Airship

An airship is a buoyant aircraft that can be steered and propelled through the air. Unlike aerodynamic craft (e.g. airplanes and helicopters) which stay aloft by moving an airfoil through the air in order to produce lift, aerostatic craft such as airships (and balloons) stay aloft primarily by means of a cavity (usually quite large) filled with a gas of lesser density than the surrounding atmosphere.

Airships are also known as dirigibles from the French dirigeable, meaning "steerable." The term airship is sometimes informally used to mean a machine capable of atmospheric flight. The term zeppelin is a genericised trademark that originally referred to airships manufactured by the Zeppelin Company. In modern common usage, the terms zeppelin, dirigible and airship are used interchangeably for any type of rigid airship, with the terms blimp or airship alone used to describe non-rigid airships. In modern technical usage however, airship is the term used for all aircraft of this type with zeppelin referring only to aircraft of that manufacture and blimp referring only to non-rigid airships.

In the early days of airships, the primary lifting gas was hydrogen. Until the 1950s, all airships, except for those in the United States continued to use hydrogen because it offered greater lift and was cheaper than helium. The United States (until then the sole producer) was also unwilling to export helium because of its rarity and the fact it was considered a strategic material. However, hydrogen is flammable when mixed with air, a quality that, among other factors, contributed to the Hindenburg disaster. The buoyancy provided by hydrogen is actually only about 10% greater than that of helium. The issue therefore became one of safety versus cost. American airships have been filled with helium since the 1920s and modern passenger-carrying airships are often, by law, prohibited from being filled with hydrogen. Some small experimental ships still use hydrogen. Other small experimental airships are filled with hot air in a fashion similar to a hot air balloon.

In contrast to airships, balloons are buoyant aircraft that generally rely on wind currents for movement, though vertical movement can be controlled in both.

Airships are also distinct from aerostats which are tethered balloons that are shaped similarly to airships.

Types

• Rigid airships (for example, Zeppelins) have rigid frames containing multiple, non-pressurized gas cells or balloons to provide lift. Rigid airships do not depend on internal pressure to maintain their shape.
• Non-rigid airships (blimps) use a pressure level in excess of the surrounding air pressure in order to retain their shape.
• Semi-rigid airships, like blimps, require internal pressure to maintain their shape, but have extended, usually articulated keel frames running along the bottom of the envelope to distribute suspension loads into the envelope and allow lower envelope pressures.
• Metal-clad airships have characteristics of both rigid and non-rigid airships, utilizing a very thin, airtight metal envelope, rather than the usual rubber-coated fabric envelope. Only two ships of this type, Schwarz's aluminium ship of 1897 and the ZMC-2, have been built to date.
• Hybrid airship is a general term for an aircraft that combines characteristics of heavier-than-air (airplane or helicopter) and lighter than air technology. Examples include helicopter/airship hybrids intended for heavy lift applications and dynamic lift airships intended for long-range cruising. It should be noted that most airships, when fully loaded with cargo and fuel, are typically heavier than air, and thus must use their propulsion system and shape to generate aerodynamic lift, necessary to stay aloft; technically making them hybrid airships. However, the term "hybrid airship" refers to craft that obtain a significant portion of their lift from aerodynamic lift and often require substantial take-off rolls before becoming airborne.

History

The development of airships was necessarily preceded by the development of balloons. See balloon (aircraft) for details.

Airship Pioneers

Airships were among the first aircraft to fly, with various designs flying throughout the 19th century. They were largely attempts to make relatively small balloons more steerable, and often contained features found on later airships. These early airships set many of the earliest aviation records.

In 1784 Jean-Pierre Blanchard fitted a hand-powered propeller to a balloon, the first recorded means of propulsion carried aloft.

The first person to make an engine-powered flight was Henri Giffard who, in 1852, flew 27 km (17 miles) in a steam-powered airship.

In 1872, the French naval architect Dupuy de Lome launched a large limited navigable balloon, which was driven by a large propeller and the power of eight people. It was developed during the Franco-Prussian war, as an improvement to the balloons used for communications between Paris and the countryside during the Siege of Paris by German forces, but was only completed after the end of the war.

Charles F. Ritchel made a public demonstration flight in 1878 of his hand-powered one-man rigid airship and went on to build and sell five of his aircraft.

Paul Haenlein flew an airship with an internal combustion engine on a tether in Vienna, the first use of such an engine to power an aircraft.

