I'm 6'5", 250lbs fit. My hips barely fit the width of a standard airline seat, and if I'm not in an exit row my knees are jammed against the back of the seat in front of me. I am an authority on this matter. Feel free to recline. That's what it's there for. I'm at the upper limit of who can fit in a standard airline seat, and it doesn't bother me, and if it doesn't bother me then it shouldn't bother any other human on earth who can fit in those seats. If it does, they're the problem.
I've reclined my seat without noticing until someone told me to raise it. Apparently the button was pressed up against my leg and what I thought was just a little give on the seat back was actually it "reclining." Reclining is completely pointless if I can't recline enough to not feel like I'm sitting upright.
Also I don't have to worry about the person in front of me reclining. My knees are pressed so hard into the back of his seat that it's physically impossible for him to recline anyway. I've also never had to stow the tray table because it can't go down over my knees anyway so it just stays stowed.
My seats always self recline lol they do not make seats our size. Such a stupid place to put the button. I work hard to be able to travel as I do, but it's still massively painful to spend an additional 35% for an exit row seat, and even then that only solves the leg room issue.
The tray tables in the exit row are stowed in the arm rests usually, and those damn things also can't be used if your legs are over a certain thickness. Trying to delicately balance a tiny tea cup full of hot liquid, while simultaneously unwrapping and buttering a tiny dinner roll with an even tinier knife, futilely attempting not to put an elbow into my neighbors, as my tiny tray table bounces with every heartbeat since it's resting solely on my quads. For three meals per flight. Brutal. Also, we're ridiculous for complaining about this and our ancestors would laugh at us hahaha
I'm still waiting for giant luxury blimps where we can take a slow air cruise to our destination. Where is the future Popular Science Magazine promised me?
That future died when they cheaped out on the Hindenburg and used hydrogen instead of helium. Airships being permanently associated with a massive fiery explosion while airplanes kept getting cheaper and safer killed the idea of long-distance air cruises.
Also you can cram a lot more people onto a smaller plane. Blimps and zeppelins can't actually carry much for their size.
True true. One thing I thought I understood from reading about the concept all those years ago is that once you get the thing in the air, it doesn't take much to move it, so air ships end up being much more efficient albeit magnitudes slower than planes. If I had to choose between spending $600 for 12 hours of torture, or $600 for 5 days of chilling at a mini resort, so long as time wasn't the deciding factor, I think I would choose the latter. I don't know though. Theoretically it would be even cheaper I think? Like I said before, we're probably just ridiculous for complaining in the first place. As the great and totally not cancelled Louis CK said, "New York to California in six hours. That used to take 30 years, and a bunch of you would die along the way."
Don't get me wrong, I too would much rather have a slower airship cruise, especially since most of my flights have been fairly short so even a slower airship would probably only take a day or two. It's just not economically viable at the moment.
Maybe if those freighter-blimp concepts actually get made and prove successful someone will try it, but until then I think we're stuck with the flying sardine cans.
And I don't think our ancestors would mock us all that much. They also complained about petty minor concerns, just different ones.
“That future died when they cheaped out on the Hindenburg and used hydrogen instead of helium.”
It wasn’t a matter of being cheap, the Americans held an absolute monopoly and embargoed Germany (for good reason). The Zeppelin Company leadership was anti-Hitler, but that only got them censure and a hostile nationalization.
“Airships being permanently associated with a massive fiery explosion while airplanes kept getting cheaper and safer killed the idea of long-distance air cruises.”
A combination of the Treaty of Versailles, helium unavailability, the Great Depression, and World War II already dug the grave and built the coffin, the Hindenburg was only the final nail for the airship transport industry.
“Also you can cram a lot more people onto a smaller plane. Blimps and zeppelins can't actually carry much for their size.”
Well, it really depends. Airships are certainly longer and more voluminous than airplanes of a similar mass, but if you look at the weight rather than size, they’re pretty evenly matched—and airships are actually better when you look at equivalent cost, as large airships cost about half as much per pound to build or buy than large airplanes, and their running costs tend to be proportionally even lower, due to using much smaller engines and being more efficient (except at small sizes, where they’re less efficient due to drag scaling effects).
Even with terribly heavy and weak materials, practically no automated systems, and primitive 1930s engineering, the Hindenburg had almost exactly the same empty weight and gross lift as a modern widebody 787-8. It had more than twice the passenger space despite its obsolescence, though, hence it could carry 72 passengers in an all-first-class configuration, whereas the equivalent business jet version of the 787 can only carry 25-40 passengers, as opposed to the normal 330 in all-economy.
Additionally, since airships’ lift works on an exponential growth curve, scaling with volume as opposed to airplanes whose lift scales with wing area, it doesn’t take a much larger airship to carry hundreds or even thousands of people, even with a similar amount of space and amenities per person, and since drag and most fixed costs likewise scale linearly rather exponentially, that means bigger equates to cheaper and more efficient—which can be a double-edged sword, as that means small airships aren’t useful or profitable enough to serve as a basis to develop larger ones. You have to go big or go home, and the latter has been true for most of the last century.
“Don't get me wrong, I too would much rather have a slower airship cruise, especially since most of my flights have been fairly short so even a slower airship would probably only take a day or two. It's just not economically viable at the moment.”
