Greentext

While i would love to travel by airship, I dont think there would be a commercial success in airship passenger travel in the near future:

• travel times of multiple days means you probably need 2-3x the crew, compared with a plane on a 8h flight
• this also means a plane that is 4x as fast can make the same trip 4x more often, bringing in more money for the airline in the same amount of time
• you probably can't land on existing airports, because an airship the size of a large building would be crawling accross your airspace blocking all flight traffic, or shaken by the turbulences behind a large jet powered airliner
• new technology without any existing infrastructure is much more expensive than building on top of existing things
• tickets would be much more expensive than a commercial plane because of the reasons above, the lower passenger capacity and the fact that you have to carry more supplies (water + food for days multiplied by people on board) for a longer trip. Each passenger with cabin and supplies was calculated as 300kg weight on a transatlantic flight on the hindenburg
• Hindenburg could not fly in a direct straight line, because it travels at a height of only 400-600m. This means you had to go around high mountain ranges, because people and the combustion engines need oxygen which you dont have much above 4000m. However i dont know if this is still a problem with modern pressurized cabins, or if there is another limitation from the lifting gas...