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.
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.
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.
Did you take a look at the cabin? Seems in line with something like a private jet.
That’s Pathfinder 1. Pathfinder 3 is supposed to be much bigger. And the Hindenburg had cabins for sleeping, so there’s no reason these couldn’t be equipped with that sort of space.
i bet they would milk the available space for every inch like they do on planes lol
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.
You could make all those arguments about cruise ships, yet they still exist. At least this will be more environmentally friendly
The market for this must be literally dozens of people.
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.
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…)
Airship can land and take off from virtually any surface that allows that silly baloon to fit. Not just airports or air strips.
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.
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).
It’s not like the world is running out of Helium or anything and maybe it would be better used in scientific and medical applications than a big fuckoff airship.
For everyone saying it has no market… some googling finds it is intended for slow cargo delivery to places that have no existing infrastructure. Also this is a prototype, so the bigger ones will have a much larger capacity. They also say it is for disaster relief, similarly to places with no infra, or where that infrastructure has been destroyed like in an earthquake or what not.
slow cargo delivery to places that have no existing infrastructure.
And how much cargo demand is there in places that have no infrastructure?
Yeah no, there’s still no market. Anyplace that has the need for cargo delivery builds the infrastructure.
Also this is a prototype, so the bigger ones will have a much larger capacity.
Accepted, but “much larger” in this context is going to be like 2x, maybe 3x payload. Not 10x.
They also say it is for disaster relief, similarly to places with no infra, or where that infrastructure has been destroyed like in an earthquake or what not.
Ah yes, just what the world has been waiting for… slow disaster relief.
There’s no disaster relief role that this could fill that isn’t already being done better by helicopters.
Also, the idea of sending a lighter-than-air vehicle anywhere near a hurricane or recently erupted volcano is ludicrous. Earthquake, maybe, but a helicopter would still do supply drops and rescue faster and more flexibly than a ponderous gasbag.
It’s made of indestructible materials, not even god can sink it!
I do believe those are traditionally called airships rather than aircraft or is the renaming of lighter-than-air dirigibles to “aircraft” yet another example of Silicon Valley Marketing spinning yet-another-reinventing-of-the-wheel as innovation.
Aircraft is a general term for basically anything that flies while being supported by air pressure (wings, jets/rotors, balloons). A rocket would (generally) not be considered an aircraft because the rocket supports its own weight (it doesn’t create lift from the atmosphere around it).
