>>1320943Cons
>Low passenger density.>Helium safer, but was expensive and unavailable at the time.>Hydrogen was cheap, but precautions had to be taken to ensure the ship didn't just explode in mid-air.>Ships had an unfortunate tendency to get into "predicaments-" crashing, going tail-up, exploding.>Weight measurements had to be exact to keep the thing afloat, stewards had to wear paper-thin clothing and napkins often had to be reused to keep weight down.>Tickets were expensive.>Wartime resource demands killed the remaining ships.>Faster than going by steamship, but became irrelevant with the improvement of heavier-than-air travel.>Blimps nowadays are more novelty than anything.Pros
>When operated correctly, the ride was heaven (one story told how passengers balanced a pencil on its end to see how long it would take to fall down, they eventually got bored and knocked the pencil down manually)>High-class travel, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.>Damn, they were amazing to look at.Airships were great when there was really no other option (ships were the only other way to cross the ocean non-stop), but performance history wasn't always on the airship's side. Even Hugo Eckener admitted that the Zeppelin had been made obsolete by the airplane: "A good thing has been replaced by a better."