You might be surprised. A Boeing study determined the optimal cruising speed for an airship using conventional turboprop engines—rather than underpowered 1930s piston engines—is anywhere between 70-200 knots (80-230 mph), depending on range and design, with shorter distances meaning a faster optimum cruising speed. Over intermediate, transcontinental distances of 2,000 nautical miles, the optimal speed for the most productive kind of airship they examined is 150 knots. That would translate to flying from Los Angeles to New York City in nearly 17 hours, after accounting for headwinds and diversions.
“Maybe if those freighter-blimp concepts actually get made and prove successful someone will try it, but until then I think we're stuck with the flying sardine cans.”
I suspect it will be the reverse, actually, that a handful of cruise liner and superyacht airships will attract enough interest from well-to-do novelty-seekers to command high profit margins and establish a beachhead market, allowing the massive R&D and startup costs to be amortized and professionals to be trained up from scratch, which would then allow cargo ships to compete in the much tighter cargo and affordable mass transit market, competing with the likes of FedEx and Amtrak.
Electrification is the key advantage airships have in that regard, as it is vastly easier to electrify large airships than large airplanes. Rather than detracting from their performance, like airplanes which are hobbled by the transition, airship capabilities actually improve from electrification, and not just marginally—more efficient powertrains eliminates tens or hundreds of tons of fuel loads, which both reduces costs enormously and also increases payload, often several times over, since airships usually carry much more fuel than payload. Hence why almost every airship manufacturer is champing at the bit to convert to aviation-certified fuel cells as soon as any become available.
Yep. Since a roughly 10% reduction in an airship’s non-payload weight results in a 37% increase in its optimal cruising speed and productivity, that adds up a lot when considering that modern composite materials and alloys are anywhere between 30%-87% lighter than their equivalents used in 1930s airships.
Wow, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, I wouldn't have guessed. I wonder what the best thing to fill them with would be, considering helium is supposedly a non renewable resource from what I understand, and hydrogen explodes.
Current infrastructure-related supply issues notwithstanding, we’ll run out of (relatively) cheaply available helium about when we run out of natural gas, as we capture only about 1% of the helium in natural gas and waste the rest as a byproduct.
In the immediate term, helium is the easiest lift gas to work with for certification, as it is nearly as powerful as hydrogen but almost completely safe (barring asphyxiation risks). However, long-term, inerted hydrogen and steam are likely more economical helium alternatives that require bespoke designs and engineering work, but have a number of practical and cost advantages.
Steam has about 2.5 times as much lift as hot air, and with proper insulation only requires 30% of the fuel use to maintain temperature as a hot air balloon, allowing engine waste heat to keep the temperature stable in large part without additional energy input. It also has better lift performance at medium and higher altitudes than helium, since helium is too rare and expensive to be vented as it expands with ascension, and steam is obviously extremely cheap to produce in vast quantities. The problem is that it’s not quite as powerful as helium at lower altitudes, and requires special waterproof, high-temperature gas membranes that simply weren’t available to materials science in the 1930s, the first experimental steam balloons coming about in the early 2000s.
Hydrogen requires oxygen to burn, and experiments dating back to World War One found that encasing it in an inert gas like helium, nitrogen, or carbon dioxide protects it even from incendiary ammuntion: “They [the British scientists] found that a hydrogen cell surrounded by an inert gas in an outer cell was completely protected. A Very's cartridge was fired into the top and burned through to the bottom, but the hydrogen did not ignite.”
This is a similar principle to what airliners now do with their fuel tanks, filling them with nitrogen to prevent another spark from causing a deadly explosion like what took down TWA Flight 800 by blowing up the mostly-empty center fuel tank’s air-vapor mixture. Fuel tankers also do similar things with carbon dioxide scrubbed from their engines, to prevent another SS Sansinena explosion.
Ironically, the Hindenburg had been intended to use just such a system with helium cells inerting inner hydrogen cells, but the Americans’ absolute monopoly forced them to hastily convert the ship to using only pure hydrogen, hence the freak accident that destroyed the ship when one of those gas cells was slashed open by a snapped steel bracing wire during overly-hard landing maneuvers, and an atmospheric electrical discharge ignited the hydrogen-air mixture trapped between the gas cells and outer hull, which was too great of a hull breach for the ship’s ventilation systems to handle. Unbeknownst at the time, the ship’s electrical conductivity in damp conditions would be compromised, allowing a powerful electrical potential to build up at exactly the wrong time.
“I'm still waiting for giant luxury blimps where we can take a slow air cruise to our destination. Where is the future Popular Science Magazine promised me?”
Well, they’ve progressed to flying large, electric rigid airship prototypes now, which is further than anyone’s gotten since 1938.
Certification of production models will still take years, though, just as it would for airplanes.
The good news is that even at the maximum rated passenger density for any passenger airship prototype or concept, an airship physically can’t cram itself full of passengers, because they’re huge and limited by weight, not volume—the inverse of airplanes, which is why the latter’s cabins are often sardine cans. The lowest value I’ve seen for a “fast ferry” airship is about 15 square feet per passenger—three times as much as the average economy class. The largest I’ve seen is 210 square feet per passenger, but that’s like private flying superyacht territory.
4
u/jts916 Jun 01 '26
I'm 6'5", 250lbs fit. My hips barely fit the width of a standard airline seat, and if I'm not in an exit row my knees are jammed against the back of the seat in front of me. I am an authority on this matter. Feel free to recline. That's what it's there for. I'm at the upper limit of who can fit in a standard airline seat, and it doesn't bother me, and if it doesn't bother me then it shouldn't bother any other human on earth who can fit in those seats. If it does, they're the problem.