In 1880, Karl Wölfert and Ernst Georg August Baumgarten attempted to fly a powered airship in free flight, but crashed.

In the 1880's a Serb named Ogneslav Kostovic Stepanovic also designed and built an airship. However the craft was destroyed by fire before it flew.

In 1883, the first electric-powered flight was made by Gaston Tissandier who fitted a 1-1/2 horsepower Siemens electric motor to an airship. The first fully controllable free-flight was made in a French Army airship, La France, by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs in 1884. The 170 foot long , 66,000 cubic foot airship covered 8 km (5 miles) in 23 minutes with the aid of an 8-1/2 horsepower electric motor.

In 1888, Wölfert flew a Daimler-built petrol engine powered airship at Seelburg.

In 1896, a rigid airship created by Croatian engineer David Schwarz made its first flight at Tempelhof field in Berlin. After Schwarz's death, his wife, Melanie Schwarz, was paid 15,000 Marks by Zeppelin for information about the airship.

In 1901, Santos Dumont, in his airship "Number 6", a small blimp, won the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize of 100,000 francs for flying from the Parc Saint Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in under thirty minutes. Many inventors were inspired by Santos-Dumont's small airships and a veritable airship craze began world-wide. Many airship pioneers, such as the American Thomas Scott Baldwin financed their activities through passenger flights and public demonstration flights. Others, such as Walter Wellman and Melvin Vaniman set their sights on loftier goals, attempting two polar flights in 1907 and 1909, and two trans-atlantic flights in 1910 and 1912.

The beginning of the "Golden Age of Airships" was also marked with the launch of the Luftschiff Zeppelin LZ1 in July of 1900 which would lead to the most successful airships of all time. These Zeppelins were named after the pioneer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. Von Zeppelin began experimenting with rigid airship designs in the 1890's leading to some patents and the LZ1 (1900) and the LZ2 (1906). At the beginning of WW1 the Zeppelin airships had a cylindrical aluminium alloy frame and a fabric-covered hull containing separate gas cells. Multi-plane tail fins were used for control and stability, and two engine/crew cars hung beneath the hull driving propellers attached to the sides of the frame by means of long drive shafts. Additionally there was a passenger compartment (later a bomb bay) located halfway between the two cars.

Airships in the First World War

The prospect of using airships as bomb carriers had been recognised in Europe well before the airships themselves were up to the task. H. G. Wells described the obliteration of entire fleets and cities by airship attack in The War in the Air (1908), and scores of less famous British writers declared in print that the airship had altered the face of world affairs forever. On 5 March 1912, Italian forces became the first to use dirigibles for a military purpose during reconnaissance west of Tripoli behind Turkish lines. It was World War I, however, that marked the airship's real debut as a weapon.

Count Zeppelin and others in the German military believed they had found the ideal weapon with which to counteract British Naval superiority and strike at Britain itself. More realistic airship advocates believed the Zeppelin was a valuable long range scout/attack craft for naval operations. Raids began by the end of 1914, reached a first peak in 1915, and then were discontinued after 1917. Zeppelins proved to be terrifying but inaccurate weapons. Navigation, target selection and bomb-aiming proved to be difficult under the best of conditions. The darkness, high altitudes and clouds that were frequently encountered by zeppelin missions reduced accuracy even further. The physical damage done by the zeppelins over the course of the war was trivial, and the deaths that they caused (though visible) amounted to a few hundred at most. The zeppelins also proved to be vulnerable to attack by aircraft and antiaircraft guns, especially those armed with tracer bullets. Several were shot down in flames by British defenders, and others crashed 'en route'. In retrospect, advocates of the naval scouting role of the airship proved to be correct, and the land bombing campaign proved to be disastrous in terms of morale, men and material. Many pioneers of the German airship service died bravely, but needlessly in these propaganda missions. They also drew unwanted attention to the construction sheds which were bombed by the British Royal Naval Air Service.

