The (biggest) problem that keeps airships from practical use is that they are huge sails. Big sails mean even small amounts of wind can be powerful forces acting on the airship. In the air a big push from the wind might be safely managed, but if you're near anything solid such as the ground, you can get smashed to bits.
To safely operate a suitably efficient (large) airship, we'd need both huge specialized docks with extremely strong mooring structures to keep wind from smashing the airship into whatever is near it, and a system (such as a 3-axis propulsion system on the airship) that is capable of counteracting wind force acting on the airship when it's near the ground or other solid objects and not docked.
Despite the many attractive advantages of airships, there's yet been anything like a good solution to this problem. There are other challenges too (what do you do when you drop off your cargo and the airship wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly compress your gas?), this is just the biggest.
> There are other challenges too (what do you do when you drop off your cargo and the airship wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly compress your gas?)
Not to detract from your overall point, but you do the same thing you do when burning fuel while cruising: Add ballast.
Yes, but how do you add ballast to an airship while it is underway? Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the zeppelins did.
It has to be more energy efficient to re-compress your lifting gas back into storage bottles. What do modern airships do? This has to be a solved problem.
I think they're aware of all these problems because they do mention almost everything you said in the linked post thinking through the idea: https://www.elidourado.com/p/cargo-airships
Obviously that was simply a post thinking through everything hypothetically and I didn't read anything that seemed like they actually had the best solution, but at least they seem to be aware of the challenges to landing and off-loading cargo efficiently.
Reading that article I see no proposed solutions to this sail problem. They mention wind as an issue for delivery times but not safety. There's also no acknowledgement that the "scaling law" that makes building huge airships lucrative also makes these problems worse.
Just cover the thing in solar, and run it on electric. Add a couple of wind turbines too. I mean, the whole concept is preposterous, so why not just lean into it?
Solar powered airships floating around the world, following the prevailing winds, accepting durable goods by… catapult or something, delivery by chucking it out the window over populated areas. Paint them some nice pastel colors and we’re in Solarpunk world.
I calculated, than the airship with 100tonns capacity, and wind speed 25m/s require 25tons trust to compensatecthenwind. It is Boeing jet engine, not Electric fan require.
I think if that was the biggest problem, they'd be used much more. There are a lot of places with light and regular winds, and we're also pretty good at predicting winds in the 1 day forward timescale. And of course there's the regular and predictable high winds that were traditionally used by sail ships.
Even a light wind with a giant sail area is dangerous. An empty 20ft shipping container weighs about two tons. If it's hanging from an airship and the wind causes it to shift even a foot it'll kill you dead if it hits you. If it hit a light frame building it would bust right through a wall. It would also easily knock down a non-reinforced cinder block wall.
A cargo airship would lowering cargo would essentially be an incredibly dangerous crane. The sail area of the airship makes it far more dangerous than lowering external cargo with a helicopter.
What makes you think "docks with extremely strong mooring structures" is a particularly difficult problem to solve? A giant metal hook anchored in concrete attached to the ship with some steel cables doesn't seem like it would be that difficult for a team of smart engineers with a multi-million dollar budget to figure out a good design for. Certainly not so difficult or expensive as to threaten to make the entire concept nonviable.
Historically the difficulty isn't in building the mast, it is in preventing the airship from being smashed into the mast by the wind. Or in dramatic cases flipping end over end because it was only moored on one location.
Couldn't the sail factor be reduced by ionizing wind coming at the vehicle who then keeps away from the vehicle while going around it, depositing little energy?
> "But for air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage."
How does an airship solve any of those problems? Its still got to go through customs and such, and still go through local truck delivery
Customs in software is already a bit of a thing, judging from what postal tracking reports on occasion. I guess that doesn’t obviate the need for physical inspections, but it should make them faster.
They don't need to be immune from the same fluctuations in fuel costs. But if they use less fuel per ton, then a rise in fuel prices should benefit them more.
Airships could potentially be electric and solar powered. That would insulate it from fuel cost fluctuations. It would also resolve the issue with refueling.
Longshoremen, lines at limited numbers of ports, etc., there a lots of problems that airships can solve simply by allowing airship ports to exist in, say, Kansas.
