Pathfinder 1: The Airship That Could Usher in a New Age
59 comments
·February 18, 2025aetherson
card_zero
I liked the one that looked like a bum, that was the best one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlander_...
First flight was 2012, production starts in 2028? Maybe?
timbit42
My dad's uncle is 94 and he remembers seeing the Hindenburg flying over Atlantic Canada toward New Jersey the day before it crashed and burned. He was born in 1930 so was 6 and 3/4 years old at the time. Obviously he also lived through WW2. It's crazy how much he has lived through and seen.
deadbabe
Kind of like VR then. Promising tech, that is always just a few more iterations away from being incredible.
stickfigure
I play VR games on a $500 device. It's pretty incredible already.
sleepybrett
I mean we haven't really used airships for anything except war since the turn of the century. And even in war their usecases were very specialized. It seems like a solution looking for problems.
pintxo
I seem to have missed the business reasoning for this development?
Why are they investing money and time into this?
I thought the consensus is that airships are just too hard to dock/land, handle in anything than low wind scenarios that they are not much use?
notahacker
If you can handle the wind scenario and don't mind slow speed, you can run on electricity for a very long time (and have quite a large surface area to stick panels on) which makes opex look attractive compared with heavier than air flight as well as being climate friendly. There's also probably an element of "Sergey Brin believes in it and he's not short of money..."
danbruc
A German company had a go at this with CargoLifter [1] in the mid 90s. They wanted - as the name says - transport oversized loads that are hard to transport on road or would otherwise require an expensive transport like long detours on waterways. Their hangar is now an indoor water park [2].
pintxo
I am well aware of their fate.
Turns out, if you transport extremely heavy stuff, you'll either need to take on massive ballast when offloading or ditch much of your expensive Helium. Either is not helping with turning a profit.
Let alone that fact, that any of this will only work of there is no wind at both the start and end of your journey.
But I guess the swimming resort is kinda nice.
michaelt
> Turns out, if you transport extremely heavy stuff, you'll either need to take on massive ballast when offloading or ditch much of your expensive Helium.
Can you not compress the helium, when you no longer want it so buoyant?
danbruc
As compared to transporting passengers, transporting cargo seems like a good choice when it comes to the weather, you probably have a lot more freedom in scheduling flights, being able to wait for good conditions. With the ballast, did they not plan to compensate the weight of the cargo with water? Certainly adds complexity and probably also risk if you have to load a hundred tons of water into an airship relatively quickly, but does not sound completely unreasonable to me.
null
michaelt
1. A guy with $164 billion is willing to pay $250 million for it.
2. If in the future a Peak Oil type scenario arises, and electric planes aren't able to overcome issues of battery energy density, and power-to-gas doesn't come through either, some replacement form of air travel might be very useful. Low probability, but very high reward.
aetherson
#2 is fanciful.
sleepybrett
in scenario 2 people just start either digging a lot of canals or laying more train tracks.
vasco
Might be a billionaire yacht alternative. Think super yacht but on the sky.
evan_
That's basically the plot of Bioshock Infinite
flaque
they're a replacement for cargoships. If done right, they're faster than a cargoship, but could (maybe) carry lots of capacity for cheap, while also not requiring them to take the same routes as a ship.
deadbabe
A few of these hovering over cities at all times would make good police watch towers with aimable spotlights and docking hubs for police drones.
nwatson
They'll also be prime targets for drones.
ReptileMan
If we get serious about reducing emissions - airtravel has to go in its current form. So there could be an opening for lighter than air approach.
calmbonsai
Nah. The most likely scenarios are a switch to pure ammonia combustion and/or sourcing "all green" methane to make carbon-neutral or near-zero emissions flight. Unfortunately, ammonia combustion is inefficient and synthetic hydrocarbon fuel is far too expensive atm.
We'll never get away from the brutal physics:
1. Long flights require planes to get lighter (burn fuel) as they go further so battery power doesn't work.
2. Wings are just too damn efficient at producing lift.
3. Putting enough on-board safe-station-keeping power (weight) on an airship makes it a very poor airship.
4. A very good airship is least safe to fly precisely where is has the most potential to cause damage and loss of life.
ReptileMan
>1. Long flights require planes to get lighter (burn fuel) as they go further so battery power doesn't work.
Up to a critical density/weight/kwh, afterwards it doesn't matter.
cogman10
I just don't see how it's a better idea than high-speed rail.
Probably cheaper to deploy, but the capacity will always be low and speed slow.
I'm not one for an "either or" generally, but I really have a hard time seeing the benefit of blimps beyond "this is neat and kinda fun".
VyseofArcadia
Intra-continental I don't think anything beats high-speed rail. Inter-continental I don't think high speed rail is viable, unless you have a transatlantic locomotive in your pocket that you aren't telling anyone about.
gwbas1c
> I just don't see how it's a better idea than high-speed rail.
How can you build a railroad across an ocean?
Avicebron
"I don't see how it's a better idea than high-speed rail" is pretty much my follow up to almost any proposal for transportation improvements in the states, which critically are never rail, what wild is almost everyone I've ever spoken with agree and yet..crickets
pintxo
This would be such a big dent in humanity learning that the people on the other side of the world are just that: people.
I sincerely hope we will be able to maintain current air-travel by switching to efuels and similar means.
Humanity having to ditch air-travel at todays levels would be a massive social negative.
elictronic
We won’t. We still haven’t even started touching geo-engineering at scale yet.
Getting humanity to give up anything without either killing or enslaving a large swath is not happening or realistic. We can’t even get rid of nuclear weapon stockpiling which has a much lower positive vibe from nearly everyone.
bombcar
It's 2-4% at worst. While it might be nice to reduce, it's not pressing.
bryanlarsen
The transition is well under way for the big 3 carbon emission sources -- electricity generation, ground transportation and heating. After agriculture, air travel is one of the biggest remaining obstacles to net zero.
bell-cot
Yeah.
The opening paragraphs admit that Sergey Brin paid for it.
And the final paragraphs finally get past the "Big!, Shiny!!, Cool!!!" gushing, to admit that there don't seem to be any use cases.
Maybe Sergey is a steampunk fan?
pintxo
I can fully accept a "I like the idea and have the money" motive. But a journalist worth their money should make this clear.
bell-cot
> But a journalist worth their money...
The author did...eventually. After making sure that his article had collected all the Clicks, Time on Page, and whatever other metrics he needs to keep the BBC convinced that he's worth paying a journalist's salary to.
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.
svilen_dobrev
previous discussion ~1.5 year ago:
sleepybrett
More and more the present moment seems like a shitty echo of the gilded age.
jakedata
"Helium is less flammable than hydrogen" uh-huh
breakitmakeit
[dead]
6stringmerc
[dead]
I am old enough to have seen now 30 years of, "Maybe airships are coming back" articles.