Meanwhile the Royal Navy had recognised the need for small airships to counteract the submarine threat in coastal waters, and beginning in February 1915, began to deploy the SS (Sea Scout) class of blimp. These had a small envelope of 60-70,000 cu feet and at first utilised standard single engined planes (BE2c, Maurice Farman, Armstrong FK) shorn of wing and tail surfaces as an economy measure. Eventually more advanced blimps with purpose built cars, such as the C (Coastal), C* (Coastal Star), NS (North Sea), SSP (Sea Scout Pusher), SSZ (Sea Scout Zero), SSE (Sea Scout Experimental) and SST (Sea Scout Twin) classes were developed. The NS class, after initial teething problems proved to be the largest and finest airships in British service. They had a gas capacity of 360,000 cu feet, a crew of 10 and an endurance of 24 hours. Six 230 lb bombs were carried, as well as 3-5 machine guns. British blimps were used for scouting, mine clearance, and submarine attack duties. During the war, the British built over 225 non-rigid airships, of which several were sold to the Russia, France, the US and Italy. Britain, in turn, purchased one M-type semi-rigid from Italy whose delivery was delayed until 1918. Eight rigid airships had been completed by the armistice, although several more were in an advanced state of completion by the wars end. The large number of trained crews, low attrition rate and constant experimentation in handling techniques meant that at the wars end Britain was the world leader in non-rigid airship technology.

Airplanes had essentially replaced airships as bombers by the end of the war, and Germany's remaining zeppelins were scuttled by their crews, scrapped or handed over to the Allied powers as spoils of war. The British rigid airship program, meanwhile, had been largely a reaction to the potential threat of the German one and was largely, though not entirely, based on imitations of the German ships.

Airships in the Inter-war period

Airships using the Zeppelin construction method are sometimes referred to as zeppelins even if they had no connection to the Zeppelin business. Several airships of this kind were built in the USA and Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly imitating original Zeppelin design derived from crashed or captured German World War I airships.

The British R33 and R34, for example, were near identical copies of the German L-33, which crashed virtually intact in Yorkshire on September 24, 1916. Despite being almost three years out of date by the time they were launched in 1919, these sister ships were two of the most successful in British service. On July 2, 1919 R34 began the first double crossing of the Atlantic by an aircraft. It landed at Mineola, Long Island on July 6, 1919 after 108 hours in the air. The return crossing commenced on July 8 because of concerns about mooring the ship in the open, and took 75 hours. Impressed, British leaders began to contemplate a fleet of airships that would link Britain to its far-flung colonies, but unfortunately post-war economic conditions lead to most airships being scrapped and trained personnel dispersed, until the R-100 and R-101 commenced construction in 1929.

Another example was the first American-built rigid dirigible USS Shenandoah , which flew in 1923, while the Los Angeles was under construction. The ship was christened on August 20 in Lakehurst, New Jersey and was the first to be inflated with the noble gas helium, which was still so rare at the time that the Shenandoah contained most of the world's reserves. So, when the Los Angeles was delivered, it was at first filled with the helium borrowed from ZR-1.

The Zeppelin works were saved by the purchase of what became called the USS Los Angeles by the United States Navy, paid for with "war reparations" money, owed according to the Versailles Treaty. The success of the Los Angeles encouraged the United States Navy to invest in larger airships of its own. Germany, meanwhile, was building the Graf Zeppelin, the first of what was intended to be a new class of passenger airships. Interestingly, the Graf Zeppelin burned un-pressurised blau gas, similar to propane, as fuel. Since its density was similar to that of air, it avoided the weight change when fuel was used.

Initially airships met with great success and compiled an impressive safety record. The Graf Zeppelin, for example, flew over 1 million miles (including the first circumnavigation of the globe by air) without a single passenger injury. The expansion of airship fleets and the growing (sometimes excessive) self-confidence of airship designers gradually made the limits of the type clear, and initial successes gave way to a series of tragic rigid airship accidents.

The "catastrophist theory" of airship development owes much to the sensationalist press of the 1920s and 1930s and ignores successful ships such as Graf Zeppelin, R100 and Los Angeles. The worst disasters - R101, USS Shenandoah, USS Akron and Hindenburg were all partially the result of political interference in normal airship construction and flight procedures.

Although the USS Los Angeles flew successfully for 8 years, the U.S. Navy eventually lost all three of its American-built rigid airships to accidents. USS Shenandoah, on a poorly planned publicity flight, flew into a severe thunderstorm over Noble County, Ohio, on 3 September 1925 and broke into pieces, killing 14 of her crew. USS Akron was caught by a microburst and driven down into the surface of the sea off the shore of New Jersey on April 3, 1933. The USS Akron carried no life boats and few life vests. As a result, 73 of her 76-men crew died from drowning or hypothermia. USS Macon broke up after suffering a structural failure in its upper fin off the shore of Point Sur in California on 12 February 1935. Only 2 of her 83-man crew died in the crash thanks to the inclusion of life jackets and inflatable rafts after the Akron disaster.

