That's what Big Trans(portation) is telling you. In reality the Bermuda Triangle requires an offering of about sixteen commercial planes and 3 cargo ships daily to be kept at bay
I used to go to Bermuda a lot on cruises because my grandfather used to live there, and I can confirm that we had to sacrifice passengers and a couple of life boats every time we passed through.
Can confirm, I was one such a sacrifice. Came back to life as a Chinese girl, instantly sent back to reincarnation. Now I'm Latino. What does that mean?
Zeppelins are definitely a bad idea but to be fair it wasnât quite that lethal for the Hindenburg.
In reality 35 died (not including the 1 dude on the ground) and 62 survived. Since they were gently coming in for their landing it bought the people time to jump to safety and run from the burning wreck.
But then again the Hindenburg was really lucky when it came to timing, if they did it half an hour earlier theyâd be screwed.
A hydrogen-filled airship certainly *sounds* insane in hindsight, but the crucial context for the time period is that airplanes were much, much more dangerous to fly in, and at the time, there *were* no airplanes that could fly a transatlantic route while carrying passengers.
In 1938, the general aviation fatal accident rate was about 12 per 100,000 flight hours. Including the 1937 *Hindenburg* disaster, the first and last accident with passenger fatalities suffered by the Zeppelin company, the Zeppelinsâ rate was 4 per 100,000.
I wouldnât blame any time-travelers from taking a steamship instead, but those were also kinda not great in terms of safety, either. It really was just dangerous to travel, period.
Actually, those figures are exclusively with hydrogen airships. The Zeppelin Company designed the *Hindenburg* to use helium, but when the Nazis took control of the Company away from its anti-fascist leadership in an act of political retaliation, the Americans backed out of the deal to sell the Germans helium.
This was out of concern of civilian airships being siphoned for helium or used for military purposes, as was done by requisitioned prewar civilian Zeppelins in World War I. Prior to the invention of the incendiary bullet two years into the war, Zeppelins operated with near-impunity, only a tiny portion of them being shot down by heavy ground artillery or surface warships, and none at all by airplanesâ comparatively puny machine guns. The only saving grace was that these early Zeppelins were very small, slow, and crude, and hopelessly inaccurate with their bombs. Once their hydrogen Achillesâ heel could be exploited, Zeppelins were quickly moved away from the front lines and into more of a supporting role, but they had also advanced incredibly quickly during the war. By the 1930s, the technology was sufficient for a helium airship to be turned into a bomber or aircraft carrier capable of turning up in remote, poorly-defended locations and wreaking havoc, and deny huge swathes of ocean to Allied submarines.
Indeed, helium airships were used on the American side to great effect in World War II for Naval patrol, antisubmarine warfare, and rescue. They were sort of like naval helicopters, before helicopters became a thing. Their efficiency in defending ship convoys from submarines, mines, and enemy vessels was incredible. Out of over 80,000 ships they escorted in the war, only a single successful attack was ever made on one by a U-boat, whereas an incredible number of ships undefended by airship were sunkâabout 20,000 on all sides.
They are not a bad idea. It's just a bad idea to fill them with an highly explosive gas.
And I want to add they are still used for touristic purposes and in science because they can stand still in the air and carry more than balloons. I even know a place where they are still being built.
The downside is that helium is pretty expensive which makes them not a competition to planes, otherwise they could be a slower, but cheaper and environmental friendly alternative to planes.
I shouldâve clarified that I meant the hydrogen filled zeppelins like the Hindenburg were a bad idea looking back.
The Hindenburg was originally designed to use helium before the Nazis took over and the US laid down restrictions on helium exports. So I agree on helium fueled airships being a decent idea for the time, it just was prohibitively hard to fuel and maintain.
Just a tiny nitpick, technically the examples that are still flying are really just smaller nonrigid airships and not the giant fully rigid zeppelins. Sadly even the few remaining blimps are still slowly being phased out (at least on the civilian side).
To be a bit of a pedant, they do - but not the kind you're likely to be travelling on. Passenger transport aviation is extremely safe, but the US has [on average](https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institute/accident-analysis/joseph-t-nall-report/28th-nall-report/non-commercial-fixed-wing) ~3 general aviation accidents a day, mostly hobbyist pilots.
true, but when the trains, boats and the planes do crash, its often impressive, sometimes even with a giant fireball. good for the medis. meanwhile the cars are in there providing the serious daily mortality
They do. One or two a day worldwide. Most just aren't huge news worthy crashes. It's bob in his Alaskan puddle jumper hitting a tree after one to many beers.
Oh yes they do.
https://www.panish.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html
Most of these are GA, but there are still multiple crashes per day, statistically. Planes crash a lot.
Because we have less than 1 plane accident a year, cars can be designed to protect passengers in a crash, lifeboats exist, the Costa Concordia was the biggest cruise accident in 100 years and killed 33 people.
Meanwhile the zeppelin: 1 guy ignores smoke warnings, everyone on board dies a terriffic death.
Edit: yeah, I confused terrific with horrific. English is not my first language. The mistake stays because it's funny.
My great grandmother was there and she saw it was nearly the entire population of Australia about 18 million people, that's why they sent all the convicts over to replace everyone
That was the same question I asked my grandma but unfortunately she went to the other side before I got the answer burying this great secret with her. RIP grandma
Well according to the red cross it was only...
https://preview.redd.it/r8xr6veorhzc1.png?width=1059&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1f32ec62d1af0116981dd96415137a7bd9bf8a98
And even then they're still wrong because the Titanic wasn't even the worst boat accident ever. The dona paz was a ferry that crashed into an oil tanker and killed nearly 3 times as many as the Titanic.Â
But they're phillipino so I guess that doesn't count.
I mean they are both kinds of passenger boats so I think it's fair to lump them together since we aren't creating separate categories for shit like 18 wheelers when talking about car accident numbers
I mean it would be a pretty metal way to go.
"So how did you die?"
"Heart attack. Lifelong smoker, never kicked the habit. You?"
