Actually I’m surprised that they want only 40 tonnes – maybe Boeing wants to crawl before they walk. There’s a latent market for things too big (>100 tons) to move in one piece by normal road – eg large turbine shafts. That was certainly the thinking behind Cargolifter AG’s undercapitalised efforts (they went broke after their first prototype crashed in 2002). Cargolifter actually bought and used the Hindenburg’s hangar.

Don’t you need to moor the airship, and doesn’t that create some chances of bad weather doing nasty things? Can you keep them safe through bad weather on their moorings?

As for vulnerability to bad weather, that’s true. But for this sort of freight you can simply wait until the weather forecast is right (don’t forget forecasts are far better than in the airship’s heyday). Also, bluntly, one-off freight lifts can live with a lot more risk than scheduled passenger services. If I was a crew member I’d be packing a parachute for heights and a rappelling line for landings!

Heavy lifting airships may be good for forestry, as the second photo indicates, if affordable. Roads are the biggest environmental problem, and this would be a no impact solution.

When Melbourne was debating the Grollo tower this was regarded as very crass masculine reasoning which could all be traced back to some kind of phallic preoccupation.

That was patently nonsense. Things are often long and thin because that is the way they are best made. They aren’t ‘phallic’ in any meaningful way as a result. Imagine an airplane or missile or tall building which did not vaguely resemble a cylindrical object longer than it is thick.

BTW, “size of a football field” sounds impressive, but translated it means “much smaller than any of the airships of the 1930s”.

dd is correct about the dangers of hydrogen. It is not a major factor. What destroys airships (sooner or later, mostly sooner) is what destroyed the German prototype a few years ago and nearly every other big airship ever built – bad weather.

Hydrogen balloons are not much more dangerous than helium ones, and its a helluva lot cheaper in a really big one. F’rinstance, contrary to myth the
Hindenburg disaster had little to do with the hydrogen in it – it was the very flammable and electrostatic sealant they used that caused the problem.