Not a chance. If you’re paying for air freight it’s because you need something delivered now. If you don’t need it fast, then train/truck shipping is more cost effective.
While Pathfinder 1 can carry about four tons of cargo in addition to its crew, water ballast and fuel, future humanitarian airships will need much larger capacities.
By comparison, the Airbus A350-900 has a payload capacity of 53 tons, and the newer A350F version can carry 111 tons.
Even if they manage to triple the payload capacity, the A350F can carry 10x the weight.
If they send a bunch of them and they replace container ship traffic, however- how much less pollution is that?
Not saying they don’t face an extremely uphill battle to scale enough for that to make sense (we all know the green angle alone won’t be enough even if it should be…)
A single standard twenty-foot cargo container can carry ~20000 lbs (10 tons). This airship can’t even match half the capacity of one container. Modern cargo ships carry thousands of those containers, the largest about 24000. You would need to build 40000 airships to get roughly the carrying capacity of one container ship.
This isn’t an uphill battle, it’s completely infeasible.
Not a chance. If you’re paying for air freight it’s because you need something delivered now. If you don’t need it fast, then train/truck shipping is more cost effective.
By comparison, the Airbus A350-900 has a payload capacity of 53 tons, and the newer A350F version can carry 111 tons.
Even if they manage to triple the payload capacity, the A350F can carry 10x the weight.
Airship can land and take off from virtually any surface that allows that silly baloon to fit. Not just airports or air strips.
Sure, but so can a helicopter, which can also carry more weight and get there faster.
If they send a bunch of them and they replace container ship traffic, however- how much less pollution is that?
Not saying they don’t face an extremely uphill battle to scale enough for that to make sense (we all know the green angle alone won’t be enough even if it should be…)
A single standard twenty-foot cargo container can carry ~20000 lbs (10 tons). This airship can’t even match half the capacity of one container. Modern cargo ships carry thousands of those containers, the largest about 24000. You would need to build 40000 airships to get roughly the carrying capacity of one container ship.
This isn’t an uphill battle, it’s completely infeasible.