Airships Will Never Be Part of Our Transportation Infrastructure : Oh, Really ?!

There's an on-line posting

(Helium Hokum: Why Airships Will Never Be Part of Our Transportation Infrastructure By Joseph Dick , May 2011 Scientific American)

that states --- and proves beyond a shadow of the author's doubt --- that lighter-than-air craft (dirigibles, blimps, Zeppelins, etc.) are unusable, unsustainable, and unmanageable, and so are off the table when discussing transportation technology.

OK, try these assignments on for size, using any other means of transportation besides an airship :

1. You have 200 Tonnes (Metric tons at 2240 pounds per tonne) of cargo. Carry it from the Midwest to the North Pole. Make that 6,000 miles (more or less) in one trip, in less than 4 days.

2. Take off from Laredo, Texas and stay on patrol with a field of view of ten square miles; stay there for ten days, non-stop

3. Travel from Biloxi, Mississippi to Chicago carrying 100 tonnes of cargo at a time when the Mississippi River is in flood stage ... Now do it when the River is nothing but mud and snags  ... Land on Great Slave Lake, when the entire lake is frozen solid.

4. Transport an entire battalion of troops, including heavy artillery and supplies for two months, from an Air Base in Germany to the middle of the Sahara Desert. Uh, length of runway in the Sahara ?  None !

5. Hover in silence at night for six hours over the reported rendezvous point of a criminal group.

6. Now go back and perform all these missions in absolute silence.

Having a little trouble now ? Think LTA or Hybrid airships.