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
the airship was blown out over the Atlantic Ocean and is never seen again.
Hastily stuffing "Ghost zeppelin" into my horror idea bag
Yes, those things are really hard to park.
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.
they were abandoned because commercial airliners were faster, safer, more durable, and could carry more people.
Also hard to maneuver, hard to park, and not very good in even moderately bad weather.
...and they don't fuck up our limited helium reserves en masse.
EDIT: they might fuck up other things, but it would be some serious waste, because there are much more important applications to our limited helium.
forgot about helium
Hard to say that theyre really safer, when the primary safety incident everyone thinks of, occurred during the 1930s, a time whose airplanes certainly wouldnt have been as safe as modern ones either
planes are safer because they are less prone to failure and can take more damage (and more significant damage) before falling out of the sky, as well as being able to maneuver on the way down instead of just actually falling.
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.
Thermite is known for being freaking hard to ignite, even torching it is not enough sometimes. So I doubt that had anything to do with the fire.
Not according to myth busters. Although some thermite reactions likely accured the blimp would have gone up without it
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...
Far from the only fuckup they made.
Yeah, but how were they to know the central reservation on the autobahns would need a barrier as well as earthworks?
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.
Hydrogen is awesome, for it is cheap. Just make it more expensive is not a good strategy.
We shouldn't have made them from led.
There's some research done on aerogel airships. There's still hope
Oh that's fucking cool.
I don’t understand this meme. Everyone knows that modern airships use helium instead of hydrogen, right?
It was my understanding that these vessels were propelled by flatulence.
I don’t understand this meme either. Everyone knows that modern airships use farts instead of hydrogen, right?
I thought farts used them.
I thought they used farts
I thought they used farts
I thought they used farts
I farted a thought.
We need more airship content
He is not H.
Dummy
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.