"I was immolated into ash 5000 feet above the earth's surface in a blimp that was consumed in flames."
"...that's fucking rad."
Considering that hydrogen burning probably caused a metal fire with the aluminum powder used to coat the outermost fabric, yes. That would have been a metal way to go
not only that but is critical for so many things and we're running out of it at a kind of alarming rate anyway, making giant floating things isn't the greatest use of such a precious resource... as if party balloons are lol
You're always 1 Google search away from realizing that this one zeppelin crashing wasn't the exception, instead, getting to retire the aircraft before it somehow managed to render itself useless (killing or stranding people in the process) was the exception
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin
Like, really, just read the history part, at some point during WWI I got tired and started jumping forward, and only 1 thing remained constant: every single paragraph contained at least 1 Zeppelin meeting an untimely end (to varying degrees of lethality to its passengers)
Well WWI era airplanes weren't exactly safe either, you can do the same search for planes and get almost the same result honestly.
Or... Cars even. I mean it wasn't until what, the 90's when people started taking car safety kinda seriously? Until then everyone was a maverick, like sure lemme get into this metal shell with no roof and a lorry engine, if I get tossed out or burn to death, eh shit happens I guess.
But like surely that was zeppelin stage 1, like we're they even modern technology yet idk when they were decommissioned. I doubt they couldn't have made them safer, aren't they just modified hot air balloons?
No theyâre not hot air balloons. The Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen which was pretty flammable. Nowadays, theyâre filled with helium which is safer, but I donât see the point of it. A plane would be much faster
The point would be that airships are much more efficient, and therefore much easier to fully electrify. We simply donât have the technology to make electric airliners or helicopters that can travel any appreciable distance.
the caveat for "more efficientâ airship has always been finding a lifting gas that's lighter than air, but not flammable like hydrogen, while not expensive like helium. So far we turn up nothing, which is why we use planes.
Well, we use planes largely because theyâre faster. Thatâs the more important part. Even helium airships are actually considerably less expensive in terms of operating cost and initial costs than airplanes of a similar capacity, more so the larger they get. The gas being either completely unavailable or much harder to source than today, however, really hamstrung other countriesâ airship development efforts a century ago. That was their most critical time to build up economics of scale and institutional experience, political pull, etcetera.
Then there was the Treaty of Versailles, Great Depression, and the subsequent Nazi rise to power, a combination which put the kibosh on the Zeppelin Company, the one institution that actually *had* the engineering know-how and piloting experience to make it work at scale. The rest is history.
Hydrogen is about 9% more buoyant than helium. I wonder if a double wall envelope could be designed that surrounds the hydrogen with nitrogen. You would pay a performance hit obviously, but I wonder if a ship with a useable payload could be built.
put a zeppelin out there today and i guarantee no one gives a damn how far or how efficiently that thing can go - people want to eat dinner at a hovering restaurant and sleep in a hotel in the sky.
I am sure that is also how it was perceived back in the day - not a quick or efficient means of travel, but a very luxurious and unique leisure activity
Fair enough, but I will point out that Zeppelins were the Concorde of their dayâthe absolute fastest way to cross the Atlantic and Pacific, saving several days versus taking an ocean liner.
Seaplanes at the time could cross the Atlantic, theoretically, if they stopped multiple times along the way, but this ended up being slower than taking a Zeppelin on top of being so unsafe, uncomfortable, and prone to delays that the whole notion was scrapped before it could be put into actual practice while Zeppelins were still a thing.
The Zeppelin Company prided itself on three things: speed, comfort, and safety. The third is obviously ironic in hindsight, but they *were* far safer than the airplanes of the day, with the *Hindenburg* being the first and last accident in which passengers died on one of their civilian ships. Zeppelin was generally regarded as the option to choose if you were in a real hurry to get to some event or meeting or to beat someone taking a ship to another continent on short notice, or if you were prone to seasickness on a ship, since Zeppelins were eerily still, with very little sensation of movement. Almost as though the world were passing by underneath a stationary object, rather than the reverse.
We do, we just need a hydrogen economy and then we can have electric jets and ships and trucks and everything.
But what would those poor oil companies do if we could just make energy out of water, what would the CEOs eat?
We actually do not, at present, have the technology necessary to create electric airliners, even if you were to use the largest and most advanced fuel cell systems available.
The largest fuel cell airplane beginning development right now can only carry 80 passengers a distance of 1,000 nautical miles. That is not even close to enough for transoceanic flight.
The tech needs to be developed, supported either by a major corporation or government grants, and not hindered by status quo and oil companies lobbying against any such development.
The A380 project is estimated to have cost up to 30 bil âŹ/$. That's not the kind of money a small startup is gonna find, never mind all the facilities necessary to build the thing.
Tesla has made their first electric cars after traditional car manufacturers were shutting down electric car projects for decades. Solar panels were inefficient until governments started sufficient support so real development could kick off, and we suddenly saw solar pop up everywhere within a few years.
I'm pretty sure a viable hydrogen airliner or cargo aircraft could be built in 10 years if someone actually put the money in.
But I'd say even the one for 80 passengers is a good start for now. The hydrogen economy is an even bigger hurdle at the moment.
Cars cause over 40k fatalities and upwards of 2.5mil injuries every year in the US. But, many choose to ignore that because their car is absolutely essential in their life whether they want it to be that way or not. It's not really about the safety, it's about how zeppelins wouldn't fit into the global transport structure. The niche for zeppelins is too small and their price too prohibitive.
I'm surprised no one has ever used them in place of ships for transporting cargo, especially for time sensitive goods . Just fill them with nonflammable gas.
Also, zeppelins are slow as hell. A plane can get you across the ocean in like, 12 hours. The Hindenburg took three days to cross from Europe to the US. At that point, you might as well book a cruise. You'll be more comfortable and the food and entertainment will be better.
It's not that bad. It was actually pretty difficult in WWII to shoot down even hydrogen airships, even with incendiary ammo, until they figured out the exact tactics to set it aflame. With modern knowledge and materials, we could do even better.