Britain suffered its own airship tragedy in 1930 when R101, a ship far advanced for its time but rushed to completion and sent on a trip to India before she was ready, crashed in France with the loss of 48 out of 54 aboard on 5 October. Because of the bad publicity surrounding the crash, the Air Ministry grounded the competing R100 in 1930 and sold it for scrap in 1931.

The most spectacular and widely remembered airship accident, however, is the burning of the Hindenburg on 6 May 1937, which caused public faith in airships to evaporate in favour of faster, more cost-efficient (albeit less energy-efficient) airplanes. What is generally not remembered is that of the 97 people on board, 62 got out alive. There were 36 dead: 13 passengers, 22 aircrew, and one American groundcrewman.

Most probably, the airplane became the transport of choice also because it is less sensitive to wind. Aside from the problem of manoeuvring and docking in high winds, the trip times for an upwind versus a downwind trip of an airship can differ greatly, and even crabbing at an angle to a crosswind eats up ground speed. Those differences make scheduling difficult.

Airships in the Second World War

While Germany determined that airships were obsolete for military purposes in the coming war and concentrated on the development of airplanes, the United States pursued a program of military airship construction even though it had not developed a clear military doctrine for airship use. At the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 that brought the United States into World War II, it had 10 non-rigid airships:

• 4 K-class : K-2, K-3, K-4 and K-5 designed as a patrol ships built from 1938.
• 3 L-class : L-1, L-2 and L-3 as small training ships, produced from 1938.
• 1 G-class built in 1936 for training.
• 2 TC-class that were older patrol ships designed for land forces, built in 1933. The US Navy acquired them from Army in 1938.

Only K and TC class airships could be used for combat purposes and they were quickly pressed into service against Japanese and German submarines which at that time were sinking US shipping in visual range of US coast. US Navy command, remembering the airship anti-submarine success from WWI, immediately requested new modern anti-submarine airships and on 2 January 1942 formed the ZP-12 patrol unit based in Lakehurst from the 4 K airships. The ZP-32 patrol unit was formed from 2 TC and 2 L airships a month later, based at US Navy (Moffet Field) in Sunnyvale in California. An airship training base was created there as well.

In the years 1942-1944, approximately 1400 airship pilots and 3000 support crew members were trained in the military airship crew training program and the airship military personnel grew from 430 to 12400. The US airships were produced by the Goodyear factory in Akron, Ohio. From 1942 till 1945, 154 airships were built for the US Navy (133 K-class, 10 L-class, 7 G-class, 4 M-class) and 5 L-class for civilian customers (serial number L-4 to L-8).

The primary airship tasks were patrol and convoy escort near the US coastline. They also served as an organisation center for the convoys to direct ship movements and course, and were used during naval search and rescue operations. Rarer duties of the airships included aerophoto reconnaissance, naval mine-laying and mine-sweeping, parachute unit transport and deployment, cargo and personnel transportation. They were deemed quite successful in their duties with the highest combat readiness factor in the entire US air force (87%). They were extremely successful in their primary goal of anti-submarine warfare as the below numbers illustrate:

During the war some 532 ships were sunk near the coast by submarines.

• 1942: 454 ships sunk near the US coast, 4-13 airships in service
• 1943: 65 ships sunk near the US coast, 17-53 airships in service
• 1944: 8 ships sunk near the US coast, 56-68 airships in service
• 1945: 3 ships sunk near the US coast, 53-48 airships in service

Not a single ship of the 89,000 or so in convoys escorted by blimps was sunk by enemy fire. Airships engaged submarines with depth charges, or rarely from other on-board weapons. They were very successful since they could match the slow speed of the submarine and bomb it until its destruction. Additionally, submerged submarines had no means of detecting an airship approaching.

Only one airship was ever destroyed by U-boat: on the night of 18/ 19 July 1943 a K-class airship (K-74) from ZP-21 division was patrolling the coastline near Florida. Using radar, the airship located a surfaced German submarine. Due to the failure of the depth charge release mechanism, the airship was unable to release the bombs during the bombing run and the German returned fire. The (K-74) received serious damage and was forced to make a water landing. The crew was rescued by patrol boats in the morning, but one crewman died from a shark attack. The U-Boat responsible was sunk a few hours later.

Some US airships saw action in the European war theater. The ZP-14 unit operating in the Mediterranean area from June 1944 completely denied the use of the Gibraltar Straits to Axis submarines. Airships from the ZP-12 unit took part in the sinking of the last U-Boat before German capitulation, sinking U-881 on 6 May 1945 together with destroyers Atherton and Mobery.

