[endominus]

>A century after terrifying disasters, is it a safe-enough bet?

In the Hindenberg disaster, 35 of the airship's 97 occupants died. Meanwhile, every time I browse the front page of HN, there seems to be another story of an aircraft crashing or being shot down and everyone on board being killed instantly.

[jetrink]

The Hindenburg was one of only two passenger airships, so imagine if 50% of passenger aircraft eventually crashed. There was also no obvious route towards making them safer at the time. Even if the problem of flammability could be solved, they were very vulnerable to bad weather and it was still decades before modern weather forecasting.

[snakeyjake]

Forget 50%, the US Navy built five rigid airships.

ZR-1 through ZR-5.

The only one that wasn’t destroyed by a crash that also killed most if not all of its crew was ZR-3 and its history is filled with so many near-disasters that it was pure chance that the rigid airships program didn’t have a 100% loss rate.

[jcranmer]

Something like half of all rigid airships ended their lives in crashes. That's an airframe loss rate far in excess of anything you see with regular aircraft.

[moffkalast]

Yeah in the end it's not about the risk, but about it taking a week to get across the Atlantic in one. Ain't nobody got time for that.

[phreeza]

People cross the Atlantic in cruise ships all the time. I would be much more interested in an airship Cruise.