The need for specific geological features dramatically limits the amount of ports we can have, which seriously affects costs. If you could build a single, tiny airship point in every major city, you could save a bundle, and likely be close enough to the destination to unload directly to the customer at the port.
The article isn't about solving those problems, it's about taking a few days longer to do the actual travel to save a bunch of money, since there's already massive delays on either end.
No, the article is saying "actually I was wrong about being longer and slotting in between airplane and cargo ship; we can be as fast as planes, but cheaper, and take a big slice of that whole huge market". Which is why they need to explain why airships won't also have customs etc.
I guarantee that's not going to be a viable option. No nation, especially China or the USA, is going to allow an aircraft free access to land unknown cargo at a random warehouse without going through customs. It's going to have to land at some kind of airfield just like a cargo plane would.
Let's say airfreight takes 7 days, with the flight being one of them. Then his airship would take 11 days, which is not much worse. He was expecting the comparison to be 5:1.
That's the take I would have made too, but no, the author explicitly claims that airships can be faster than airfreight by somehow magically sidestepping customs, warehousing, and trucking.
> For air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage.
> Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5 days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to look pretty good. If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time.
This already happens, has happened for ages, and yet somehow the logistics industry manages to accomplish transshipment without fucking everything up . . . most of the time, anyway.
His argument is not quite correct. Let's try to steelman it.
If an airplane takes 12 hours to cross the ocean, and it takes 2 days on both sides with customs, warehouses, trucking and the last mile delivery, then it's a total of 4.5 days. If the airship takes 5 days to take the ocean, and the same 2 days on both sides, the total is 9 days. Despite being 10 times as slow in flight, the end-to-end delivery time is only two times slower than the one for the airplane.
That exists and it's called ocean freight. Air freight is where you pay a premium to get a small amount of stuff there NOW. Ocean freight is what you use when you need 15 shipping containers of stuff there in a couple of weeks.
Whether there is any market for an "in between" mode is an open question, and it's the business case of these airships for better or worse.
Yeah my initial reaction was you're comparing today's air freight in a static state with your envisioned optimal airship model; that's not realistic. The alternative to spending big on an entire new industry isn't doing nothing; it's using that investment in some other way, like optimizing air freight, or intra-continental, or addressing the entire overseas manufacturing/shipping model.
Maybe a smaller issue than wind, but something is wrong with this claim:
"If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other..."
How do you handle customs inspections and duties on imports? As TFA states, in current air freight, "there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker..." Freight has to go through the warehouse on arrival in-country so the customs inspectors can look at it and assess duties. The article seems to envision the airship dropping down directly at the destination address, which would be that nation's customs agency's worst nightmare.
Not quite how it works. (At least, not in the US).
Firstly, not just any FBO is a point of entry.
Which brings us to the second point, the entire reason for designated points of entry is so that the customs officials can be on site already. As in, assigned to that FBO. Now at times specialists have to be sent out. (Think exotic or rare animals or biological/agricultural products.) But if that happens, your freight, and maybe even you, are quarantined and your freight isn't going anywhere any time soon. Believe me.
Most important, and relevant in this context is the third issue. Which is the fact that arrivals are met by customs officials and passengers and cargo are always subject to the same inspections/regulations as they are at any commercial airport.
So the original question is valid, how are they handling customs at the scale they're hoping to achieve in a fashion any faster than anyone else?
Not sure how realistic, but could the inspectors go to the airship instead? They are not planes: Not only can they "park" while airborne, but at least there were concepts of boarding/unboarding in the air as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/realestate/26scapes.html
They could in theory but I'm dubious governments will be willing to shape their customs enforcement to accommodate this company. Best case I think they might be able to do a drop off at a place for customs inspections and pick them up again with a different craft once cleared.
I agree with most other criticisms in the thread about the feasibility of this, but your suggestion is not _totally_ crazy. There are airports where you can land _if_ you give customs a heads up that you'll be flying there from abroad and they'll send a dude. The only one I've interacted with is in the Bahamas but I don't see any reason it's a showstopper. There're a lot bigger showstoppers on the critical path for this project than that.
