[endominus]

>A century after terrifying disasters, is it a safe-enough bet?

In the Hindenberg disaster, 35 of the airship's 97 occupants died. Meanwhile, every time I browse the front page of HN, there seems to be another story of an aircraft crashing or being shot down and everyone on board being killed instantly.

[jetrink]

The Hindenburg was one of only two passenger airships, so imagine if 50% of passenger aircraft eventually crashed. There was also no obvious route towards making them safer at the time. Even if the problem of flammability could be solved, they were very vulnerable to bad weather and it was still decades before modern weather forecasting.

[snakeyjake]

Forget 50%, the US Navy built five rigid airships.

ZR-1 through ZR-5.

The only one that wasn’t destroyed by a crash that also killed most if not all of its crew was ZR-3 and its history is filled with so many near-disasters that it was pure chance that the rigid airships program didn’t have a 100% loss rate.

[jcranmer]

Something like half of all rigid airships ended their lives in crashes. That's an airframe loss rate far in excess of anything you see with regular aircraft.

[moffkalast]

Yeah in the end it's not about the risk, but about it taking a week to get across the Atlantic in one. Ain't nobody got time for that.

[phreeza]

People cross the Atlantic in cruise ships all the time. I would be much more interested in an airship Cruise.

[ghaff]

Why other than the novelty? I’ve taken an ocean liner with great food, lectures, shows, multiple places you could eat, a promenade walk, etc.

[__MatrixMan__]

I like the airship idea over ocean ships because land doesn't get in the way. I imagine a ring of airships encircling the globe based on the prevailing winds. Except bigger, like a handful of sky cities (hydrogen being abundant, the square-cube law being what it is).

So instead of shipping something from the other side of the planet, you can just wait a few weeks until the warehouse is overhead, and burn a lot less fuel overall.

Or maybe you're having a conference in one. Either take a plane there and have your conference in the sky, taking the slow way back. Or get on when it's overhead and take a plane back (or if you're really patient, take the long way around the planet). The change of scenery would be much better than just flying to Vegas all the time.

[ghaff]

Upthread was about moving people.

New York City to (near) London is almost certainly the most common route by ship and it really isn't that many people in the scheme of things. I couldn't imagine having gone to my boss and telling them I'd spend a week getting to London for an event and spend 4x or whatever the amount. You can also get New York to Hamburg or a shortish train trip from Paris. And business passengers are most of the (especially premium) travel volume on those general routes. (And that doesn't even take into account far less frequent liner schedules.)

I don't dispute that, if you take budgets out of the equation, we could probably make corporate events more exclusive and more fun, but that's not really the way things are.