Several companies want to bring the zeppelin back
The airship Airlander 10 from Great Britain. (Image: HAV)
The move away from traveling by plane is bringing an almost forgotten means of transport back into the focus of a public willing to travel: the zeppelin. That sounds amazing, but it isn’t.
Airplanes are heavy and cannot be electrified from now on. Zeppelins, on the other hand, are light and, even with conventional propulsion, cause less than a tenth of the carbon dioxide emissions of a conventional passenger aircraft. The internal combustion engines can also be exchanged for electric drives relatively easily. Various companies are working on appropriate aircraft.
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Airships can compete with airplanes
There’s the British company, for example Hybrid air vehicles (HAV), which turned their airship, originally developed for reconnaissance purposes for the military, into one for civil aviation. The Airlander 10 is to go into regular flight operations by 2025 – initially with four conventional diesel engines. Work is in progress on electrification.
Travel comfortably – in the Airlander 10. (Image: HAV)
The Airlander 10 should be able to transport 100 passengers 7,400 kilometers. A flight from Germany to Mallorca would take more than four hours instead of around one, but this time consumption would not be absurdly high. In intercontinental operations, zeppelins can at least keep up with fast ships.
Such an airship is also to be built and used in Russia to connect remote and climatically difficult areas such as Siberia to other parts of the country. The creators of the Aerosmena, so the working title of the project, have in mind a circular shape that can carry different loads in four sizes and should be able to fly at up to 250 kilometers per hour. The first aircraft are to be expected from 2024.
In the USA, Google co-founder Sergej Brin supports the airship project LTA Research.
There is already tourist use
Other manufacturers such as the German Zeppelin NT or the Israeli Atlas LTA want to keep the airships rather small and use them for tourist purposes, such as sightseeing flights. These airships only carry a few dozen passengers, similar to the Hindenburg, whose spectacular accident over 100 years ago ended the era of the airships quite abruptly. If you are more interested in the prospects of aviation with zeppelins, be yourselves this post from the 1E9 community recommended.
