Lithium Battery Fires On Airliners Average More Than One Per Week - AVweb

Interesting thanks.

Doesn’t sound viable for a passenger service, but perhaps in remote areas as it does not require much of a paved runway.

There have been proposals for using airships in remote areas such as northern Canada. Lockheed-Martin has been pitching a double-bubble (sideways) design.

Sounds to me as though variation in weight with cargo is a key challenge, perhaps compressing and expanding helium would be feasible. (Well, I better think that through from basics - the stuff would still be on board so lifted.) Do not want to waste helium at today’s prices (there are people working on producing much more helium, some natural gas wells have an amount worth extracting).

Winds we know are a challenge, some places are windy (like the south Peace River block of NE BC, wind funnels through a pass, wind turbines are viable there).