https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
Apart from the 80% of the entries that are basically “Crashed during bad weather” - my personal highlights:
… breaks loose from its mooring during a storm and is blown over the English Channel; after sightings in Wales and Ireland and a brief touchdown in Belfast, the airship was blown out over the Atlantic Ocean and is never seen again.
Zeppelin LZ 8 Deutschland II (brand new) is caught by a wind gust while being walked out of its hangar and damaged beyond repair after it smashes on the roof of the hangar.
… the airship, weighed down with gold and burgundy paint, reached 600 feet altitude before beginning an unplanned right descending turn, making a “controlled descent” into a garbage dump, impaling the blimp on a pine tree, coming down just a quarter-mile from the site of the Hindenburg’s 1937 demise.
… suffers an intentional mid-air collision with a radio-controlled airplane.
the airship was blown out over the Atlantic Ocean and is never seen again.
zeppelins are always just Phineas and Ferb plots
suffers an intentional mid-air collision with a radio-controlled airplane.
like you cannot tell me that this isn’t just the platypus controlling the evil guys “overly complicated bomb holding RC plane” after stealing the remote from him
lol, the gilded blimp crashing into a junkyard
Let’s put a billion birthday balloons worth of MRI gas in a terminally slow aircraft and inexplicably fly it over sports stadiums.
Modern airship designs can go hundreds of km per hour.
With modern technology we also can contain fire into pockets.
This isn’t much different than criticising a plane because petrol is flammable.
Yeah, no. I’m back at a real computer and thought about this so I went and looked.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/fastest-speed-for-an-airship
Guinness World Record is 115 km/h, a blistering 72 miles per hour.
That’s a stripped down machine made for “speed”. Anything made for “work” is going to be considerably slower. Don’t get me wrong, airships were an important stepping stone for aviation but none of them can compete with an airplane for utility.
Wait, what? I’m in my phone at work so searching sucks, can you link one of those fast airships?
The Hindenburg with 90 year old tech had a cruising speed of 122 km/h.
woah! Everyone hold on to your hats!
We shouldn’t have made them from led.
Every 100 years, I guess. We gotta go through all the shit every 100 years.
what if it was made of helium though
that stuff doesn’t burn
The Empire State Building was designed as a zeppelin docking station. Boarding/de-boarding and flight times are barely competitive with the modern subway. It was fun and novel, but quite impractical.
The thing we’re running out of?
yeah I didn’t think of that
It’s a Noble gas that we can’t synthesize chemically and is light enough it just floats away forever when released. And it provides less lift than hydrogen.
Helium’s sole advantage is also why it’s about the least-renewable thing out there.
Well, the Nazis were stupid and used hydrogen instead of helium. The Hindenburg, pride of Nazi Germany, was full of rich people when it blew up in New Jersey, so who really cares anyway?
It’s also worth noting that it wasn’t the hydrogen that caused the fire. The Hindenburg had an aluminium skin. It began having degradation issues, so they painted it. The paint was iron oxide based. Aluminium and iron oxide are the 2 main ingredients in thermite.
Analysis of the video shows that it was the skin burning off. It would have gone up almost as badly, even if filled with helium.
Not according to myth busters. Although some thermite reactions likely accured the blimp would have gone up without it
Helium is very finite and very leaky. If you want flying ships you need something else.
They should just get some guy to make more Helium. Lazy kids…
The Nazis had to use hydrogen because that other gas was hoarded as a strategic reserve by another nation.
But still Nazis. So…
Anyway big flying things are cool. Still would be.
its just that planes are faster, cheaper to build, less of a hassle to land and take off…
Well they weren’t totally stupid, they couldn’t get helium because the US restricted them from getting it as the largest supplier. The plan was originally to use helium, but they went with the second best option.
I don’t understand this meme. Everyone knows that modern airships use helium instead of hydrogen, right?
I thought they used farts
I thought they used farts
deleted by creator
Whatever happened to the Goodyear Blimp? Feels like it’s been decades since I’ve seen it!
They’re actually having a 100 year celebration right now and all 3 of the US based Goodyear blimps are over Akron, Ohio this week.
It’s still around. It regularly flies over the Rose Bowl for big games.
We need more airship content
He is not H.
Dummy