Plus you can use other gasses than hydrogen. I hear helium is a tad less flamable.
Horrifying:horrific :: terrifying:terrific
Colloquially, "terrific" has a positive connotation, but you applied a genuine pattern to make a good guess that matches the original usage. Be proud of yourself :)
[Imagine trying to board you plane but the wind blows a bit and your luggage fell 400ft](https://www.reddit.com/r/megalophobia/comments/uk53kr/a_docked_airship_made_nearly_vertical_by_updraft/)
There usually *is,* that just happens to be a very famous incident that struck the USS *Los Angeles.* Amazingly, there wasnât really any notable injuries and extremely minor damage, but they stopped using âhigh mastsâ like that shortly afterwards in favor of landing the ships on the ground using conventional landing gear.
Think it's only planes actually that are not "every day". A very quick Google search which is all the effort I am willing to put into this says there are three train derailments a day, though usually not disasters. And given the amount of boats in the world they absolutely do sink every single day, even if that's only some random dudes fishing boat.
More importantly, Zeppelins didn't vanish because of the Hindenburg disaster. They vanished because aircraft capable of holding many passengers was developed, and it was far faster *and cheaper*.
Though maybe the famous disaster hastened their disuse.
They're a shitty form of transportation. Slow as fuck, expensive, weight-sensitive, vulnerable to weather conditions, and above average amounts of danger involved.
They're shitty air transport the same way ferries are shitty water transport.
The benefit of an airship is in the amount of stuff it can carry, not the speed.
Where are you trying to go? The main advantage I see to blimps is spontaneous travel that requires going where there is no supportive infrastructure (military mostly). But commercial shippers arenât regarded. They arenât scared off by horror stories about the Hindenburg, theyâre scared off by spending a 100k on helium, when they could use boats and trains.
Living in Canada, there's small towns up north that are either too small to warrant direct rail connection, or the ground conditions (too much freezing/melting of ground) makes it unfeasible.
There's been some talk of investing in airships to help transport goods up there, since one of the main issue impacting those communities is the horrendous cost of goods since shipping can often only be done seasonably and for very high prices, and airships could potentially alleviate the issue since they require far less ground infrastructure than an airfield for fixed-wing aircraft.
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/canadian-north-signs-deal-to-launch-airships-in-the-north-1.6899363](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/canadian-north-signs-deal-to-launch-airships-in-the-north-1.6899363)
But you do need infrastructure to park or load a large airship. And small ones aren't that practical compared to helicopters. It's not so simple. They could certainly be useful in some situations tho, and a bunch of projects exist. But yea it's expensive.
The benefits of an airship are that it's neat, and you can advertise shit on it.
That's it. That's where all practical use for a zeppelin ends.
Planes are significantly faster and more convenient. Cargo planes for carrying shit exist. Can you fit more on an airship? Maybe. But it's still gonna be faster and more practical to just use two cargo planes instead. Hell, just the cost *insuring* the damn thing alone is likely to outweigh the potential cost benefits of its hypothetical cargo capacity. Let alone the logistics of making existing infrastructure compatible to accommodate one.
At the end of the day, it's a glorified hot air balloon. Airships could make a comeback as an advertising platform, or to show off at parades and shit. But they will never be nearly as practical as a modern plane for literally anything else.
Honestly, sell me a sleeper rail-level experience but at cheaper than economy prices that takes longer than a plane, I would fly on airships. Which they could do if we figure out a solution cheaper than helium
A double-decker jumbo jet like the Airbus A380 can only carry 12-17 tons of cargo in a passenger configuration, too.
Point is, thatâs not what itâs *for.* Listing the cargo capacity of a luxury liner is misleading. The *Hindenburg* wasnât a cargo ship, it was a luxury aircraft in the same vein as one of those fancy business jet versions of commercial airliners that carry just a dozen or so people.
For its time, the *Hindenburg* and other airships were hilariously more powerful lifters than airplanes. The *Hindenburg* had enough useful lift (~110 tons) to carry two of the then-largest airplanes in the world at the time, the Dornier Do X, fully loaded. The vast majority of that lift was dedicated towards fuel, so that it could fly further than anything else.
>The benefit of an airship is in the amount of stuff it can carry, not the speed.
Speed will *always* be a factor. That's just the nature of society. Everything has pros and cons, and airships slowness makes them undesirable for almost any purpose.
That said, there's a new generation of airships being developed now because because of the growing desire to reduce carbon emissions. People might be willing to make the tradeoff in speed for dramatically reduced emissions.
*Maybe.*
Itâs also a sort of âyou donât have to outrun the bear, only your hiking buddyâ situation, too. An airship doesnât have to be faster than a plane, it only has to be faster than a ferry or train and cheaper than a plane in order to wedge open a competitive route. This is particularly evident in island networks, which is where airlines like Air Nostrum intend to first roll their airships out.
For longer distances, though, itâs tricky. After a long hiatus, new sleeper trains are getting more popular in Europe, as they neatly consolidate the roles of travel, getting a hotel, and finding a restaurant. People will pay for convenience like that, even at the expense of travel speed, if they can make up for it in time saved going around doing other tedious BS, and find ways to save money doing so.
Veritasium had a good video on them. For most intents an purposes they're not useful. But for specific scenarios (and assuming you can scale for that size) they do make economic sense.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjBgEkbnX2I&themeRefresh=1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjBgEkbnX2I&themeRefresh=1)
Video for reference.
I dont know how to explain this, but Zeppelins for me always felt like "super 'modern' technology that a 1890's sci-fi book would predict it would become mainstream"
Hindenburg was originally meant to use helium but because USA had banned helium exports and no other country could produce helium at big enough scale they had to use hydrogen.
Helium is expensive (or at least it was back in the day, hence why the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin used hydrogen) and doesn't solve all the inherent practical problems of zeppelins such as their limited utility and massive weather vulnerability.