Also the customs exist at both ends. Usually, you have to do preliminary enforcement too. That’s what DHL does at least. Still, most of your time “wastage” will happen at customs and there is no technological innovation for that. There is no way any (or most) governments will allow you to by pass them.
It's down to the laws of the country and the government could make an exception to go direct if they want for special items. One of the things the airships might make sense for is huge wind turbine blades that are too large to go by road. The government might well do it for that kind of thing.
But for regular freight I doubt it. I use to fly from England to France in a single engine plane, pre Brexit, and you might think just stick stuff in the plane in an airfield in the UK, fly to a field in France drop it off, vive the single market and that. But no you have to fly to a customs airport in the UK, queue up with your passport as usual, do the same in France then fly on to your field. Probably France to Germany say would be ok. It all depends on the local laws.
Also how many hours you save compared to truck/van? You still have to load it to one to drive it to where ever airship is moored, and then unload it, load to airship. Fly that to destination(weather depending). And same. Or you could drive from start to end. At certain distances it might make sense, but I think those might be somewhat limited.
Yeah--I came here to highlight this too. I think all the legacy systems around international shipping won't permit direct to consumer pick up and delivery. Unless someone can show me an existing example?
Some international logistics businesses pickup from and ship directly to customers. They are well-practiced in avoiding customs delays and have extensive experience with non-traditional transport, such as semi-submursibles.
Seriously, if a Toyota supplier in Japan delivers parts daily to a factory in Ohio, do they go through regular customs or is there some other arrangement? Can they fly directly to an airfield near the factory?
No. They absolutely are NOT happening. In fact, this is one of the very few technical solutions I'm very confident to state is never happening.
1) The economic model is unproven so even initial costs will be far too high to pay of debt incurred to manufacture, market, and maintain and they're not competitive with extant mass-market alternatives on cost & time out-of-the-gate with no clear pathway to even being niche competitive, let alone having mass-market adoption. And no, the Airship cruise industry is never going to take-off (heh) because there wouldn't be any extant "ports of call" (unlike with sea-going cruise ships) and no way to economically stimulate their construction.
2) Inclement weather mitigations (aside from docking, re-routing (delaying), or rescheduling (also delaying)) are virtually non-existent so there's a much higher trip variance which eats into fuel, time, labor, and ultimately a far higher cost variance which (as a 2nd order effect) leads to an overall MUCH higher cost to operate ANY route compared to conventional cargo or mixed-mode transportation. As a historic model, look at the air cargo transport costs in the transition from mandated multi-stop piston engine refueling and in-weather flying in the late 1930s to single-hop above-the-weather flying in the gas turbine "jet age" of the late 1940s. It's not JUST that jets were much faster, they were also far more predictable to service routes AND had far lower maintenance costs. A lower, slower, and less predictable airship with higher maintenance costs and, at best, a handful of percentage points off of the dollars/mile/ton figure with a higher initial cost outlay doesn't merit investment.
3) Safety is still a huge issue for any airship attempting station-keeping or full-authority-navigation close to any ground-effect altitude which is, unfortunately, also the airspace where any accident is likely to cause the most collateral damage. No other form of transport has this problem and, with current tech, would seem insolvable without turning the airship into a poorly performing version of a plane or rotor-craft.
As it turns out, ships are just really good at shipping. People keep trying airships with no fundamental tech or economic breakthroughs and they should all expect the same result.
This reads as a technologist that has absolutely no clue about anything regarding the shipping or the logistics industry. I hope someone told these guys what the spent is on new (water) ships globally, because it points only in one direction.
I used to have intermodal carriers as customers, so for an IT guy I know a good bit about it. I went to comment on his post and it said only paid subscribers can comment. I'm not going to pay him to point out issues he'd need to deal with.
Yeah, it seems like every attempt at an airship company for the last 70 years or so just ends up speed-running the development of modern travel/logistics that makes airships obsolete. Same way crypto is/was speed-running the need for modern financial regulation.
On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the industrial revolution the average pace of technological advance was extremely slow. The Mongols conquered Asia with weaponry that would have been instantly familiar to people living 2000 years earlier. Perhaps our descendants 1000 years from now will still be using refrigerators virtually identical to our own.