The Soviet Union used a single airship during the war. The W-12, built in 1939, entered service in 1942 for paratrooper training and equipment transport. It made 1432 runs with 300 metric tons of cargo until 1945. On 1 February 1945 the Soviets constructed a second airship, a Pobieda-class unit (used for mine-sweeping and wreckage clearing in the Black Sea) which later crashed on 21 January 1947. Another W-class - W-12bis Patriot was commissioned in 1947 and was mostly used for crew training, parades and propaganda.

Continued use

Although airships abandoned carrying passengers, they continued to be used for other purposes. In particular, the US Navy as above.

In recent years, the Zeppelin company has reentered the airship business. Their new model, designated the Zeppelin NT made its maiden flight on September 18, 1997. There are currently three NT aircraft flying. One has been sold to a Japanese company, and was planned to be flown to Japan in the summer of 2004. However, due to delays getting permission from the Russian government, the company decided to transport the airship to Japan by ship. An airship was flown over Athens during the 2004 Summer Olympics as part of security anti-terrorism measures.

Blimps continue to be used for advertising and as TV camera platforms at major sporting events.

Several companies, such as Cameron Balloons in Bristol, UK, build hot-air airships. These combine the structures of both hot-air balloons and small airships. The envelope is the normal 'cigar' shape, complete with tail fins, but is not inflated by helium, but by hot air (as in a balloon), which provides the lifting force. A small gondola, carrying the pilot (and sometimes between 1 and 3 passengers), a small engine and the burners to provide the hot air is suspended below the envelope, below an opening through which the burners protrude.

The advantages with the hot-air airship are that is costs less to buy and maintain than a standard modern blimp and it can be quickly deflated at the end of a flight, meaning it is easily transported on a trailer or truck, without the need for expensive storage arrangements. Such craft usually are very slow moving, with a typical top speed of 15-20 mph. They are used mainly for advertising, but several have been used in rainforests for wildlife observation, because they could easily be transported into remote areas.

Present-day research

There are two primary focuses of current research on airships: 1) high altitude, long duration, sensor and/or communications platforms and 2) long distance transport of very large payloads.

The US government is funding two major projects in the high altitude arena. The first is sponsored by U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and is called the Composite Hull High Altitude Powered Platform (CHHAPP). A prototype ship made a 5 hour test flight in September 2005. The second project is being sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and is called the high-altitude airship (HAA). In 2005, DARPA awarded a contract for nearly $150 million to Lockheed-Martin for prototype development. First flight of the HAA is planned for 2008.

There are also three private companies funding working on high altitude airships. Sanswire is developing high altitude airships they call " Stratellites" and Techsphere is developing a high altitude version of their spherically shaped airships. JP Aerospace has discussed its long-range plans that include not only high altitude communications and sensor applications but also an " orbital airship" capable of lifting cargo into low earth orbit with a marginal transportation cost of $1 per short ton per mile of altitude.

The largest project focused on long distance and heavy lift is the WALRUS HULA [1] sponsored by the US Department of Defense [2] The primary goal of the research program is determine the feasibility of building an airship capable of carrying 500 short tons (450 metric tons) of payload a distance of 12,000 miles (20,000 km) and land on an unimproved location without the use of external ballast or ground equipment (e.g. masts.) In 2005, two contractors, Lockheed-Martin and US Aeros Airships were each awarded approximately $3 million to do feasibility studies of designs for WALRUS.

On January 31, 2006 Lockheed-Martin made the first flight of their secretly built hybrid-airship designated the P-791 at the company's flight test facility on the Palmdale Air Force Plant 42. The P-791 aircraft is very similar in design to the SkyCat design unsuccessfully promoted for many years by the now financially troubled British company Advanced Technology Group. Although Lockheed-Martin is developing a design for the DARPA WALRUS project, the company claims that the P-791 is unrelated to WALRUS. Nonetheless, the design represents an approach that may well be applicable to WALRUS. Some believe that Lockheed-Martin has used the secret P-791 program as a way to get a "head-start" on the other WALRUS competitor.

A priviately funded effort to build a heavy-lift aerostatic/aerodynamic hybrid craft, called the Dynalifter, is being carried out by Ohio Airships. The company has stated that they expect to begin test flight of the Dynalifter in Spring of 2006.

Proposed designs

There are several proposed long-range/large-payload designs. All of these designs are still on the "drawing board".