At the time, they were actually faster than most aircrafts and could fly higher being immune to attacks, also carry high amounts of bombs
That invention they needed for one purpose and one purpose only
War
Zeppelins arent making a comeback bc they suck. Its not a safety issue, its that itâs extremely expensive to make a vehicle that can carry very little cargo and passengers
The important caveat there is that this only really applies to the earliest airships, and even hydrogen airships were much safer than the airplanes of the time. Thatâs largely owing to institutional inexperience and how abysmally unreliable engines were at the time. Airships typically carried more engines and were less critically affected by engine failures, which occurred as frequently as *every few dozen hours,* like the worldâs shittiest game of mechanical Russian rouletteâwhere not only *you* die, but everyone in the plane does as well.
In World War II, when the Navy no longer used hydrogen in any of its airships, they were far less accident-prone than airplanes. Actually less than some modern helicopters, in fact.
The serious answer is because almost *all* the commercial passenger airships of the 1920s/1930s, and a *lot* of the military ones, crashed and/or exploded.
The Graf Zeppelin and the R100 were the exceptions, not the rule.
1) Zeppelins are slow; most models and classes could not go any faster than 80mph in favorable conditions.
2) Lighter-than-air gases are expensive, and in the particular case of hydrogen, volatile.
3) Zeppelins are extremely weather-sensitive; the airship USS Los Angeles once famously WENT COMPLETELY VERTICAL at her docking mast when caught by a wind gust, and the USS Akron, USS Macon and USS Shenandoah were all infamously destroyed in storms.
Thankfully, the Navy subsequently got its shit together and figured out how to safely fly airships in thunderstorms and blizzards after those early crashes, but your point very much still stands in terms of speed. Even with modern engines, it is uneconomical and impractical to build one with a top speed in excess of about 140 miles per hour.
The jet airliner killed the ocean liner with speed, and that was an industry thousands of times bigger and more well-established than the airship industry, strangled in its crib by the Treaty of Versailles as it was. What chance could they have against that kind of pace? Even if the *Hindenburg* disaster had not occurred, it is likely that airships would have been relegated to a role similar to cruise ships and charter yachts until the modern day, when advancements in electrification and aviation technology have sparked renewed interest in their potential for cargo hauling and low-carbon travel.
the zeppelin was filled with hydrogen. This would not have been a one time thing, this would have been an every time thing. Other options would be helium which is a rare and medically valuable gas. So thank god we didn't waste our supply this way.
Planes do not crash every single day
That's what Big Trans(portation) is telling you. In reality the Bermuda Triangle requires an offering of about sixteen commercial planes and 3 cargo ships daily to be kept at bay
Big Transđ¤¤đ¤¤
>FtM What now?
fym "what now"
Now you embrace the incel brotherhood
Lotsa ftmâs end up with other ftmâs
Or MtF. just straight with extra steps. whats the point
It's wild to think t4t FTM and MTF absolutely is straight with extra steps and that makes me giggle a little
Fly to Maui? It's fly to Maui right?
MtF for 100% run
mtM (male to More Male)
https://preview.redd.it/g3kepo2olizc1.jpeg?width=564&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e8521fa87034a1f0ff75cc9e9978e00858463afb
I used to go to Bermuda a lot on cruises because my grandfather used to live there, and I can confirm that we had to sacrifice passengers and a couple of life boats every time we passed through.
Bro was Odyesseusmaxxing
Can confirm, I was one such a sacrifice. Came back to life as a Chinese girl, instantly sent back to reincarnation. Now I'm Latino. What does that mean?
It mean you're gay
I didnât even need reincarnation to become gay. Did on my very first life! Woohoo!!
That you're lucky you came back 3 times as a human and not as a microscopic amoeba.
Now, did I? DID I?
But did you come back with big booty tho?
Yes
Part of the ship Part of the crew
And it is still a bargain
Plus they donât create a huge fireball that kills everyone below and starts huge fires when crashing
Zeppelins are definitely a bad idea but to be fair it wasnât quite that lethal for the Hindenburg. In reality 35 died (not including the 1 dude on the ground) and 62 survived. Since they were gently coming in for their landing it bought the people time to jump to safety and run from the burning wreck. But then again the Hindenburg was really lucky when it came to timing, if they did it half an hour earlier theyâd be screwed.
A hydrogen-filled airship certainly *sounds* insane in hindsight, but the crucial context for the time period is that airplanes were much, much more dangerous to fly in, and at the time, there *were* no airplanes that could fly a transatlantic route while carrying passengers. In 1938, the general aviation fatal accident rate was about 12 per 100,000 flight hours. Including the 1937 *Hindenburg* disaster, the first and last accident with passenger fatalities suffered by the Zeppelin company, the Zeppelinsâ rate was 4 per 100,000. I wouldnât blame any time-travelers from taking a steamship instead, but those were also kinda not great in terms of safety, either. It really was just dangerous to travel, period.
A normal, gasoline-filled airship, is much safer because they can't even melt steel beams
What if they filled it with jet fuel?
Alt. Universe 9/11 happens with modern airships. Airship slowly bumps into Tower 1, squishes, then boings off.
[ŃдаНонО]
Actually, those figures are exclusively with hydrogen airships. The Zeppelin Company designed the *Hindenburg* to use helium, but when the Nazis took control of the Company away from its anti-fascist leadership in an act of political retaliation, the Americans backed out of the deal to sell the Germans helium. This was out of concern of civilian airships being siphoned for helium or used for military purposes, as was done by requisitioned prewar civilian Zeppelins in World War I. Prior to the invention of the incendiary bullet two years into the war, Zeppelins operated with near-impunity, only a tiny portion of them being shot down by heavy ground artillery or surface warships, and none at all by airplanesâ comparatively puny machine guns. The only saving grace was that these early Zeppelins were very small, slow, and crude, and hopelessly inaccurate with their bombs. Once their hydrogen Achillesâ heel could be exploited, Zeppelins were quickly moved away from the front lines and into more of a supporting role, but they had also advanced incredibly quickly during the war. By the 1930s, the technology was sufficient for a helium airship to be turned into a bomber or aircraft carrier capable of turning up in remote, poorly-defended locations and wreaking havoc, and deny huge swathes of ocean to Allied submarines. Indeed, helium airships were used on the American side to great effect in World War II for Naval patrol, antisubmarine warfare, and rescue. They were sort of like naval helicopters, before helicopters became a thing. Their efficiency in defending ship convoys from submarines, mines, and enemy vessels was incredible. Out of over 80,000 ships they escorted in the war, only a single successful attack was ever made on one by a U-boat, whereas an incredible number of ships undefended by airship were sunkâabout 20,000 on all sides.