I think it's more like the Western economy is silently crashing than technological development having reverted back to ~19th century rate, although the latter is said to be happening too - something feels wrong about tech lately.
I'm old enough to remember Airship Industries (1979):
>The AD500 was "a new-generation airship making use of advanced materials and technology." It was 164 feet (50 m) long and contained 181,200 cubic feet (5,130 m3) of helium.
>Unfortunately, on 8 March 1979, the month-old AD500 was seriously damaged when the nosecone failed while the ship was moored in high winds.
Cargo airships will not happen,in any land based area where wind happens,ie :anywhere
this has been hammered flat on numerous aviation
engineering forums
the only way around the guaranteed ground handling
debaucle is to engineer mega structur masts for anchoring,which will need to have a circular pad underneath,where the cargo would have to follow the LTA,as it pivots in the wind so back to a debaucle,with lots of smashing stuff
one possibility is airship to ocean ship transfers
where wind drift can be managed.....sort of
could be made to work for passengers snd small cargo that loads through the central pivot in the mast
still the anchoring phase will always be very high risk
It absolutely can happen, but not for routine goods where being on schedule is highly important. But for outsize goods, waiting for a favorable weather forecast is a much smaller concern than strengthening roads or perhaps even removing a bridge or two. For how wind turbine deployment, freight airship would be a gamechanger and there's a long (but truly narrow) tail of more niche use cases. Including any "unknown unkowns" that really can't exist before matching transportation.
The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling containers between China and the rest of the world that's still tiny.
Modern airships are semi-rigid. They have a keel and a rigid structure to support the empennage. The rest of the structure can be deflated and collapsed just like a non-rigid blimp.
There are tons of dumb startups that were created by former SpaceX people. Having worked at SpaceX doesn't magically turn you into a superior person that can solve all problems. But having worked at SpaceX is a great way to convinced investors to give you money.
The article on the site is vague, but if you go to the company's site, and examine the images, you can get a close look at the airship design. The image on the web site [1] is higher resolution than the web site needs, and you can zoom in if you open the image directly.
The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU.
This is comparable to a B-747 freighter. Current new price of a B-747 freighter is about US$400 million. Trips per unit time would be less but fuel cost would be lower.
Large container ships are now in the 20,000 TEU range.
It's not clear there's much demand for faster container shipping. Container ships tend to run slower than they can, to save fuel. Maersk has some 4,000 TEU high speed container ships capable of 29 knots, but due to lack of a market and huge fuel costs, they're mothballed in a loch in Scotland.
> The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU.
Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo", not "500 ton total mass". And 500 tons of cargo are at minimum 25 TEU.
If they are competing with 747 freighters, those containers will almost always be "cubed out" (the container volume is full long before reaching its maximum legal weight), meaning the airship would load several times as many containers.
This is another advantage they have against air freight. Those 747s are frequently cubed out themselves, flying lighter than they would like. And you can't easily build much more volume into jet aircraft (well, you can, that's what the Airbus Beluga XL is, and apparently several air freight companies are pestering Airbus to re-open a production line for those). Airships, on the other hand, will be practicably impossible to cube out.
> Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo".
From their images, the airship is about 30 containers long. That's only 600 feet, shorter than the Macon or the Hindenburg. Useful lift of the Hindenburg was 232,000 kg.
Readit News
To safely operate a suitably efficient (large) airship, we'd need both huge specialized docks with extremely strong mooring structures to keep wind from smashing the airship into whatever is near it, and a system (such as a 3-axis propulsion system on the airship) that is capable of counteracting wind force acting on the airship when it's near the ground or other solid objects and not docked.
Despite the many attractive advantages of airships, there's yet been anything like a good solution to this problem. There are other challenges too (what do you do when you drop off your cargo and the airship wants to shoot up into the air? Vent gas? Rapidly compress your gas?), this is just the biggest.
Not to detract from your overall point, but you do the same thing you do when burning fuel while cruising: Add ballast.
Yes, but how do you add ballast to an airship while it is underway? Simple: condense water out of the exhaust like the zeppelins did.
Citation? Would not the condenser need to burn fuel, thus lightening the ship?
