Originally Posted by
cwatters
I flew in a small airship at Cardington some years back. It needed quite a large ground crew to stop it moving about. As I recall they used teams of Air Cadets or Scouts? Boarding passengers took awhile because it was one on, one off, one on, one off... to keep the weight reasonably stable.
It was nice to take a slow pleasure flight around the countryside but I'm not sure about application beyond that. Perhaps as a replacement for sea freight?
As mentioned in the post above yours, the ground handling issue is one of their innovations.
A little thought will show a huge number of military ISR and maybe Strike applications.
All you have to do is think through each military aircraft type and then think whether enormous loiter at slow speed would be useful or not.
Example.
Is it better to orbit a B1B over a point in the desert at a squillion $/hr waiting for a CAS mission, or have a balloon loiter there for three weeks carrying Brimstone?
Is it better to have a Rivetjoint/Shadow/Reaper/insert other sneaky plane of choice loiter in an area sucking up wiggly amps for 5/10/20 hrs or a balloon for three weeks?