The Empire State building was nominally planned as a dirigible docking station. At some point, one dirigible docked there for three minutes. No attempt to use it as such was ever made again.
I've been looking into dirigibles for some months. I read somewhere that using a skyscraper as a mooring station for onboarding and landing passengers isn't realistic if only because dirigibles use water as ballast and maneuvering them in relation to a docking mechanism involves dumping water.
A LOT of water. You can't reasonably dump water onto busy streets and sidewalks in densely built downtown areas on a regular basis to dock airships routinely.
I've tried to find out how much space you need to dock an airship. I have, as yet, not found any notes on that. It seems to take "a lot of space" but you cannot run calculations nor buy plots of land in hopes of creating an airship company based on "a lot of space."
Passenger airships are essentially a dead industry. The US has a short list of registered airships, many of which are used as billboards in the sky, not passenger ships.
I have no idea where you would begin to find pilots or a means to train pilots. It's a largely dead industry globally.
I don't know where or how you would begin to register a passenger airship airline, though supposedly newer solar-powered ones can use up to 85 percent less energy than airplanes for the same distance, making them much lighter on the environment. Given the long boarding times at airports, for short distances, airships aren't necessarily hugely problematic in terms of travel time, especially if compared to driving times in places with no good direct routes instead of comparing them to, say, private jets.
Olympic National Park is both a draw for the Olympic Peninsula and a barrier to development. I have been wondering if airships could solve that issue.
I have this idea of creating a company called Diamond Air with four mooring stations in a diamond shape, one in Aberdeen, one in or near Port Angeles (which has a ferry to Canada), one in the Seattle-Tacoma area, one on the Pacific Coast, perhaps near the Quinault nation. It could be marketed as a tourist attraction, letting people see Olympic National Park by air, and also serve to improve connections between some of the most urbanized parts of this odd little corner of the world.
Port Angeles is just 20,000 people, so I was surprised to learn the ferry to Canada can hold up to 1000 passengers and it runs twice daily in the off season and four times daily in the summer. That's up to 2000 people in the slow season and 4000 in the busy season passing through this small town DAILY.
There are some bus routes and there is an airport in the area, but I imagine most people get there by car. I assume that not too many of those people are local residents. It's probably mostly tourist activity and other travelers.
I'm quite poor and have no hope of trying to do this as things stand currently and I have hesitated to write about it because there is a history of people stealing my ideas and giving me no credit and no cut of any proceeds and actively cutting me out of any hope of it leading to money. But I am finding that I cannot even research it enough to determine how grossly stupid the idea may or may not be.
It seems to me you would need to be someone with money to burn on stupid shit to even TRY to pursue this, like Elon Musk BEFORE he bought Twitter and flushed scads of money down the drain pursuing his pet project of an "everything app."
So I'm not sure it makes sense to worry that this idea can be readily stolen. What fool would read a blog post, buy up large amounts of land in the region and try to solve for all the parts I can't even find info about? What fool would have that kind of money and still be that impulsively stupid -- aside from Elon and he's probably sort of tapped out for his "stupid personal indulgences" allowance. Probably blew it all on X.
And I grow tired of playing with the idea of somehow magically being the owner of such a thing and being able to have a home in one city and a pied-à-terre in another. I can't even figure out how to supply meals on the damn thing that would be sensible in my mind.
Apparently, delivering the meals on airlines which have such a terrible reputation for being rubbish involves a lot of dry ice and such. It sounds like airline food alone is an industry ripe for disruption with something more environmentally-friendly and probably also generally healthier and more appetizing as well.
The one airline meal I remember fondly was some vegetarian thing, some kind of chickpea-in-pita-bread sandwich, that I ordered in line with my policy of "When in doubt, get the vegetarian option. It's less likely to kill you or land you in the ER." It was WONDERFUL, but most airline food has an apparently well-deserved reputation as anything BUT wonderful.
So I find myself fantasizing about having a vending-machine-based eatery with salads and cold-prep ramen options and the like and I find myself fantasizing about serving similar food on my airship airline and I don't know how all the pieces play together. I'm probably the ONLY PERSON on the planet who even thinks cold-prep ramen with fresh diced or julienned veggies is even COOL.
I imagine other people would be galled at getting ramen in a cup with fresh veggies on a solar-powered airship. "I paid how much for my ticket and THIS is what they feed me????"
Meanwhile, in addition to how ugly the impact of airplanes is on our carbon footprint, they typically feed you garbage AND it's probably garbage which also has a ridiculously bad environmental track record.
I'm not rich enough to be some nutty "eccentric" trying to solve this issue. I can't pay my own damn bills.
But I still sometimes wish I could have stupid hobbies like Elon Musk has of spending billions to flush a project down the tubes for the fun of pursuing a mad dream of something better without knowing how in the hell to make it work. THIS would be one of my idiot projects that the world would roll its eyes at every time it hit the news.
