Back to the future: China revives blimps, now fully electric

No, China hasn't revived anything. Airships never truly have been gone, they simply can't really compete in any meaningful markets to be widely adopted. The article (on bit of a sketchy website to be honest) also mentions this as the use cases cited there are also on the niche side.

Since this was discussed recently, and I really don't want to type the same story twice I'll recycle my comment from that post.

I always have found airships interesting, although I am far from an expert. But there are a lot of points this article gets wrong. The reason airships faded from obscurity isn't because of the dangers with using flammable gas. There is a whole host of reasons they faded into obscurity and some of them are fairly fundamental to what they are.

For example. In order for them to have any meaningful payload capacity they need to be scaled up a lot, making them massive (also what I think is the appeal for many people, just the idea of having these giant behemoths in the sky). This comes with all sorts of drawbacks:

• Handling becomes more difficult with bigger size. The article mentions that a lot of this is addressed by computerized controls, which I am sure will help. But that brings me to my next point.
• Weather sensitivity, airships are always vulnerable to wind conditions and this only gets worse the bigger they get. I am not entirely sure how computerized controls can prevent them from being blown off course in windy conditions given the fundamental physics involved with a huge surface being blown against. This, in the past, meant that airships could only be operated in relatively calm conditions.
• Infrastructure, they require at the very least massive hangars for storage and maintenance. In the past they also required specialized mooring masts and ground crews, though I do remember reading the latter not being needed for more modern airships as they have much better control due to modern computerized controls.
• The bigger they get, the more expensive they get. Not only in construction but also operating costs like helium.

Then there is another simple economic factor. In most scenarios they simply don't have the speed to compete with aircraft or the payload capacity to compete with modern container ships, trains, or even cargo trucks. Meaning that they are mostly suitable for niche markets making it really difficult to operate at any sustainable level.

As much as I would like to see a future where rigid airships are part of the sky again, the odds are stacked against them and the article does a poor job of diving into that aspect. Not only that, it is disingenuous in one aspect. This might be the first rigid airship to be built since the 1930s, but it is not the first time companies have tried building an airship since then. In fact, the Zeppelin company was re-established in the 1990s, but makes semi-rigid airships. If you read the wiki article about the Zeppelin NT there are a few things to note:

• A lot of the things the BBC article claims the Pathfinder team have solved are also mentioned as being solved for Zeppelin NT.
• Only 7 have been build since the 90s, which already gives an indication of how much of a niche market this.

I don't have any readily quotable sources in front of me, but I've noticed how grifters typically trend towards reinventing mass transit, especially airships and trains/subways, in an effort to dazzle some unknowing "entrepreneur."