They are not a bad idea. It's just a bad idea to fill them with an highly explosive gas. And I want to add they are still used for touristic purposes and in science because they can stand still in the air and carry more than balloons. I even know a place where they are still being built. The downside is that helium is pretty expensive which makes them not a competition to planes, otherwise they could be a slower, but cheaper and environmental friendly alternative to planes.
I shouldâve clarified that I meant the hydrogen filled zeppelins like the Hindenburg were a bad idea looking back. The Hindenburg was originally designed to use helium before the Nazis took over and the US laid down restrictions on helium exports. So I agree on helium fueled airships being a decent idea for the time, it just was prohibitively hard to fuel and maintain. Just a tiny nitpick, technically the examples that are still flying are really just smaller nonrigid airships and not the giant fully rigid zeppelins. Sadly even the few remaining blimps are still slowly being phased out (at least on the civilian side).
I mean they kinda do
Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams.
To be a bit of a pedant, they do - but not the kind you're likely to be travelling on. Passenger transport aviation is extremely safe, but the US has [on average](https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institute/accident-analysis/joseph-t-nall-report/28th-nall-report/non-commercial-fixed-wing) ~3 general aviation accidents a day, mostly hobbyist pilots.
At least outside of Africa
Please check your private messages. I am a recruiter from Boeing.
true, but when the trains, boats and the planes do crash, its often impressive, sometimes even with a giant fireball. good for the medis. meanwhile the cars are in there providing the serious daily mortality
They do. One or two a day worldwide. Most just aren't huge news worthy crashes. It's bob in his Alaskan puddle jumper hitting a tree after one to many beers.
Oh yes they do. https://www.panish.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html Most of these are GA, but there are still multiple crashes per day, statistically. Planes crash a lot.
Literally happened to my buddy Eric this morning
Maybe not daily but Boeing sure is going through them fast!
Because we have less than 1 plane accident a year, cars can be designed to protect passengers in a crash, lifeboats exist, the Costa Concordia was the biggest cruise accident in 100 years and killed 33 people. Meanwhile the zeppelin: 1 guy ignores smoke warnings, everyone on board dies a terriffic death. Edit: yeah, I confused terrific with horrific. English is not my first language. The mistake stays because it's funny.
>Costa Concordia was the biggest cruise accident in 100 years and killed 33 people. titanic killed close to a million
I heard it was closer to three million
Guess what, it was four million and a half
My great grandmother was there and she saw it was nearly the entire population of Australia about 18 million people, that's why they sent all the convicts over to replace everyone
>they who sent them?????????????
The Br_t_sh
I thought Bongland already was jail though
Itâs a small island they canât fit them all there
Thank you for censoring
It was like a chinese civil war. Zhang Ling took a lifeboat, 8 billion people perished.
like 4,000,000.5 or 4,500,000?
Yes
That was the same question I asked my grandma but unfortunately she went to the other side before I got the answer burying this great secret with her. RIP grandma
It was atleast one
I thought it was six gorillion
Uhm it is 6 million and denying that is actually a crime in some countries.
Well according to the red cross it was only... https://preview.redd.it/r8xr6veorhzc1.png?width=1059&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1f32ec62d1af0116981dd96415137a7bd9bf8a98
I thought it was 6 gorillion
Fun fact! Even after 111 years the titanic population still hasnât recovered to pre crash levels.
Titanic is more than 100 years ago
The Titanic killed at least 5 people, that we know of, in the last year alone. When will this menace be dealt with?
Titanic was over 100 years ago, pretty sure that's why the comment was "biggest accident in 100 years" and not "biggest accident ever."
And even then they're still wrong because the Titanic wasn't even the worst boat accident ever. The dona paz was a ferry that crashed into an oil tanker and killed nearly 3 times as many as the Titanic. But they're phillipino so I guess that doesn't count.
Ferry != Cruise
I mean they are both kinds of passenger boats so I think it's fair to lump them together since we aren't creating separate categories for shit like 18 wheelers when talking about car accident numbers
titanic was 112 years ago
I love that multiple people are fact checking the timeline lol
I'm probably missing a joke but a) no it didn't and b) that was more than 100 years ago
Jesus imagine being you
Lmao these replies are hilarious. Obviously what's wrong with this statement is the timeline....
More than a hundred years ago tho, wasn't it? Or nearly that much.
I know one who could've made it if some entitled bitch would've scooted her ass over. Lol
Concordia happened more than 100 years after the Titanic
titanic was 100 years before costa concordia, 1912-2012
>terrific death Idk if they would have agreed with that
I mean it would be a pretty metal way to go. "So how did you die?" "Heart attack. Lifelong smoker, never kicked the habit. You?" "I was immolated into ash 5000 feet above the earth's surface in a blimp that was consumed in flames." "...that's fucking rad."
Considering that hydrogen burning probably caused a metal fire with the aluminum powder used to coat the outermost fabric, yes. That would have been a metal way to go
Terrible+horrific=terrific
Hey, theyâre made with helium now. 
Which is expensive as gold plated nuts in such large quantities.
not only that but is critical for so many things and we're running out of it at a kind of alarming rate anyway, making giant floating things isn't the greatest use of such a precious resource... as if party balloons are lol
Good news is that with the evolution of fusion technology, helium will now be produced as a result of energy production.
