[ciphol]

The capacity of airships is miniscule compared to transatlantic shipping. The article suggests a 450m long airship carrying approximately 800 tons. For contrast, a single container ship is about the same size as that airship, but can carry 230,000 tons. Why would you replace your current system with a new system having 300 times less capacity? A brief estimate suggests that the container ship only uses 100 times as much fuel, so it's roughly 3 times as efficient as airships to boot.

[cormacrelf]

For your a mere 10x the price of a container ship, you can get a container across the Atlantic in 3 days instead of a week. At the level of demand for fast transatlantic shipping we see at the moment, I think you could do better than the airship on both speed and price using fixed-wing aircraft. I didn't see in the piece any argument that what people really want is slightly slower than a plane and slightly faster than a ship. If there's a sleeping giant of demand out there, I'm not seeing it.