The biggest problem facing large airships may be ground handling. You don’t just fire up the engines and taxi out to the runway with an 800′ long aircraft, and the alternatives used in the 1920s and 30s — 200-man ground crews and/or elaborate rail systems — could be prohibitively expensive today. The Zeppelin NT fellows seem to get a lot of benefit out of their tail rotor, but it’s not clear how well this would scale up to something the size of largest American and German ships, which were three times longer and had 20-30 times the enclosed volume.

So it remains to be determined if a use can be found for large rigid airships and if they will ever return. But we can always dream about what might have been, and I’ve explored one of the more glamorous but less likely possibilities on my website at http://airships.paulgazis.com

I am not one of those dreamers who believe rigid airships could ever be a practical means of scheduled transportation… BUT…. at the same time, your comment suggests that zeppelins inherently lack any ability to operate in or around adverse weather, which is simply not the case.

The best example is the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin; over a nine year career, the Graf Zeppelin flew more than a million miles, all over the globe, on 590 flights, carrying over 34,000 passengers, and it did so in and around major weather systems. Naturally, careful and attentive navigation was required to avoid certain weather systems, or even take advantage of them, through pressure pattern navigation. (More information is obviously available on my website.)

Again, I am not suggesting that zeppelins are a practical means of transport; I am simply that, when operated skillfully, they are not limited to blue sky days, either.

Of course, operating a sightseeing ship in bad weather makes no economic sense in any case, nor would there be any justification for undertaking the additional risk to passengers of foul-weather operations, but that does not mean that other missions for a ship like the Zeppelin NT — military, surveillance, etc — might not be appropriate.

Given their low speeds, I don’t see how any dirigible could be expected to maneuver around a front of even modest size. And they simply don’t have the ability to climb ABOVE the weather.

Despite all the futuristic dreaming, I’m afraid commercially viable dirigible travel will remain in the same realm as commercially viable interplanetary travel.

Well I guess that depends on your reaction to zeppelins…

Just kidding…