Dead Comment
Obviously that was simply a post thinking through everything hypothetically and I didn't read anything that seemed like they actually had the best solution, but at least they seem to be aware of the challenges to landing and off-loading cargo efficiently.
A cargo airship would lowering cargo would essentially be an incredibly dangerous crane. The sail area of the airship makes it far more dangerous than lowering external cargo with a helicopter.
As long as it's just one small bubble with hydrogen, you can flare it off or combine with oxygen from the air outside to reduce lift.
How does an airship solve any of those problems? Its still got to go through customs and such, and still go through local truck delivery
Nor is it clear how they are refuelled, or how they are immune from the same fluctuations in fuel cost as conventional cargo aircraft.
But what is clear is that you should “possibly invest” in his syndicate which is funding all this…
The need for specific geological features dramatically limits the amount of ports we can have, which seriously affects costs. If you could build a single, tiny airship point in every major city, you could save a bundle, and likely be close enough to the destination to unload directly to the customer at the port.
Yeah, and that shit isn't going to happen either for a bazillion $very_good_reasons.
Not least safety.
I mean, yeah, let's just turn up at a densely populated environment and use a winch to long-line drop a few tons of cargo.
Whilst the general public and employees are walking around the place ?
When there's overhead cabling around ?
Even in perfect weather, with no wind, no rain, its still a dumb-as-shit idea.
> For air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage.
> Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5 days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to look pretty good. If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time.
If an airplane takes 12 hours to cross the ocean, and it takes 2 days on both sides with customs, warehouses, trucking and the last mile delivery, then it's a total of 4.5 days. If the airship takes 5 days to take the ocean, and the same 2 days on both sides, the total is 9 days. Despite being 10 times as slow in flight, the end-to-end delivery time is only two times slower than the one for the airplane.
Whether there is any market for an "in between" mode is an open question, and it's the business case of these airships for better or worse.
"If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other..."
How do you handle customs inspections and duties on imports? As TFA states, in current air freight, "there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker..." Freight has to go through the warehouse on arrival in-country so the customs inspectors can look at it and assess duties. The article seems to envision the airship dropping down directly at the destination address, which would be that nation's customs agency's worst nightmare.
Probably no different from private airfields, you have to file customs paperwork before arriving, and they can send inspectors out.
Firstly, not just any FBO is a point of entry.
Which brings us to the second point, the entire reason for designated points of entry is so that the customs officials can be on site already. As in, assigned to that FBO. Now at times specialists have to be sent out. (Think exotic or rare animals or biological/agricultural products.) But if that happens, your freight, and maybe even you, are quarantined and your freight isn't going anywhere any time soon. Believe me.
Most important, and relevant in this context is the third issue. Which is the fact that arrivals are met by customs officials and passengers and cargo are always subject to the same inspections/regulations as they are at any commercial airport.
So the original question is valid, how are they handling customs at the scale they're hoping to achieve in a fashion any faster than anyone else?
But for regular freight I doubt it. I use to fly from England to France in a single engine plane, pre Brexit, and you might think just stick stuff in the plane in an airfield in the UK, fly to a field in France drop it off, vive the single market and that. But no you have to fly to a customs airport in the UK, queue up with your passport as usual, do the same in France then fly on to your field. Probably France to Germany say would be ok. It all depends on the local laws.
I ran a tugboat business and we had all of the required paperwork to file directly with U.S. Customs.
In many cases, we moved cargo too big to be transferred at a port or terminal.
Seriously, if a Toyota supplier in Japan delivers parts daily to a factory in Ohio, do they go through regular customs or is there some other arrangement? Can they fly directly to an airfield near the factory?
1) The economic model is unproven so even initial costs will be far too high to pay of debt incurred to manufacture, market, and maintain and they're not competitive with extant mass-market alternatives on cost & time out-of-the-gate with no clear pathway to even being niche competitive, let alone having mass-market adoption. And no, the Airship cruise industry is never going to take-off (heh) because there wouldn't be any extant "ports of call" (unlike with sea-going cruise ships) and no way to economically stimulate their construction.
