As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes
Twelve electric motors powered by diesel generators and batteries enable vertical take-off and landing. They can propel the Pathfinder 1 at up to 65 knots (75 mph), although its initial flights will be at much lower speeds.
Archer apparently got the math on that right too, in 2010. New York to London is about 3500 miles, which would take about 47 hours at the top speed of 75 mph.
I can’t believe they actually got enough money to build this thing. It’s like a vaporware project that somehow made it.
The market for this must be literally dozens of people.
Honestly? I would love to take a 2-day trip to London on an airship. That sounds like a great adventure. You’re not on a ship, so you don’t get seasick, and you’re not on a plane, so there’s plenty of room to move around.
I have a few flight hours at the controls of a Cessna-152 (never did took it all the way to an Amateur Pilot License because it’s a pretty expensive hobby, at least in Europe) and still remember just how bad the first few flights were until I got used to it: in a small plane you feel every little shitty-shit updraft/downdraft/windshear caused by the most stupid of things (say, the wind hitting the boundary of a forest or the asphalt of a car park heated by the sun more than the surrounding area).
Lets just say I was green in more ways than one in those first couple of flights.
It didn’t help that the arfield where I did my training was near enough a major international airport and we weren’t allowed to go above 3000 feet unless quite far way from the airfield, because of the Terminal Approach Ways for landings and takeoffs in that airport.
Granted, the bigger the aircraft the less the “up and down and wiggle it all around” feeling of flying is, but it’s still quite surprising just how bad the damn thing is on a perfectly normal day if you’re only 1 km or less from the ground.
Oh, if they actually manage to run a passenger line for a little while I’ll try to go for a ride on it - you know, just to see it before they go bankrupt.
But that’s the thing, it’s only attractive as an “adventure” or publicity stunt (I can see a short-lived market for “influencers”), kind of like taking passenger rail in the US - it’s fun to ride the train when you can afford multiple days of travel time. The difference is, freight rail is practical, useful and economically viable and pays the maintenance cost of the rail lines. This gasbag won’t ever be useful in that sense, and it won’t ever have value as a regular commuter vehicle.
The only practical use I can see for this is if you need to stay in the air over a particular area for an extended time - maybe an observation platform? but you could just put cameras on a smaller, cheaper balloon…
None of the proposed use cases make sense.
Another important niche could be responding to natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and hurricanes.
This is a farcical pipe dream. How would it respond? It can’t carry enough weight to be useful, and a helicopter would be faster and more flexible for delivering medical personnel or extracting victims. If there’s one thing you want in emergency response, it’s speed. And you certainly wouldn’t take this thing anywhere near a recently erupted volcano or a hurricane because the air currents would be crazy hazardous for a lighter-than-air vehicle.
Cruise ships are more about the amenities on board. Not sure how many amenities you could get on an airship because of the weight. So it would be a two days boring as hell trip and most people aren’t going to give up the vacay time to sit around and do nothing.
I mean… if you have some idea for creating the kind of matter/energy conversion technology needed for a holodeck you’d probably end up richer than both of them combined.
Yes, and I could see some equivalent to a cruise line possibly, but that’s really it… there’s no practical use for this, only tourist stuff.
Also cruise ships are like floating hotels with hundreds of rooms, with giant shopping malls and resorts attached. You don’t get any of that on an airship because there isn’t enough space or carrying capacity.
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.
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.
How much does it cost to send that freight at that speed though?
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.
As airships get bigger and bigger they’ll be able to handle more cargo
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.
middle solution that fits between air freight and ships/road freight in both cost and speed.
With a top speed of 75 mph, this might match road transit but won’t beat it.
It’s a potential new multiple billion market solution. These people aren’t developing the tech for no reason.
It’s a hobby project for one of Google’s founders, who has more money than he know what to do with.
I can see this being used in international shipping if the get the cost down. Why put your product on a big ship when you can use an air ship? Also for landlocked countries.
It’s even more entertaining: it’s airspeed not ground speed, so the trip duration depends on the direction and force of the wind at the heigh it travels in (and that’s a lot worse for airships that aircraft because the formar have a much larger area facing the wind than the latter).
So that trip at top speed would likelly be shorter than that on the way to London, but longer than that on the way back (as the predominant winds - except during the El Niño - are from the west).
Who the hell wants a 2-day ride to London?
Archer apparently got the math on that right too, in 2010. New York to London is about 3500 miles, which would take about 47 hours at the top speed of 75 mph.