I've been looking into dirigibles for some months. I read somewhere that using a skyscraper as a mooring station for onboarding and landing passengers isn't realistic if only because dirigibles use water as ballast and maneuvering them in relation to a docking mechanism involves dumping water.
A LOT of water. You can't reasonably dump water onto busy streets and sidewalks in densely built downtown areas on a regular basis to dock airships routinely.
I've tried to find out how much space you need to dock an airship. I have, as yet, not found any notes on that. It seems to take "a lot of space" but you cannot run calculations nor buy plots of land in hopes of creating an airship company based on "a lot of space."
Passenger airships are essentially a dead industry. The US has a short list of registered airships, many of which are used as billboards in the sky, not passenger ships.
I have no idea where you would begin to find pilots or a means to train pilots. It's a largely dead industry globally.
I don't know where or how you would begin to register a passenger airship airline, though supposedly newer solar-powered ones can use up to 85 percent less energy than airplanes for the same distance, making them much lighter on the environment. Given the long boarding times at airports, for short distances, airships aren't necessarily hugely problematic in terms of travel time, especially if compared to driving times in places with no good direct routes instead of comparing them to, say, private jets.
Olympic National Park is both a draw for the Olympic Peninsula and a barrier to development. I have been wondering if airships could solve that issue.
I have this idea of creating a company called Diamond Air with four mooring stations in a diamond shape, one in Aberdeen, one in or near Port Angeles (which has a ferry to Canada), one in the Seattle-Tacoma area, one on the Pacific Coast, perhaps near the Quinault nation. It could be marketed as a tourist attraction, letting people see Olympic National Park by air, and also serve to improve connections between some of the most urbanized parts of this odd little corner of the world.
Port Angeles is just 20,000 people, so I was surprised to learn the ferry to Canada can hold up to 1000 passengers and it runs twice daily in the off season and four times daily in the summer. That's up to 2000 people in the slow season and 4000 in the busy season passing through this small town DAILY.
There are some bus routes and there is an airport in the area, but I imagine most people get there by car. I assume that not too many of those people are local residents. It's probably mostly tourist activity and other travelers.
I'm quite poor and have no hope of trying to do this as things stand currently and I have hesitated to write about it because there is a history of people stealing my ideas and giving me no credit and no cut of any proceeds and actively cutting me out of any hope of it leading to money. But I am finding that I cannot even research it enough to determine how grossly stupid the idea may or may not be.
It seems to me you would need to be someone with money to burn on stupid shit to even TRY to pursue this, like Elon Musk BEFORE he bought Twitter and flushed scads of money down the drain pursuing his pet project of an "everything app."
So I'm not sure it makes sense to worry that this idea can be readily stolen. What fool would read a blog post, buy up large amounts of land in the region and try to solve for all the parts I can't even find info about? What fool would have that kind of money and still be that impulsively stupid -- aside from Elon and he's probably sort of tapped out for his "stupid personal indulgences" allowance. Probably blew it all on X.
And I grow tired of playing with the idea of somehow magically being the owner of such a thing and being able to have a home in one city and a pied-à-terre in another. I can't even figure out how to supply meals on the damn thing that would be sensible in my mind.
Apparently, delivering the meals on airlines which have such a terrible reputation for being rubbish involves a lot of dry ice and such. It sounds like airline food alone is an industry ripe for disruption with something more environmentally-friendly and probably also generally healthier and more appetizing as well.
The one airline meal I remember fondly was some vegetarian thing, some kind of chickpea-in-pita-bread sandwich, that I ordered in line with my policy of "When in doubt, get the vegetarian option. It's less likely to kill you or land you in the ER." It was WONDERFUL, but most airline food has an apparently well-deserved reputation as anything BUT wonderful.
So I find myself fantasizing about having a vending-machine-based eatery with salads and cold-prep ramen options and the like and I find myself fantasizing about serving similar food on my airship airline and I don't know how all the pieces play together. I'm probably the ONLY PERSON on the planet who even thinks cold-prep ramen with fresh diced or julienned veggies is even COOL.
I imagine other people would be galled at getting ramen in a cup with fresh veggies on a solar-powered airship. "I paid how much for my ticket and THIS is what they feed me????"
Meanwhile, in addition to how ugly the impact of airplanes is on our carbon footprint, they typically feed you garbage AND it's probably garbage which also has a ridiculously bad environmental track record.
I'm not rich enough to be some nutty "eccentric" trying to solve this issue. I can't pay my own damn bills.
But I still sometimes wish I could have stupid hobbies like Elon Musk has of spending billions to flush a project down the tubes for the fun of pursuing a mad dream of something better without knowing how in the hell to make it work. THIS would be one of my idiot projects that the world would roll its eyes at every time it hit the news.