LTA CARGO --- The Systems Approach

The Systems Approach to a Transportation Issue : Airship Cargo
The primary question of a Systems Approach should always be :"What are we trying to accomplish?", NEVER "How can we do this better?"
Here's an example of a critically important transportation situation :
Importing goods from Asia, current volume in the billions of dollars. cargo containers are safe and secure;
Means have been devised to stack them aboard specially-designed ships, solving the problem of traversing the primary barrier --- the Pacific Ocean.
The difficult leg : getting the goods to distribution points in the Heartland and cities on the East Coast of the United States.
Barriers :
a. the central cordillera of mountains running down the spine of North America
b. a long (read "costly") and hazardous voyage around Cape Horn
c. Getting through the Panama Canal
d. sadly, crumbling infrastructure in our Western Waterways
e. The Mississippi River, the primary north-south artery in the midsection of our country, is a winding waterway of greatly varying depths and difficult navigation
Current solutions :
A. land the ships at West Coast ports --- primarily Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, then transfer them to containers-on-railroad-flat-cars (COFC) or large diesel-powered motor trucks to their destinations, necessitating the long, arduous, and costly route over the Rocky Mountains OR
B1. take the ships through the Panama Canal (for a fee), perform the container-on-railroad-flat-car transfer at Gulf Coast or East Coast ports, then by U.S. railroads or motor truck to their destinations OR
B2. navigate the ships through the Panama Canal, then to COFC intermodal ports, then by US railroads or trucks to their final destination.
The real issue is how to transport goods most expeditiously and inexpensively (competitively) from one place to another at the lowest cost --- most competitively. All too often, bright minds in science, engineering, and technology devote their time and energy to materials and manufacturing methods, neglecting applying new technologies or approaches to their transportation.
We believe that the problem has been solved, but solutions have rarely been applied because of the peculiar rewards system existing in academia. Faculty are rewarded ( granted tenure, promoted) based on quantity of research and number of publications, rarely based on the solution of real-world problems. This can --- and often does --- result in the constant re-invention and presumed improvement of the wheel.
Variations of this approach also exist in industry, in two guises :
1. Extracting the maximum number of papers from one topic to extract the maximum benefit from public relations and customer anticipation
2. Pursuit of the Perfect Solution displacing the Acceptable Solution, sometimes referred to as the "Perfect being the Enemy of the Good".
These add luster to researchers but accomplish little in the real world. A relevant example in the LTA world :
For some years, a conference called "Airships to the Arctic", originally sponsored by a very reputable Canadian university in the prairie states but now produced by an independent non-profit agency, has considered the problem of transporting cargo to remote areas in Northern Canada. Most reasonable folks agree that LTA Airships could provide an ideal solution. Such "heavy-lift" LTA craft have been designed and brought to a reasonable and competent level, as much as one could hope in the early stages of a new and evolving technology.

BUT, there is no avenue, program, or academic department to actually build an airship with that capability. Most LTA airships that have been produced, are the products of small manufacturers in rented industrial buildings, and oftgen have difficulty funding and marketing. SO, the university and its successor non-profit organization continue each year to roll out the same techniques, the same encouraging speeches, frequently presented to the same audience, at yet another conference ... but these wonderful plans are not put into effect or action.
... and yet, several reputable manufacturers of LTA airships build high quality products that have not gained widespread market acceptance, perhaps because of price or unwarranted public fear generated by the Hindenburg disaster . These companies are relatively unknown, and therefore their products are underutilized for transportation, primarily because transportation has held an ultra-conservative viewpoint regarding acceptance of radical change.Tomorrow (Blog # 3) will continue with a solution which attacks the problem head-on.