2) Inclement weather mitigations (aside from docking, re-routing (delaying), or rescheduling (also delaying)) are virtually non-existent so there's a much higher trip variance which eats into fuel, time, labor, and ultimately a far higher cost variance which (as a 2nd order effect) leads to an overall MUCH higher cost to operate ANY route compared to conventional cargo or mixed-mode transportation. As a historic model, look at the air cargo transport costs in the transition from mandated multi-stop piston engine refueling and in-weather flying in the late 1930s to single-hop above-the-weather flying in the gas turbine "jet age" of the late 1940s. It's not JUST that jets were much faster, they were also far more predictable to service routes AND had far lower maintenance costs. A lower, slower, and less predictable airship with higher maintenance costs and, at best, a handful of percentage points off of the dollars/mile/ton figure with a higher initial cost outlay doesn't merit investment.
3) Safety is still a huge issue for any airship attempting station-keeping or full-authority-navigation close to any ground-effect altitude which is, unfortunately, also the airspace where any accident is likely to cause the most collateral damage. No other form of transport has this problem and, with current tech, would seem insolvable without turning the airship into a poorly performing version of a plane or rotor-craft.
What IS spent on new ships globally, and what direction does it point in?
• Approximately 900 container ships are currently being built or on order worldwide
• These have a combined capacity of 6.8 million TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units)
Major shipping lines:
• Evergreen: 20 ships of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2024-2025)
• OOCL: 10 vessels of 16,000 TEU capacity
• MSC: Multiple orders including 24,100 TEU ultra-large ships and smaller vessels
• CMA-CGM: 6 vessels of 15,000 TEU capacity (delivery 2025)
It points to that the business is not only doing good but that investments is being made, heavily.
On a broader scale I also wonder if we're near the top of a technological S-curve. It's worth remembering that until the industrial revolution the average pace of technological advance was extremely slow. The Mongols conquered Asia with weaponry that would have been instantly familiar to people living 2000 years earlier. Perhaps our descendants 1000 years from now will still be using refrigerators virtually identical to our own.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
>The AD500 was "a new-generation airship making use of advanced materials and technology." It was 164 feet (50 m) long and contained 181,200 cubic feet (5,130 m3) of helium.
>Unfortunately, on 8 March 1979, the month-old AD500 was seriously damaged when the nosecone failed while the ship was moored in high winds.
And various other things not really working till they went bust in 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Industries
I wonder if Airship Industries (2024) will do any better?
Their ships don't looks very different - old co https://www.airliners.net/photo/Airship-Industries/Airship-I...
New co https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
"Well the front's not supposed to fall off, for a start."
The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling containers between China and the rest of the world that's still tiny.
The cargo capacity of the airship shown appears to be four 20-foot containers, or 4 TEU. This is comparable to a B-747 freighter. Current new price of a B-747 freighter is about US$400 million. Trips per unit time would be less but fuel cost would be lower.
Large container ships are now in the 20,000 TEU range.
It's not clear there's much demand for faster container shipping. Container ships tend to run slower than they can, to save fuel. Maersk has some 4,000 TEU high speed container ships capable of 29 knots, but due to lack of a market and huge fuel costs, they're mothballed in a loch in Scotland.
[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66b24fc3f58cf0...
Either that's a smaller airship than his articles describe, or it's just artist's discretion. They always talk about 500 ton cargo ships - as in "delivering 500 tons of cargo", not "500 ton total mass". And 500 tons of cargo are at minimum 25 TEU.
If they are competing with 747 freighters, those containers will almost always be "cubed out" (the container volume is full long before reaching its maximum legal weight), meaning the airship would load several times as many containers.
This is another advantage they have against air freight. Those 747s are frequently cubed out themselves, flying lighter than they would like. And you can't easily build much more volume into jet aircraft (well, you can, that's what the Airbus Beluga XL is, and apparently several air freight companies are pestering Airbus to re-open a production line for those). Airships, on the other hand, will be practicably impossible to cube out.
From their images, the airship is about 30 containers long. That's only 600 feet, shorter than the Macon or the Hindenburg. Useful lift of the Hindenburg was 232,000 kg.
Or maybe they are back? There aren't a lot of sources I could find.