Are airships a potential solution to global warming in regards to air travel?

Question

"According to researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the total climate-changing impact of an airship is 80-90 per cent less than that of ordinary aircraft - and that's even when they're burning fossil fuels.

They also fly at a low altitude - around 4,000 feet as opposed to 35,000 feet - which means their water vapour emissions have very little impact on global warming. Another bonus is most airships don't need a runway and could operate without further airport expansion.

Another big plus is airships are quiet. If they were powered by hydrogen fuel cells you'd hardly be able to hear them at all - which would make a big difference to residents living on flight paths.

There is a downside, however: airships are far from supersonic. They typically travel at around 125 mph - as fast as a high-speed train. This is fine for travelling from London to Bristol, but to cross the Atlantic to New York would take a mind-numbing 43-hours."

Answer 1

Airships would be a great accessory to air travel, but they will never replace airplanes as far as speed or payload.  Especially transatlantic or transpacific trips.  A jet still takes up to 24 hours to go to India or Australia from California.  A week long trip in an airship might be pushing th limits of endurance.

Answer 2

It's good for short trips.  But it won't cover the majority of plane trips.  It would be horrible if they packed people into these and force people to take 43 hour trips.  Just as they're trying to force us to dump the cars we earned and get packed into buses that take several hours to get from place to plane rather than 20-30 minutes.  There's no train station where I live, nor do I think that I should be forced to take one when I paid a lot for my modest, zero emission car.  I earned it and people who enjoyed their cars during the 50s through the 90s for their whole lives have no right to tell me that I can't do the same considering we have cleaner burning fuels and catalytic converters that cars didn't have before.  And cars can be made even better than this, so there's no excuse.  They're no reason to take people's freedom away from them.

Answer 3

Have you ever heard of the Hindenburg:

http://www.nlhs.com/tragedy.htm

This is the main thing that kept this from being our main form of air travel.

Edit: I think you put your update in when I was pulling this up, but it still doesn't combat how slow they are.

Answer 4

They will be prohibited in California, unless their balloons made of latex. California lawmakers want to prohibit all helium filled metallic balloons :))).

Answer 5

Most flights are regional and travel could be done with high speed trains, going 200 mph.

There is no environmental sense in any countries infrastructure, most often not even business sense.

I would first forbid any car using more then 1 Gallon per 50 miles. I drove a comfortable car in the 80's with 56mpg, what happened to technology?.

Next, I would stop urban sprawl and get people back to live, where they work.