[MichaelGroves]

Wind will never not be a problem for airships. At best, modern weather radars and forecasting might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did.

Incidentally, a lot of casual airship fans pin hopes on helium instead of hydrogen to keep airships safe. But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard.

[jodrellblank]

> "might allow airships to avoid storms better than their early 20th century counterparts did"

Not sure they wanted to; from [1]: "To maintain altitude, Hindenburg would brush against clouds and collect rainwater in gutters that fed the ballast tanks. If we passed through a shower every few hours there was no need to release gas. There were occasions when no rain was available, but we were rarely far from a suitable shower."

[1] https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/crossing-atlan...

[lachstar-x]

That is the coolest thing. Reminds me of cloudscoops mining He3 from gas giants in science fiction books

[perl4ever]

>the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship

I think that may be a misleading way to put it.

"Most casualties had been caused by drowning and hypothermia, since the crew had not been issued life jackets, and there had not been time to deploy the single life raft"

When a large airplane enters heavy turbulence, stalls and falls into the sea, I don't think that would be the usual scenario.

[MichaelGroves]

I don't think that is misleading; a storm downed the airship, resulting in nearly all the crew dying. That they didn't die on impact doesn't change things. If a torpedo sank a ship and most of the crew died from exposure in the water rather than the explosion (USS Indianapolis), you'd not say that torpedoes aren't a major threat to ships.

Regardless, if you don't like that example, pick from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents

Another comment elsewhere in this discussion says that airships stalled for fear of another Hindenberg. 'Fear' suggests some measure of irrationality, as though the Hindenberg were a one-off accident. The reality is these things were crashing all the time. People had ample reason to rationally expect airships would continue to crash.

[jodrellblank]

> "But the deadliest airship disaster in history was a helium airship, the USS Akron, which was destroyed by bad weather killing 73 of the 76 aboard."

Worse than that in fate's sense of irony, after the Hindenburg disaster the US authorities banned Hydrogen as a lifting gas and built the USS Shenandoah as a Helium airship. When a Hydrogen airship of that era flew too high it had valves at the top to vent Hydrogen to the atmosphere and reduce buoyancy, but Helium was 50x-100x more expensive and the Sheandoah had its valves sealed so the crew couldn't waste any of it. It hit a turbulent updraft, rose so high the gas pressure in the balloons was past spec, and this is suspected to have contributed to it breaking up and crashing, killing 14 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Shenandoah_%28ZR-1%29#Cras...