25
votes
Pathfinder 1 airship overflies Golden Gate bridge: pictures
Link information
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- Title
- Pictures of LTA Research airship over the golden Gate bridge - AeroTime
- Authors
- Miquel Ros
- Published
- Oct 31 2025
- Word count
- 174 words
From the article:
What exactly is the use-case for this sort of transport? It's slower than any other form of large-scale transport, limited in carrying capacity, and energetically expensive to navigate in anything but still air. Pretty much the only niche I can see it filling is for slow, luxury cruising, and I could see the novelty of that wearing off long before the market covers R&D.
I'm as big a fan of the retro-futurist Sky Captain aesthetic as the next nerd, but I'm skeptical that the numbers support this ever being anything but a cool proof of concept.
Just from a cursory internet search, they tend to have lower emissions than airplanes and are more environmentally friendly. This article has multiple people strongly support using it for cargo. For one that's a bit less heavy on jargon, this article goes into a lot of the pros of airships.
To that end, I could also see it being a good alternative for air travel in the same vein as trains, at least for domestic travel routes. Air Nostrum plans to start using ten airships in 2026 for routes in Spain. One big plus is just the comfort since they're not trying to cram hundreds of people into a tiny plane. I think some people would be happy to fly for four hours with adequate leg room instead of one hour in a tiny cramped seat.
I think the appeal to passengers might actually increase with the length of the route.
Consider an East Asia ↔︎ NA West transpacific flight, for example. One of the later long-range revisions as discussed in the comments equipped with sleeper seats and an observation deck where people can stand up and walk around without bothering other passengers sounds like overall a more pleasant experience than is possible on a plane despite taking a couple of days instead of 10-12 hours, especially with how much more quiet airships probably are. If executed well it could make travel feel more like a short vacation and less like a slog.
Sky train.
I believe the main attraction is cost. They're supposed to be much less expensive to build, maintain, and operate than airliners.
I think it might be useful for cargo in certain remote areas that aren't accessible in any other way? Maybe compare the cost and cargo capacity to a helicopter.
Seems like the cost would always be way higher than a helicopter. You need a specialized, massive hangar to house it, special mooring equipment to land it, it wouldn't be able to fly in high winds like a helicopter, it can't really hover in one spot like a helicopter, it's slower than a helicopter, and I don't know what the aircraft itself would cost, but I imagine it's many times more expensive than even the biggest cargo helicopters.
There's are pretty good reasons we don't use airships anymore, and it has very little to do with the Hindenburg. Heavier than air aircraft have advantages in basically every single area, and once manufacturing and aerospace science got to the point where they could produce cheap, large rotary and fixed wing aircraft, airships stopped making financial sense.
These projects only ever pop up every so often because of some wealthy benefactor, since airships are neat.
Supposedly the Pathfinder 1 has a >2,500 mile range. It flew from Ohio to CA somehow, and I don't think there are any suitable hangers in between. The Pathfinder 3 being built is rumored to have a 10,000 mile range.
It still seems very niche, though.
Flying Whales made a nice little video on some of the possibilities of airships.
Call me a cynic but this is bankrolled by Sergey Brin the eviler of the Google founders, I'm assuming it's a military play. Apparently V3 is going to have a 10,000 mile range. Having a thing that can stay out in the air for that long probably has some sorts of military uses. Or at least, the extremely competent government might give a fat contract eventually.
I kinda doubt it. It's not fast enough to escape a moderately determined Volkswagen Beetle, let alone a modern military jet. Something that large is likely to show up on radar like a blinking, blimp-shaped neon sign, so I can't imagine it would be much good for spying either. If the military wanted it for anything it would be for logistics, and even then its utility would be marginal–"slow, steady and vulnerable" is really more the logistics private sector's bag.
No, I reckon ol' Sergey imagines himself a modern-day Phileas Fogg with a little Henry Ford mixed in for good measure.