[masklinn]

> Yes, airships are expensive, inconvenient and slow, they leak helium and they require huge hangars and mooring masts, but that's far cry from "can't work".

"Can't work" is a pretty good effective compression of "work on the barest of technicality while being more expensive, slower, less flexible, and less reliable than pretty much all alternatives".

Also the Hindenburg was absolutely not able to take 100+ people across the atlantic, half of that was crew which you don't usually consider "taken over" as they have to fly back. So Hindenburg took 3 days to carry 72 passengers across the atlantic, needing 40 crew to do so, at a ticket price of $7460 (one way, in modern USD).

By comparison, bloody Concorde transported up to 128, with a crew of 3, in 3.5 hours, at lower prices.

[doikor]

> By comparison, bloody Concorde transported up to 128, with a crew of 3, in 3.5 hours, at lower prices.

Pretty sure the crew of Hindenburg included a whole bunch of waiters, cooks, etc. just like the Concorde had flight attendants on top of its flight crew of 3. Hindenburg was basically a small cruise ship in the air.

https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/ has some nice drawings/photos about the interior.

Basically traveling on it was more like a nice sleeper train with cabins and a good restaurant than a modern airplane.

[cycomanic]

What sort of comparison is that the concorde was flying from 1976, the Hindenburg disaster was in 1937. You say can't work is a good compression of not economically feasible and you come to the economically feasible by comparing 1937 tech/economics with 1976 one?

For comparison a commercial plane service didn't even exist for airfoil planes in 1937. So by your argument it was impossible to fly across the Atlantic (it wasn't actually, people had done it but your argument is uneconomical=impossible) , but nowhere close to bringing 100 passengers across.