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I'm old enough to have seen this suggestion refloated for going on five decades. It keeps on not happening, and the older I get, the more I understand why. There are simply massive constraints on large-scale airship development, construction, and operation. Niche applications: maybe. Widespread adoption in the face of extant or potential viable alterantives? No.
More in this 9-month old comment of mine: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29611076>
And from others in a thread from just over a year ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28119943>
What I'm thinking instead:
Ground transportation should see a revolution in rail, particularly in flexibly coupled-and-decoupled trainsets which would eliminate marshalling issues for present freight rail systems. "High speed" transcontinental freight presently tends to take 10--30 days by rail. This could be significantly improved on. Worse, the lack of flexibility makes short haul rail freight, < 500 mi / 1,000 km, highly impractical, and prefers tucks. For all the talk of EV-based trucking, rail is still vastly more efficient in terms of mass moved distance per unit energy, it's the organisation that's utterly lacking, and there seems to be vanishingly little research into this area as I've mentioned in some previous comments.
Electrified air transport seems to me a fairly unlikely option for anything other than small-passenger count short-haul (~100 mile or so) commute hops at speeds low enough that high-speed rail is almost certainly a viable contender.
The interesting question is transoceanic transport, and here I've been thinking that submerged floating tunnels, as proposed for Norway's fjord-spanning highway projects, might be an option. Shorter links (Bearing Strait) could be achieved by conventional tunnels, and much of the Indonesian archipelago might be joined similarly or with bridges. The notion of a transatlantic link, perhaps from Newfoundland to Scotland, or from Brazil to Western Africa, would require traversing about 3,000 mi / 5,000 km of open water. The notion of a tunnel floating at 20--50m depths is provocative and not entirely implausible. I'd suspect such projects might best be piloted as automated freight conduits first, with live human passenger travel coming afterward. It's possible to link at least five or six continents within reason, and possibly even Antarctica.
Trans-Atlantic transit times might range from 15 hours at conventional speeds (240 kph / 150 mph) to as little as 2.5 hours in a hyperloop-like evacuated tube at 1,600 kph / 1,000 mph. Even at a more modest 300 kph / 186 mph an overnight journey could be made (16 hours).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submerged_floating_tunnel>
I've ... floated this concept a few times on HN without any nibbles so far.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>