this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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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.
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.
"a bunch"?
Container ships can carry over 200K tons
If they are fully automated and solar powered, might be useful for shipping on the cheap if you have a swarm of it.
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.
How much does it cost to send that freight at that speed though?
As airships get bigger and bigger they'll be able to handle more cargo, and they'll be a nice middle solution that fits between air freight and ships/road freight in both cost and speed.
It's a potential new multiple billion market solution. These people aren't developing the tech for no reason.
Air freight is usually for overnight, so it definitely tends to be expensive. I don't see how this is going to be less expensive, with such a limited carrying capacity. Every pound will come at a premium.
OK, to improve the payload of an airplane you can improve the aerodynamics, increase the wingspan, use more powerful engines or lighten the frame/use newer fancy composite materials. The modernized A350F doubled the payload of the previous model.
This airship is a prototype and parts of it are probably overbuilt and could be more efficient. But it also has almost no cabin structure, so to carry more cargo they're going to have to add a fair amount of structure which is going to cut into the added weight capacity. And, the heavier the cargo is the heavier the frame and structure will have to be. To effectively double the payload, they'll have to more than double the size of the gas envelope, which is going to hit a practical limit pretty quickly. They might get to the capacity of 1 TEU (~10 tons) with very efficient design, but it will never match the capacity of even the older A350-900. And the bigger balloon is going to restrict the places this thing can land.
With a top speed of 75 mph, this might match road transit but won't beat it.
It's a hobby project for one of Google's founders, who has more money than he know what to do with.