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There are companies trying to bring airships back. The Airlander 10 is expected to be flying flights over Spain in 2026.
While i would love to travel by airship, I dont think there would be a commercial success in airship passenger travel in the near future:
- travel times of multiple days means you probably need 2-3x the crew, compared with a plane on a 8h flight
- this also means a plane that is 4x as fast can make the same trip 4x more often, bringing in more money for the airline in the same amount of time
- you probably can't land on existing airports, because an airship the size of a large building would be crawling accross your airspace blocking all flight traffic, or shaken by the turbulences behind a large jet powered airliner
- new technology without any existing infrastructure is much more expensive than building on top of existing things
- tickets would be much more expensive than a commercial plane because of the reasons above, the lower passenger capacity and the fact that you have to carry more supplies (water + food for days multiplied by people on board) for a longer trip. Each passenger with cabin and supplies was calculated as 300kg weight on a transatlantic flight on the hindenburg
- Hindenburg could not fly in a direct straight line, because it travels at a height of only 400-600m. This means you had to go around high mountain ranges, because people and the combustion engines need oxygen which you dont have much above 4000m. However i dont know if this is still a problem with modern pressurized cabins, or if there is another limitation from the lifting gas...
The other problem with high altitudes is that the wind speeds up there tend to be very strong and fast. Aircraft can overcome them because they can travel at hundreds of kilometers an hour, (but it still has a significant effect on travel time) but airships trundle along at a speed roughly equivalent to that or the motorist on their driving test.
Could work more along the lines of a cruise ship though. Not as an efficient way to get somewhere but just to go float around doing vacation stuff.
Well, you can have a lot of space for casinos, shops and pools with waterslides on a cruise ship to entertain passengers because weight is not important. But on an airship...?
Not impractical really, according to Wikipedia even the old Hindenburg: "held 200,000 cubic metres (7,062,000 cu ft) of gas in 16 bags or cells with a useful lift of approximately 232 t (511,000 lb). This provided a margin above the 215 t (474,000 lb) average gross weight of the ship with fuel, equipment, 10,000 kg (22,000 lb) of mail and cargo, about 90 passengers and crew and their luggage."
So if it has a capacity of 40,000+ lb beyond all the needed crew, passengers, fuel, and whatever cargo with a 100 year old design using diesel engines I imagine you throw a small nuclear reactor for power in a modern design you could probably float around for a while with some pretty comfy accomodations.
There was a Wendigo video about how it could be used as a way of transporting goods as cargo since it isn't too time sensitive and it could be quite cheap compared to trucks and ships because of fuel iirc. Also for tourism since they can land vertically
Airlander 10
Nice.
now thats what I call a PAWG