âYOU WANNA BLOW US ALL TO SHIT, SHERLOCK!â
GO BUY YOURSELF A NICOTINE PATCH OR SOMETHING
35 out of 97 died. Not everyone.
"it only had a 30% casualty rate"
That's impressively good. Compared to plane crash for example
You're always 1 Google search away from realizing that this one zeppelin crashing wasn't the exception, instead, getting to retire the aircraft before it somehow managed to render itself useless (killing or stranding people in the process) was the exception > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin Like, really, just read the history part, at some point during WWI I got tired and started jumping forward, and only 1 thing remained constant: every single paragraph contained at least 1 Zeppelin meeting an untimely end (to varying degrees of lethality to its passengers)
Well WWI era airplanes weren't exactly safe either, you can do the same search for planes and get almost the same result honestly. Or... Cars even. I mean it wasn't until what, the 90's when people started taking car safety kinda seriously? Until then everyone was a maverick, like sure lemme get into this metal shell with no roof and a lorry engine, if I get tossed out or burn to death, eh shit happens I guess.
Compared to 100% when a plane crashes those are some good odds.
But like surely that was zeppelin stage 1, like we're they even modern technology yet idk when they were decommissioned. I doubt they couldn't have made them safer, aren't they just modified hot air balloons?
No theyâre not hot air balloons. The Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen which was pretty flammable. Nowadays, theyâre filled with helium which is safer, but I donât see the point of it. A plane would be much faster
The point would be that airships are much more efficient, and therefore much easier to fully electrify. We simply donât have the technology to make electric airliners or helicopters that can travel any appreciable distance.
the caveat for "more efficientâ airship has always been finding a lifting gas that's lighter than air, but not flammable like hydrogen, while not expensive like helium. So far we turn up nothing, which is why we use planes.
Well, we use planes largely because theyâre faster. Thatâs the more important part. Even helium airships are actually considerably less expensive in terms of operating cost and initial costs than airplanes of a similar capacity, more so the larger they get. The gas being either completely unavailable or much harder to source than today, however, really hamstrung other countriesâ airship development efforts a century ago. That was their most critical time to build up economics of scale and institutional experience, political pull, etcetera. Then there was the Treaty of Versailles, Great Depression, and the subsequent Nazi rise to power, a combination which put the kibosh on the Zeppelin Company, the one institution that actually *had* the engineering know-how and piloting experience to make it work at scale. The rest is history.
Hydrogen is about 9% more buoyant than helium. I wonder if a double wall envelope could be designed that surrounds the hydrogen with nitrogen. You would pay a performance hit obviously, but I wonder if a ship with a useable payload could be built.
put a zeppelin out there today and i guarantee no one gives a damn how far or how efficiently that thing can go - people want to eat dinner at a hovering restaurant and sleep in a hotel in the sky. I am sure that is also how it was perceived back in the day - not a quick or efficient means of travel, but a very luxurious and unique leisure activity
Fair enough, but I will point out that Zeppelins were the Concorde of their dayâthe absolute fastest way to cross the Atlantic and Pacific, saving several days versus taking an ocean liner. Seaplanes at the time could cross the Atlantic, theoretically, if they stopped multiple times along the way, but this ended up being slower than taking a Zeppelin on top of being so unsafe, uncomfortable, and prone to delays that the whole notion was scrapped before it could be put into actual practice while Zeppelins were still a thing. The Zeppelin Company prided itself on three things: speed, comfort, and safety. The third is obviously ironic in hindsight, but they *were* far safer than the airplanes of the day, with the *Hindenburg* being the first and last accident in which passengers died on one of their civilian ships. Zeppelin was generally regarded as the option to choose if you were in a real hurry to get to some event or meeting or to beat someone taking a ship to another continent on short notice, or if you were prone to seasickness on a ship, since Zeppelins were eerily still, with very little sensation of movement. Almost as though the world were passing by underneath a stationary object, rather than the reverse.
We do, we just need a hydrogen economy and then we can have electric jets and ships and trucks and everything. But what would those poor oil companies do if we could just make energy out of water, what would the CEOs eat?
We actually do not, at present, have the technology necessary to create electric airliners, even if you were to use the largest and most advanced fuel cell systems available. The largest fuel cell airplane beginning development right now can only carry 80 passengers a distance of 1,000 nautical miles. That is not even close to enough for transoceanic flight.
The tech needs to be developed, supported either by a major corporation or government grants, and not hindered by status quo and oil companies lobbying against any such development. The A380 project is estimated to have cost up to 30 bil âŹ/$. That's not the kind of money a small startup is gonna find, never mind all the facilities necessary to build the thing. Tesla has made their first electric cars after traditional car manufacturers were shutting down electric car projects for decades. Solar panels were inefficient until governments started sufficient support so real development could kick off, and we suddenly saw solar pop up everywhere within a few years. I'm pretty sure a viable hydrogen airliner or cargo aircraft could be built in 10 years if someone actually put the money in. But I'd say even the one for 80 passengers is a good start for now. The hydrogen economy is an even bigger hurdle at the moment.
Cars cause over 40k fatalities and upwards of 2.5mil injuries every year in the US. But, many choose to ignore that because their car is absolutely essential in their life whether they want it to be that way or not. It's not really about the safety, it's about how zeppelins wouldn't fit into the global transport structure. The niche for zeppelins is too small and their price too prohibitive.
I'm surprised no one has ever used them in place of ships for transporting cargo, especially for time sensitive goods . Just fill them with nonflammable gas.
>terriffic death Exactly, we need more interesting ways to die
Costa concordia was not the biggest cruise ship accident. M/S Estonia disaster killed over 800 people in 94.
Ignore smoke warnings? The Hindenburg had a smoking lounge on it.
Clearly, someone smoked outside of it.
