Cargo Airships Prospective - Faculty of Aerospace Engineering

Figure 1. World Air Cargo Traffic Forecast (Boeing World Air Cargo Forecast 2010-2011) [1] . World's
constantly growing GDP and population over the last century, assures constantly growing need for cargo
transportation.
Many remote communities, oil platforms and wind turbine sites are served today with non
reliable network of ground transportation or with very expensive airborne means. Process of
transferring the needed equipment, supplies and commodities to the site, in the needed
quantities, can take therefore several days or even weeks and cost a fortune. Roads and rail
cannot be easily constructed, due to huge cost of transport network establishment in the
remote areas, because of topographical and weather limitations, or just because of insufficient
financial justification for such endeavor. Airstrip or a heliport at the site is a plausible option
in most cases, but due to high operational cost of aircraft and relatively small payload volume
they can take, it is not the best solution for large cargo hauling. This is the playground for the
cargo airship. While it is much slower than conventional fixed wing aircraft, airship can carry
the same payload for a fraction of the cost and can be designed to operate without any special
infrastructure in the delivery site. It is closer by operational costs to ground vehicles, but
unlike them, it's not restricted by terrain obstacles and lacks the need of roads and rails.
Airship can be designed in such way, that the cargo would be underslung beneath its gondola,
allowing it to transport oversized payloads in one piece (for example wind turbine blade), to
inaccessible and remote location, thus simplifying the logistics and allowing high cost
reduction. Insufficient ground transportation network, in developing areas or in countries with
large territories, could benefit from airship type of transportation as well.
Figure 2. Airship could be very much handy in such cases