Noteworthy historic prototypes and experiments

The Heli-Stat was airship / helicopter hybrid built in New Jersey in 1986.

The Aereon was a hybrid aerostatic/aerodynamic craft built in the 1970's.

The Cyclocrane was a hybrid aerostatic/rotorcraft in which the entire airship envelope rotated along its longitudinal axis.

Cargolifter was very large semi-rigid airship to be built in Germany but funding ran out in 2002 after a massive hangar was built. The hangar, built just outside Berlin, has since been converted into a resort called " tropical island".

Fiction

Airships were a popular theme in scientific romance (prototypical science fiction) and adventure fiction published in the late 19th century and the earliest years of the 20th century. The theme of aeronautical exploration was most famously explored in this period by Jules Verne ( The Clipper of the Clouds) and H. G. Wells (The War in the Air).

After the invention of the airplane, airships were largely forgotten by mainstream fiction, and today appear mainly in historical fiction and alternate history (particularly the steampunk genre and the work of Michael Moorcock, most notably The Warlord of the Air). In his "Anome" trilogy (The Anome aka The Faceless Man, The Brave Free Men, and The Asutra), Jack Vance depicts a system of airships tethered to unmanned monorail dolleys which keep them on fixed courses.

In Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials ( The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass), parts of which take place in a parallel universe, airships are the most common method of air travel. Airships' strengths and weaknesses are well portrayed in these novels: their great lifting capacity makes them valuable for transporting supplies and soldiers, but they are easily destroyed.

In Theodore Judson's post-apocalyptic Fitzpatrick's War, the neo- feudal Yukon Confederacy makes heavy use of airships as military and civilian transports.

Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars Trilogy envisages rigid airships being used as a major form of transport for the emerging settlements of Mars. His book Antarctica also incorporates airships.

Kenneth Oppel's novel Airborn, a young adult adventure set in an alternate history in which airship travel is common, won the 2004 Governor General's Award for children's literature. www.airborn.ca. There is also a sequel, Skybreaker.

In Philip Reeve's Hungry City Chronicles, which takes place in the distant future, airships are the primary form of travel because of the mobile nature of cities in the books. In the series, it is mentioned that airship technology had advanced beyond the imaginations of the "Ancients." Airships include freighters, sky yachts, fighter airships and immense air destroyers.

In Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, the airship is a significant and popular form of transport.

David Brin's 1990 Hugo nominated near-future, post global-warming science fiction novel, Earth (set in 2038), portrays a future where there is regular use of airships for passenger transportation.

China Miéville's Bas Lag novels ( Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council) feature airships ("dirigibles") as a common mode of transport; they are used as taxis and military scouts. The Scar featured two large war airships controlled by the pirate city of Armada: The Arrogance (a captured New Crobuzon airship used as a crow's nest) and the Trident.

Philip José Farmer's Riverworld novels feature a giant rigid and several non-rigid airships which are used to reach the north pole of the Riverworld

More than a few video games, such as Crimson Skies, Skies of Arcadia, Sakura Taisen and the Final Fantasy series, utilize airships in their fictional worlds as a major mode of transportation. (In some cases (most notably in the Final Fantasy series), the "airship" is actually a ship with wings, propellers, etc.) Also, in Command & Conquer Red Alert 2, the Soviets' most lethal conventional weapons are their extremely tough but slow Kirov Airships, which act as hovering bombers.

The anime television series Last Exile centers around airships, which are the primary weapon of war between the two rival nations Anatoray and Disith. These airships are given lighter-than-air qualities by an exotic anti-gravity technology, bestowed on the humans of this alternate world by the mysterious Guild.

Another anime to make use of airships is Castle in the Sky, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. This appears to be an alternate history, in which primitive airships are used for exploration and transportation. As well, the military makes use of advanced, massive airships for flying fortresses, armed with an array of powerful cannons and capable of navigating through high winds.

In the futuristic and post-apocalyptic anime Wolf's Rain the "Nobles," who are the rulers of the city-states make use of airships to maintain their monopoly of air travel and as weapons of war. As in Last Exile the airships seem to utilize some form of anti-gravity technology instead of gas compartments. This could explain how they can be so huge, sometimes as big as a city block, and how they can wield such impressive arrays of lazer weapons. They are also not shapped like traditional airships in any way, but appear more as exotic space ships.

Mark Twain wrote a short story called "Tom Sawyer Aeronaut." The small ship could move under its own power, as well as using an early concept of Jet stream.