The Return of the Flying Cigar

For most of the past century, the airship has occupied the same respectable corner of American life as the monocle and the passenger pigeon: once useful, now mostly available in old photographs.

Mention dirigibles and people immediately think of the Hindenburg, which is unfortunate. Nobody hears the word “ocean liner” and immediately shouts “Titanic,” but the airship has never been granted the same generosity. One spectacular fire in New Jersey and the entire industry was sentenced to spend eternity hovering over football games advertising tires.

Now the airship may be coming back.

This is not because humanity has grown nostalgic for enormous flying cigars. It is because the modern freight system offers two basic choices. You can put your cargo on a ship, where it will travel cheaply and arrive sometime after you have forgotten ordering it. Or you can put it on an airplane, where it will arrive tomorrow along with a bill suggesting you might have purchased the airline.

The airship fits between them. It could cross an ocean in roughly a week instead of a month, while costing considerably less than conventional air freight. Think of it as the truck of the sky, except the driver does not have to stop at the Brighton Township interchange for coffee and beef jerky.

The physics are surprisingly favorable. An airship stays aloft largely because helium or hydrogen is lighter than the surrounding air. Unlike an airplane, it does not have to burn fuel continuously merely to persuade gravity to look the other way. Its engines move it forward, but buoyancy does most of the lifting. Depending on the design, that could reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent or more.

Better still, airships become more efficient as they grow larger. Double the dimensions, and the surface area increases fourfold, but the volume—and therefore the lifting capacity—increases eightfold. This is known as the square-cube law, which sounds like something your algebra teacher invented to ruin a perfectly good afternoon.

In practical terms, it means that very large airships may make more economic sense than small ones. Aviation has finally produced a machine whose answer to nearly every design problem is, "Make it bigger."

Several companies are trying.

Hybrid Air Vehicles is developing the Airlander 10, a broad, somewhat pillow-shaped craft intended for low-emission passenger travel to places where airports are scarce and scenery is plentiful. The proposed destinations include the Arctic and the Amazon, where affluent travelers may experience untouched wilderness without enduring the indignity of touching much of it.

LTA Research, backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, is testing Pathfinder airships for disaster relief and remote access. Such craft could carry workers, supplies and mobile communications equipment into regions where roads, bridges, and airports have been damaged or never existed.

A French company called Flying Whales is developing rigid airships capable of hovering over inaccessible forests, lifting heavy timber without building roads, and carrying wind-turbine blades directly to installation sites. This could be useful in western Pennsylvania, where moving anything longer than a school bus usually requires six police cars, three utility crews, and a man standing in an intersection waving both arms.

Naturally, there are difficulties.

The largest is what engineers call the load-exchange problem. Suppose an airship delivers 60 tons of cargo. The moment the cargo is removed, the craft becomes 60 tons lighter and develops an understandable desire to leave immediately.

A hybrid airship avoids much of this difficulty by remaining heavier than air while sitting still. Helium supports most of the craft, while forward motion and the shape of the hull create the additional lift needed for flight. Shut down the engines and the aerodynamic lift disappears. The airship stays on the ground, which is generally where passengers prefer it while boarding.

A purely buoyant rigid airship is trickier. Unload 60 tons and you must promptly add 60 tons of ballast, aim the propellers upward to hold the craft down, compress the lifting gas, or tether the ship to something sturdier than the fellow who happened to be standing nearby.

Then there is the gas. Helium is safe but scarce and expensive. Hydrogen is cheap and plentiful and provides more lift, but it burns. Engineers insist modern materials and compartmentalized designs can make hydrogen far safer than it was in 1937. The public, however, has a long memory for newsreel explosions.

Airships will also require immense hangars, new ground facilities, and an aviation bureaucracy willing to certify an aircraft category that has spent decades being mistaken for a Goodyear advertisement.

Still, the idea is alluring: enormous ships moving steadily above rivers, forests, and abandoned mill towns, carrying machinery without highways, runways or much fuel.

Beaver County once watched steamboats give way to railroads, railroads give way to trucks and trucks give way to distribution centers filled with things ordered on telephones. Perhaps the next freight terminal will not be beside the river or the turnpike.

Perhaps it will be overhead, moving slowly east, looking like the future as imagined in 1929.