The speed problem – produced by a combination of restricted engine-power and a huge surface area to catch adverse winds – could be harder to overcome.

Your comment about practicality, though. If we had zepplin ports, there would be a central monitoring system. The control panel to deal with ballast changes in an automated way would have been built. There certainly would be no need for 24 hour human monitoring.

The game designer Ken Hite formulated what is known as Hite’s Law: “Alternate histories tend to have more zeppelins” based on that observation — that the easiest way to establish that a book, film, or game is set in an alternate history is to have zeppelins flying by. To his credit, Hite formulated his own corollary, namely that the 1930s must have been part of an alternate history that somehow bled into our universe.

I totally mis-read that as “one of the only three passenger zeppelins.” I thought it seemed like an awfully large gondola for only three people! Then I saw the inside, thinking, “that’s more than three seats! Oh, wait…”

Also, while it doesn’t sound great for passengers, I wonder if it would make sense for freight cargo in places that are hard to reach like mountains and small islands.

Also, last I heard zeppelin development was mostly heading towards freight-hauling these days, rather than passenger trips.

Apparently after the first few months, the Zeppelin ride started showing up in the Bay Area half-price tickets dealers on occasion, but I haven’t done that yet.

This makes them extraordinarily vulnerable to turbulence and wind shear, much more so than fixed wing aircraft which pretty well just slice through those conditions except when taking off and landing.

The US Navy had four big, helium filled zeps pre-WW2. Three of them, the Shenandoah, the Akron, and the Macon, crashed due to wind shear or updraft/downdraft incidents very early in their service lives.

It’s hard to imagine any technological advancement that would reduce this vulnerability to the point where big zeps become commercially feasible. In fact, I’m amazed that the Hindenburg stayed in service as long as she did before encountering a similar weather catastrophe.

Airships are best used as aerial platforms for military or law-enforcement purposes, vacation cruises and a few cargo applications. These are all being performed, poorly, by airplanes now simply because they got the lock on the gravy-train of commuter and rapid cargo applications and so have the infrastructure and R&D money to economically edge out the potentially technically superior blimp & co. in these fields. As all we BetaMax owners know, the course of technology is affected far more by marketing and historical accidents of economics than by any kind of technical merit.

The airship is never going to compete with passenger airlines for the same reason the railroad couldn’t. Speed. People do not want to spend days traveling.
But it can compete with airlines for freight because the fuel costs/lb of freight are so much lower, the capacity is larger and speed is not such an issue. The bonus is you don’t need tracks going to your destination.

Interesting article.

And as other have pointed out these are semi-rigids. The envelope is still supported and maintains its shape because it is kept pressurized. Rigid airships OTOH contain the lifting gass in unpressurized cells..

http://www.personalblimp.com/images.html