AIRSHIP MISCONCEPTIONS

Do you think with the Vapid Majority that

1. Airship use stopped cold in 1937 with the Hindenburg disaster ?

Here are some statistics on blimp use by the U S Navy in World War II,

1941 - 1945,  significantly after the fatal flight of the Hindenburg :

Number of airships: a significant increase : From 16 in 1942, 148 in 1945

Total Flight hours: 545,527

Sorties (number of missions) : 57,710

Ships safely escorted: 80,038 with no losses

2. They only fly in good weather, don’t they?”

Probably no more or less than airplanes do

3. They need an enormous ground crew to handle the airship when it takes off and lands, isn't that true?

In the old days, given airship design and construction of that time, that may have been true. Current airship design has cut this requirement radically, especially regarding hybrids, which do much of their own, unassisted ground handling because of these design modifications :

the ability to land almost anywhere unassisted --- on land, on water, and on ice and snow --- using new shapes of their envelopes which are essentially flat.

        In addition, many of the new airship designs have vectored thrust     using movable ducted fans that can be pointed in any direction to move the airship about.

4. Think of the cost! 20 or more guys in hotels and on per-diem for 6 months! Who can afford that?  

I suppose they're talking about the ground crews. An airship crew consists of no more than an airplane with a similar mission.

5. They must be very vulnerable to attack or damage

People think that they can be shot down easily because they picture them   like the simple rubber balloons they see at children's birthday parties, a rubber covering containing gas. The facts are that airship skin is much tougher than a simple balloon; it is made of composite materials not dissimilar to bulletproof vests, AND the interior is not one giant space, but is divided into separate ballonets, so that even if one gas space is compromised, the others remain undamaged. Finally, the gas pressure is very little above the ambient air pressure. a true puncture would slowly fizzle out over a long period of time. We have seen photographs of damage trials that show an airship moving back to base under its own power after hundreds of penetrations by bullets in carefully staged and measured firing. Slower, but inexorable progress.

... and yet we still read comments by uninformed people that think they can be brought down by a BB gun. Proven not true, not even by small arms or machine gun fire.

6. They need a hangar all the time in case of bad weather.

Possibly true.  A minor point. We imagine that everyone would feel a good deal better if ALL transport equipment were sheltered from bad weather, and damage by vandals and careless ground-handling equipment, including airplanes, buses, locomotives, and railcars.

We recall the painful period in New York transit history, when almost every bit of subway equipment was covered by graffiti, and there was significant damage to bus and subway car seating by young bloods equipped with sharp knives.

7. And let's all hold off on hydrogen being a gas too flammable and too dangerous to use as a lifting gas. The jury may still be out on that one. Consider, please, that the gasoline in our cars is many times more explosive (read "dangerous") than hydrogen, yet we allow our teenagers to handle it with impunity.