless (Source)
So Zeppelins bring a lot to the table in a cool, iconically retro package, but they still aren’t in the skies. There are two key reasons why:
Nobody is building airships
Helium
Nobody is building airships
Hardly anyone is trying to bring airships to market, and the ones that are working on airships have encountered some interesting challenges along the way.
The big players in the airship space:
Ratheon’s blimp floated away after a gust of wind broke it’s tether, causing it to float 150 miles up the East Coast, knocking down power lines in its wake for hours before it eventually deflated itself. Great for the Blimp meme market.
Northrop Grummam had a flying airship, but the project’s funding was cut before it flew in any operations.
Lockheed has had the closest success as a big player with their Hybrid Airship program. After filing for some patents and undergoing scale-model testing earning signoff from the FAA, the project is aiming to have a handful of airships to customers by 2021, but the Lockheed airwaves on airships haven’t been making a lot of noise recently.
There are two key midsize players:
Zeppelin NT develops, manufactures, and operates a number of airships. They’re a part of the larger Zeppelin GmbH group that largely focuses on manufacturing, so it seems this is kind of Zeppelin’s side-hustle for maintaining their brand. Zeppelin NT builds Goodyear’s blimps (airships), but the company seems pretty dormant from a design and innovation standpoint.
Of all of the companies, Hybrid Air Vehicles in England is probably making the biggest moves, with over $150M invested in their Airlander 10 model with backing from the EU, UK, and US governments. Hybrid Air Vehicles seems like the most serious player, gunning for a big slice if not the entire global market of 500 Zeppelin vehicles.
And then there are a few smaller players. Some companies piggy-back off of the bigger players' designs while others are building their own airships:
Straightline Aviation, led by a team of ex-Virgin Group employees with a lot of experience in airship operations, is more focused on bringing the technology to market than building their own airships. They signed a letter of intent for 12 Lockheed Martin P-791 airships to be delivered by 2021 at the latest.
Ocean Sky Cruises is a small team of about 9 in Sweden that are working on applying Hybrid Air Vehicles’ Airlander design to luxury trips. Their maiden voyage is an ambitious North Pole Expedition, but they also offer Nordic seaplane trips on the side.
Flying Whales has been building a custom airship since 2012 with backing from the French government. The 120-person company’s main value proposition is hauling lumber for the French Forestry Agency, and they've also seemed to have caught the attention of the Chinese government. 2021 is their target launch date for their first model, the LCA60T.
Generally, there’s not a whole lot of competition and it’s understandable why: airships are hard, very expensive, and you need a solid business model for them to be a viable opportunity.
Helium
A century ago we used hydrogen for getting airships in the skies, which didn’t seem like that bad of an idea at the time: it’s the lightest element, extremely abundant, and is lighter than the regular air we breathe. It ended up being crazy flammable, so in order to run airships safely we need a gas that’s ultra-lightweight and NOT flammable. Helium ended up being the lightweight, predictable solution, but we’re running out of it and its really really hard to get more.
Much like oil, helium is a product of thousands of years of decaying atoms underground. You can either get helium by trying to extract it from the air (super hard to extract), or by fracking it out of pockets in the earth (super hard to find). The U.S. has the most helium, with supply in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and there is some in Qatar, but Qatar’s political history has hurt its ability to disperse its supply (embargoes).
The current helium situation is more about decreasing supply than actual increase in demand, but helium is used in MRIs, barcode scanners, undersea fiber-optic-cable development, and semiconductor production. It’s reasonable to expect the demand for many of these services to increase with time, so finding a better way to get helium is important for the long-term sustainability of its use in Zeppelin operations.
There actually is a lot of helium in the universe, just not on earth. Helium is constantly being produced through fusion in places like the sun. We could try to recreate fusion on earth, but in order for fusion to work safely, we need something like helium-3, an isotope of helium. There’s a bunch of helium-3 cooked into the moon, and it has immense potential as an energy source which is why it’s valued at over $3,000,000,000 per ton and highly sought after by space-faring governments. If you’re able to either find more helium or mine helium-3, you’ve got a much more lucrative business than operating Zeppelins.
These U.S. helium supply charts could use some lift
Our options for producing or finding more helium are difficult to say the least, and the clock is ticking on our current supply. There’s enough helium right now to fill a small fleet, but when you start scaling to 50 or 100 airships you begin to compete against other industries.
Luckily, helium recycling in today's applications is becoming a regular part of its use, but that won’t be enough to meet the demand down the line in a couple decades. So while we have enough helium to get some blimps up, the business opportunity must be lucrative enough to justify its use against other options, and in the meantime, we need to get creative on getting more of it.
Become a Zeppelin Mogul
Zeppelins really are a bold solution for flight. It’s advantages and disadvantages are a bit of an odd blend but there are some niche opportunities in mobility that Zeppelins could serve. Here’s The B Line to vindicating Zeppelins from their past and bringing them back:
Find your niche and customer. Building a Zeppelin company is going to be expensive, and you’ll need a business model that can help support itself. Four to consider:
Cargo: Mining excavations, midrange heavy-item travel, anything that is stuck in a place without a runway.
Military: Surveillance, transport, weaponry.
Luxury travel: Like a cruise ship in the sky. Or a casino… the novelty could be interesting.
Commuting: Immensely expensive to get to work now, but given how populous cities are becoming, chances of you getting a lot of people going in the same direction at about the same time could be high.
Get helium. If you uncover a way to make more helium, you’re in a whole different realm of market potential–an actual moonshot company.
Find a long term solution for profitably maintaining your helium supply, finding more helium, or making more, for decades to come.
There’s a lot to be said for Zeppelins. It really does seem like there just haven’t been a lot of swings of the bat for this concept as a transport solution. Of the few contemporary projects that have gotten off of the ground, most have suffered some unfortunate hard lessons (like tethering vehicles down well is really important), but honestly there doesn’t seem to have been many lessons at all in this space.
Pick the right niche, get the right customer, design and build a working vessel, and find true demand for the concept before helium runs out and you can own this midrange category. Dividing the mobility pie for airship applications is no easy task when so few are flying – maybe we just need to get some more up there to figuratively reignite this slice of the mobility market.
Thanks to Isaiah for inspiring this post, and for sharing his research into the state of airships. Isaiah is building ultra-slick 3D printing software and services at Ahead Wind in Denver. Their latest project is a 3D printing system they’ve used to build aerospace-grade parts for some of the world’s largest wind turbine blade manufacturers.