Could airships (blimps) be the future of air transportation?
There is a basic flaw in this: your assumption that airships are some miracle of fuel efficiency. They are not very fuel efficient. The reason is simply that they have to be large to have any useful payload, and as a result to takes a great deal power to push them through the air. Adding to the sheer volume of air they have displace, the limitations on the altitude they are capable of mean that the air they are plowing through is the densest part of the atmosphere. Let’s consider a Goodyear blimp: As large as it is, it has about the same payload capacity as many general aviation aircraft : 6 seats, which puts it on par with single engine planes like the Beech Bonanza, Piper Saratoga or Cessna 206, or twin engine planes like the Baron, Seneca, or Cessna Skymaster. The blimp has a pair of 210 horsepower engines that are the same model as the engines on a Skymaster, so we will compare them. This is about the worse case scenario for the planes: the singles use less horsepower and fuel, and