I can’t believe they actually got enough money to build this thing. It’s like a vaporware project that somehow made it.
The market for this must be literally dozens of people.
Honestly? I would love to take a 2-day trip to London on an airship. That sounds like a great adventure. You’re not on a ship, so you don’t get seasick, and you’re not on a plane, so there’s plenty of room to move around.
FYI you can get motion sick in aerial vehicles, including blimps.
I have a few flight hours at the controls of a Cessna-152 (never did took it all the way to an Amateur Pilot License because it’s a pretty expensive hobby, at least in Europe) and still remember just how bad the first few flights were until I got used to it: in a small plane you feel every little shitty-shit updraft/downdraft/windshear caused by the most stupid of things (say, the wind hitting the boundary of a forest or the asphalt of a car park heated by the sun more than the surrounding area).
Lets just say I was green in more ways than one in those first couple of flights.
It didn’t help that the arfield where I did my training was near enough a major international airport and we weren’t allowed to go above 3000 feet unless quite far way from the airfield, because of the Terminal Approach Ways for landings and takeoffs in that airport.
Granted, the bigger the aircraft the less the “up and down and wiggle it all around” feeling of flying is, but it’s still quite surprising just how bad the damn thing is on a perfectly normal day if you’re only 1 km or less from the ground.
Oh, if they actually manage to run a passenger line for a little while I’ll try to go for a ride on it - you know, just to see it before they go bankrupt.
But that’s the thing, it’s only attractive as an “adventure” or publicity stunt (I can see a short-lived market for “influencers”), kind of like taking passenger rail in the US - it’s fun to ride the train when you can afford multiple days of travel time. The difference is, freight rail is practical, useful and economically viable and pays the maintenance cost of the rail lines. This gasbag won’t ever be useful in that sense, and it won’t ever have value as a regular commuter vehicle.
The only practical use I can see for this is if you need to stay in the air over a particular area for an extended time - maybe an observation platform? but you could just put cameras on a smaller, cheaper balloon…
None of the proposed use cases make sense.
This is a farcical pipe dream. How would it respond? It can’t carry enough weight to be useful, and a helicopter would be faster and more flexible for delivering medical personnel or extracting victims. If there’s one thing you want in emergency response, it’s speed. And you certainly wouldn’t take this thing anywhere near a recently erupted volcano or a hurricane because the air currents would be crazy hazardous for a lighter-than-air vehicle.
You could make all those arguments about cruise ships, yet they still exist. At least this will be more environmentally friendly
Cruise ships are more about the amenities on board. Not sure how many amenities you could get on an airship because of the weight. So it would be a two days boring as hell trip and most people aren’t going to give up the vacay time to sit around and do nothing.
Right, so we need holodecks! Someone convince Bezos or Musk that they are feasible “in five years,” or “next year.”
I mean… if you have some idea for creating the kind of matter/energy conversion technology needed for a holodeck you’d probably end up richer than both of them combined.
Yes, and I could see some equivalent to a cruise line possibly, but that’s really it… there’s no practical use for this, only tourist stuff.
Also cruise ships are like floating hotels with hundreds of rooms, with giant shopping malls and resorts attached. You don’t get any of that on an airship because there isn’t enough space or carrying capacity.
i bet they would milk the available space for every inch like they do on planes lol
They won’t if they want to keep any benefit compared to airplanes
what are the benefits?
IIRC blimps are hard to work with
What’s the benefit of a cruise ship when planes are so much faster?
Its not always about purely practical concerns
The benefit of a cruise ship is that you can fit a massive hotel, shopping mall, resort and maybe even theme park rides on it.
Maybe cargo, not people.
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.
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.
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.
I’d love to take a slow (presumably more environmentally friendly) flight like that. Limited vacation time is the only issue.
I’d love to take a ride on a dirigible.
Upvote cus Archer reference.
Stupid, naturally safe helium!
I can see this being used in international shipping if the get the cost down. Why put your product on a big ship when you can use an air ship? Also for landlocked countries.
It’s even more entertaining: it’s airspeed not ground speed, so the trip duration depends on the direction and force of the wind at the heigh it travels in (and that’s a lot worse for airships that aircraft because the formar have a much larger area facing the wind than the latter).
So that trip at top speed would likelly be shorter than that on the way to London, but longer than that on the way back (as the predominant winds - except during the El Niño - are from the west).