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Yes, but for passenger service rather than cargo. Passenger jets are too fast, too uncomfortable, and cause too much pollution.
Passenger jets are too fast
People complain about that? If they were too fast - impossible concept - then I wouldn’t complain. After the first two hours I don’t need to see the empty sky so much, and judging by the video panel use I’m not in the minority thinking so. If it became faster to get between the biggest 10 airports in the world, because of some super passenger rocket, then I’d be all for it. Even the best flight home from NZ is 16 hours I can’t ever get back; and even the best flight is still a horrible time stuck in a tube with a few hundred people I don’t want to know by smell.
Airlines are too fast in several senses. First, people don’t usually need to get somewhere as quickly as an airline allows. Someone who is really on urgent business can use telepresence or a charter instead. Second, the airports on either end of a trip are frequently too slow, making airlines and example of “hurry up and wait”. Third, airlines move people through timezones very quickly, exacerbating jet lag.
I agree with you that airlines are too uncomfortable even for their speed to overcome. Slow travel can be much more comfortable. For example, many people are willing to spend days on trains and cruise ships.
Having not watched the video, obviously hydrogen is a bad idea, but I’d also say no to helium airships until it becomes a replenishable resource through nuclear fusion.
Kerosene in airplanes is actually significantly more dangerous. Airships with hydrogen are the only realistic option and the safety of it is only a minor engineering problem today.
Hydrogen is a nuisance of a gas, though - it has a very wide combustible range of mixtures.
But an airship envelope containing multiple lifting units of hydrogen could be passivated by filling the envelope with a non-combustible gas like helium.
So, there’s a big sausage providing structure and that’s full of helium (or nitrogen, or CO2, or anything else which doesn’t react with hydrogen in normal conditions)… and it contains balloons full of hydrogen. If one of them springs a leak, the leak won’t be going into an environment that supports fire. And if the leak then proceeds into surrounding air, the hydrogen is hopefully diluted beyond its combustible range.
Considerably less expensive than using helium only. But considerably safer than using hydrogen among air.
