As I cycled into work today I was thinking about how we need to develop airships as a more sustainable option for trans-oceanic travel than jet aircraft. Whilst many international journies can be done by coach or rail, I'm not sure when I'll be able to visit my relatives in the USA again as I'm no longer willing to take carbon-intensive flights. I've had a look around the web but can't find anything on passenger airships except the FFtF "Airstream" idea and Advanced Technologies' proposed SkyCat. AT give likely cruise speed as around 80mph, so London to New York would take nearly 2 days - much more than "Airstream" but still 3 times faster than a sea crossing. If the climate impact per passenger is indeed 80% to 90% of a jet plane (where did these numbers come from by the way?), what needs to be done to make passenger airships a reality?

Yes - absolutely I would be interested in taking an airship to New York - it would be great. When, when, when will it happen?

ok, all this talk of clean airtravel via airship (zeppelin) it can be done easily, and much much faster than one would expect.

this is something i wrote up a while ago, enjoy:

if u want to talk about clean flight travel then zeppelin is the way to do it. you can build a zeppelin that can run without leaving as much as a mark. its simple really. We all know the infamous Hindenburg story, where the hydrogen caught on fire and it all went down. So, we know that hydrogen is flammable and can potentially be used as a fuel (ex. hydro cars) well, if you uised helium as a main lifting gas and inflated a smaller bag filled with hydrogen inside of the zeppelin, you could use the hydrogen to run low speed jets to propel the ship. When you get to that point, you can also make the ship to where it would never have to refuel, EVER. if you install solar panels on the top of the zeppelin to generate energy, and install air moisture collectors as well (much like those on the USS MACON) you can perform electrolosis to create more hydrogen for fuel, and then use the oxygen by-product to oxyginate the cabin in high alititude flights. Flying in high altitudes would be good for several reasons: A problem with the original Zeppelins was their susseptability to bad weather (like what brought down the macon and akron) so u could fly over the weather. Also in high altitudes air is thinner, which means there is less air resistance and means there can be faster air travel. Wait there's more, in high altitudes you have things called jetstreams, which are like ocean currents, only in the air, so if you were to fly into a jetsstream, it could push you along on your journy as well as the engines, which makes for even faster flight time. Also, another problem with the old zeppelins was geting caught in cross winds, in these crosswinds the zeppelin would litterally be sheered in two, so if you use carbon fiber instead of aluminum, the zeppelin will flex with the wind instead of break. but there is more bonuses to carbon fiber skeletonal systems. Carbon fiber is an extremely strong substance, which means you could potentiall use less carbon fiber to create the same amount of strength as a more built-up alumiron skeleton. ALSO! carbon fiber weighs less than aluminum, which means you could save evn more weight and build a larger cabin. As you can see there are many many bonuses to zeppelin travel. but i'm not even finished yet, there is so much more to this that io haven't even mentioned, so for more info. please e-mail me, if there are any attachments, i will not open it though, so be careful. This is a very interesting topic, and i have actually made several sketches of these designs (however they are poor for i am not a good drawer)