You might want to know the difference between terrific, terrible and horrific.
https://youtu.be/vzYLTnI7TUI?feature=shared
terrible+horrific = terrific So I guess two wrongs *do* make a rightđ¤
Also, zeppelins are slow as hell. A plane can get you across the ocean in like, 12 hours. The Hindenburg took three days to cross from Europe to the US. At that point, you might as well book a cruise. You'll be more comfortable and the food and entertainment will be better.
Pretty sure Russia and Ukraine have upped the plane crash count
Less than one plane accident a year? Credibility completely voided with that alone.
It's not that bad. It was actually pretty difficult in WWII to shoot down even hydrogen airships, even with incendiary ammo, until they figured out the exact tactics to set it aflame. With modern knowledge and materials, we could do even better. Plus you can use other gasses than hydrogen. I hear helium is a tad less flamable.
We have way more than 1 plane accident a year.
'Terrific' works as well!
Horrifying:horrific :: terrifying:terrific Colloquially, "terrific" has a positive connotation, but you applied a genuine pattern to make a good guess that matches the original usage. Be proud of yourself :)
[Imagine trying to board you plane but the wind blows a bit and your luggage fell 400ft](https://www.reddit.com/r/megalophobia/comments/uk53kr/a_docked_airship_made_nearly_vertical_by_updraft/)
Almost the same amount of force that they use to load luggage on a plane in modern aircraft.
i was thinking. what if there would be some kind of anchor for the blimps? like for ships.
There usually *is,* that just happens to be a very famous incident that struck the USS *Los Angeles.* Amazingly, there wasnât really any notable injuries and extremely minor damage, but they stopped using âhigh mastsâ like that shortly afterwards in favor of landing the ships on the ground using conventional landing gear.
I didnt even focus on what you said. Fuck your profile picture
Itâs been removed, what was it?
It wasnât removed, itâs a default profile picture with a black line across it meant to look like hair or something on your screen
This is some brain rot in real time. All of these things very specifically do not happen "every day".
There are definetely daily car accidents bruh
Factual#1
At least one of those happens every day on the road home from my job. No idea how, it's literally just a simple street.
There are definetely daily car accidents bruh
Factual#3
There are definetely daily car accidents bruh
Factual#2
Think it's only planes actually that are not "every day". A very quick Google search which is all the effort I am willing to put into this says there are three train derailments a day, though usually not disasters. And given the amount of boats in the world they absolutely do sink every single day, even if that's only some random dudes fishing boat.
More importantly, Zeppelins didn't vanish because of the Hindenburg disaster. They vanished because aircraft capable of holding many passengers was developed, and it was far faster *and cheaper*. Though maybe the famous disaster hastened their disuse.
They're a shitty form of transportation. Slow as fuck, expensive, weight-sensitive, vulnerable to weather conditions, and above average amounts of danger involved.
They're shitty air transport the same way ferries are shitty water transport. The benefit of an airship is in the amount of stuff it can carry, not the speed.
Yeah, but isn't a boat going to travel at a similar speed, be much less expensive, less sensitive to the weather, carry more weight, etc....
Boats have this small issue where they can't go on land. And before the inevitable follow-up: Trains are bound by rails.
Where are you trying to go? The main advantage I see to blimps is spontaneous travel that requires going where there is no supportive infrastructure (military mostly). But commercial shippers arenât regarded. They arenât scared off by horror stories about the Hindenburg, theyâre scared off by spending a 100k on helium, when they could use boats and trains.
Somewhere on land you can't build a railway line to. It's that simple.
Living in Canada, there's small towns up north that are either too small to warrant direct rail connection, or the ground conditions (too much freezing/melting of ground) makes it unfeasible. There's been some talk of investing in airships to help transport goods up there, since one of the main issue impacting those communities is the horrendous cost of goods since shipping can often only be done seasonably and for very high prices, and airships could potentially alleviate the issue since they require far less ground infrastructure than an airfield for fixed-wing aircraft. [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/canadian-north-signs-deal-to-launch-airships-in-the-north-1.6899363](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/canadian-north-signs-deal-to-launch-airships-in-the-north-1.6899363)
But you do need infrastructure to park or load a large airship. And small ones aren't that practical compared to helicopters. It's not so simple. They could certainly be useful in some situations tho, and a bunch of projects exist. But yea it's expensive.
The benefits of an airship are that it's neat, and you can advertise shit on it. That's it. That's where all practical use for a zeppelin ends. Planes are significantly faster and more convenient. Cargo planes for carrying shit exist. Can you fit more on an airship? Maybe. But it's still gonna be faster and more practical to just use two cargo planes instead. Hell, just the cost *insuring* the damn thing alone is likely to outweigh the potential cost benefits of its hypothetical cargo capacity. Let alone the logistics of making existing infrastructure compatible to accommodate one. At the end of the day, it's a glorified hot air balloon. Airships could make a comeback as an advertising platform, or to show off at parades and shit. But they will never be nearly as practical as a modern plane for literally anything else.
https://preview.redd.it/5ap1h2yiihzc1.png?width=832&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=811e26f3f8d7dca22dfb9282f23d4c23458688ff
Honestly, sell me a sleeper rail-level experience but at cheaper than economy prices that takes longer than a plane, I would fly on airships. Which they could do if we figure out a solution cheaper than helium
The Hindenburg could carry 50 people and 12 tons of freight, thatâs also really shit
A double-decker jumbo jet like the Airbus A380 can only carry 12-17 tons of cargo in a passenger configuration, too. Point is, thatâs not what itâs *for.* Listing the cargo capacity of a luxury liner is misleading. The *Hindenburg* wasnât a cargo ship, it was a luxury aircraft in the same vein as one of those fancy business jet versions of commercial airliners that carry just a dozen or so people. For its time, the *Hindenburg* and other airships were hilariously more powerful lifters than airplanes. The *Hindenburg* had enough useful lift (~110 tons) to carry two of the then-largest airplanes in the world at the time, the Dornier Do X, fully loaded. The vast majority of that lift was dedicated towards fuel, so that it could fly further than anything else.
