>>1304120>>1304134An airship doesn't need a kite. With engines shut off, an airship would sail with the winds like a gasballoon. A tailwind means the airship has to use much less fuel, and they can use the current to their favor. Going headwind means the airship really has to go full power, and you might just go 40-50 kph if the winds are strong. If they'd go head on in a really big storm, chances are the airship would just hover with the engines at full power. So airships never go head on into storms. Airships sail the weather and the currents.
> ZPG-2 "Snow Bird" (BuNo 141561), pilot in command Cdr. Jack R. Hunt USN, supported by a naval crew of 12 plus a civilian flight engineer from Goodyear, made a record-breaking non-stop flight across the Atlantic and back. The airship departed Naval Air Station South Weymouth, Massachusetts, on Monday 4 March 1957, reaching the south-west tip of Portugal by the evening of 7 March despite adverse headwinds for some of the way, passed by Casablanca, Morocco, on the morning of 8 March, then turned back westwards over the Cape Verde Islands towards the Caribbean, eventually landing at Naval Air Station Key West, Florida, on the evening of 15 March. The flight had covered a distance of 9,448 mi (15,205 km) in 264.2 hours, and in doing so had not only broken the lighter-than-air distance record of 6,980 mi (11,233 km) set by the Graf Zeppelin rigid airship in 1929 but also the aircraft endurance record without refuelling. 