Airships May Not Be Gone For Good

From here.

One particularly attractive aspect of airships, like airplanes, is that it isn't necessary to have infrastructure in place anywhere but the landing pads, and even those don't have to be very sophisticated.

Airships can serve Alaska while leaving it roadless. It can serve islands as easily as mainland destinations. Because they aren't noisy, landing pads can be closer to urban centers, reducing the length of the final leg of a delivery trip.

The prices in the chart may be overoptimistic, but that's O.K. Even at 20 cents per ton-mile (i.e. 2-4 times the estimated cost) and 85 mile per hour instead of 100 miles per hour, they are competitive with trucks. Even at 65 miles per hour, airships have an edge over trucks because they can fly in straight lines rather than using indirect roadways. And, they aren't delayed by traffic, and accidents, and road and bridge work. The cost savings of airships have a lot to do with having 2-12 times the freight for similar sized crews - and really, it is much easier to put an airship on cruise control than a semi-truck.

Payloads of 100 to 500 tons per airship are estimated. By comparison, a standard semi-truck in the U.S. or one freight car on a freight train, carries 20-40 tons (incidentally, at the low end, about the same amount of cargo as a C-130 military transport plane). A container ship typically carries on the order of 25,000 tons.

Airships, traveling at five times the speed of a freight ship over water, also provide a nice middle ground between very expensive and low volume airplane based cargo delivery, and very slow and inexpensive maritime freight. This has obvious military and civilian applications for medium value cargo that is time sensitive but heavy and expensive for airplane based cargo delivery.

And, the cost of building and maintaining roads and bridges is profoundly greater than the cost of building and maintaining cargo airship landing pads. An airship's altitude is easily higher than any building or tower on the ground, but lower than any kind of aircraft other than helicopters.

The linked analysis suggests that even a 5-15% market share would make cargo airships a 0.5 to 1.5 trillion dollar a year industry.