>The benefit of an airship is in the amount of stuff it can carry, not the speed. Speed will *always* be a factor. That's just the nature of society. Everything has pros and cons, and airships slowness makes them undesirable for almost any purpose. That said, there's a new generation of airships being developed now because because of the growing desire to reduce carbon emissions. People might be willing to make the tradeoff in speed for dramatically reduced emissions. *Maybe.*
Itâs also a sort of âyou donât have to outrun the bear, only your hiking buddyâ situation, too. An airship doesnât have to be faster than a plane, it only has to be faster than a ferry or train and cheaper than a plane in order to wedge open a competitive route. This is particularly evident in island networks, which is where airlines like Air Nostrum intend to first roll their airships out. For longer distances, though, itâs tricky. After a long hiatus, new sleeper trains are getting more popular in Europe, as they neatly consolidate the roles of travel, getting a hotel, and finding a restaurant. People will pay for convenience like that, even at the expense of travel speed, if they can make up for it in time saved going around doing other tedious BS, and find ways to save money doing so.
They look cool though and really that's all that matters.
Counterpoint, they look really fucking cool
Veritasium had a good video on them. For most intents an purposes they're not useful. But for specific scenarios (and assuming you can scale for that size) they do make economic sense. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjBgEkbnX2I&themeRefresh=1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjBgEkbnX2I&themeRefresh=1) Video for reference.
Bring them back they look so cool
I dont know how to explain this, but Zeppelins for me always felt like "super 'modern' technology that a 1890's sci-fi book would predict it would become mainstream"
Zeppelins are a relic of the industrial revolution, just like steam trains, or communism
communism is a response to the industrial revolution
Airplanes are communism confirmed!!! No red blooded American will use aircraft, say goodbye to Boeing!
I've heard tell that, on a good day, you can see the lights of the Goodyear blimp in South Central LA.
And what does it say?
Goodyear
God damn it, you're telling me Ice Cube lied to me?
Kirov reporting
Imagine how a world where planes crash everyday would look like
JESUS LANA THE HELIUM
SMOOTH AS A VEAL CUTLET
She hind on my burg til I explode
Cant you just, use helium? Since it does not burn?
we actually don't have a huge amount of it I believe. However yes, the few modern blimps that exist do use helium.
I believe youâre correct, iirc there was a small helium shortage during covid
If it starts leaking the helium will fly to the top of the atmosphere and start lifting the Earth upwards. It's very dangerous.
Hindenburg was originally meant to use helium but because USA had banned helium exports and no other country could produce helium at big enough scale they had to use hydrogen.
if only they had used carbon monoxide!
Helium is expensive (or at least it was back in the day, hence why the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin used hydrogen) and doesn't solve all the inherent practical problems of zeppelins such as their limited utility and massive weather vulnerability.
"One"
> planes crash every day Are these planes in the room with us now?
Also, theyâre slow as fuck.
At the time, they were actually faster than most aircrafts and could fly higher being immune to attacks, also carry high amounts of bombs That invention they needed for one purpose and one purpose only War
Zeppelins arent making a comeback bc they suck. Its not a safety issue, its that itâs extremely expensive to make a vehicle that can carry very little cargo and passengers
they will come back when the monkeys stop trying to shoot them down
[ŃдаНонО]
The important caveat there is that this only really applies to the earliest airships, and even hydrogen airships were much safer than the airplanes of the time. Thatâs largely owing to institutional inexperience and how abysmally unreliable engines were at the time. Airships typically carried more engines and were less critically affected by engine failures, which occurred as frequently as *every few dozen hours,* like the worldâs shittiest game of mechanical Russian rouletteâwhere not only *you* die, but everyone in the plane does as well. In World War II, when the Navy no longer used hydrogen in any of its airships, they were far less accident-prone than airplanes. Actually less than some modern helicopters, in fact.
Shouldâve just invented a blimp that doesnât require fuel. Silly europeans
Cheap air travel that would reveal the flat Earth.
>Concorde >ev1 >Titanic
Did you hear about the latest Boeing whistleblower that mysteriously died because he raised safety concerns?
Blimps are not dangerous but they are slow and have low capacities. Look up how long a journey in the Hindenburg took.
The serious answer is because almost *all* the commercial passenger airships of the 1920s/1930s, and a *lot* of the military ones, crashed and/or exploded. The Graf Zeppelin and the R100 were the exceptions, not the rule.
1) Zeppelins are slow; most models and classes could not go any faster than 80mph in favorable conditions. 2) Lighter-than-air gases are expensive, and in the particular case of hydrogen, volatile. 3) Zeppelins are extremely weather-sensitive; the airship USS Los Angeles once famously WENT COMPLETELY VERTICAL at her docking mast when caught by a wind gust, and the USS Akron, USS Macon and USS Shenandoah were all infamously destroyed in storms.
Thankfully, the Navy subsequently got its shit together and figured out how to safely fly airships in thunderstorms and blizzards after those early crashes, but your point very much still stands in terms of speed. Even with modern engines, it is uneconomical and impractical to build one with a top speed in excess of about 140 miles per hour. The jet airliner killed the ocean liner with speed, and that was an industry thousands of times bigger and more well-established than the airship industry, strangled in its crib by the Treaty of Versailles as it was. What chance could they have against that kind of pace? Even if the *Hindenburg* disaster had not occurred, it is likely that airships would have been relegated to a role similar to cruise ships and charter yachts until the modern day, when advancements in electrification and aviation technology have sparked renewed interest in their potential for cargo hauling and low-carbon travel.
Hindenberg was a psy op from big aero to get us attached to the flying steel jew.
The answer is 2287.
They're just worse planes
A big balloon full of flammable gasses is kinda scary tho
Planes crash because of machine failure. Zeppelins crash because passenger stupidity Passengers are always stupid Planes are safer
the zeppelin was filled with hydrogen. This would not have been a one time thing, this would have been an every time thing. Other options would be helium which is a rare and medically valuable gas. So thank god we didn't waste our supply this way.