Why have cargo hybrid airships not succeeded in the market? Using a Lighter Than Air (LTA) Hybrid Airship to efficiently transport cargo to remote areas seems like an idea that should flourish.  It allows access to remote places in the world that have no airports, harbors, or roads leading to them by providing a point-to-point delivery system with vertical take-off and landing, all while providing a greener solution.  I see at least three players all trying to enter this market which seems perpetually stuck as coming about in the next 4-5 years and all seem to have benefited from the U.S. Army's Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) project that was canceled in January 2013.


Hybrid Air Vehicles in the U.K. has partnered with Northrop Grumman owns a prototype that came out of the LEMV project and plans to build a 50-ton capacity airship in about five years.
Aeroscraft in the U.S. has a prototype and plans to build an airship that carries a 66-ton load as shown on the History channel.
Lockheed Martin has a P-791 / SkyTug prototype derived from the LEMV program and hopes to build a SkyFreighter to lift a 70-ton cargo.


It appears none of these companies has any current orders and are all looking for funding to build their proposed cargo airships.  Apparently an investment of on the order of 50 to 250 million USD would allow one of these to be built for commercial use.  While this is a lot of money, it is small compared to other aviation investments. For example, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner required 32 billion USD as of 2011.

Today, all such airships use noble gas helium instead of the very flammable hydrogen used in the Hindenburg accident, so the historical fear of using such ships should not apply to the new technologies.  These proposed ships are planned to travel at between 70 and 115 MPH, so while not as fast as airplanes, they do compete with trucking and shipping speeds.

So the question is, given the relatively small cost to develop one of these cargo lift systems, why hasn't a company like Boeing with deep pockets wanted to invest in such systems and these companies continue to search for funding?  Is there some kind of flaw in the proposal that such a new cargo shipping approach would save money?  Is it that the market is too small to interest big companies? The hangar space required to store and maintain these ships is huge and little such infrastructure currently exists, perhaps that is their downfall?  Alternatively, maybe their maintenance requirements are their Achilles heel?
First of all, there is the question of demand. There aren't enough cases where a very heavy load needs to be moved to a remote location by air. There are probably even fewer where there are funds to actually pay for this option. The An-225 is currently the largest aircraft in operation, and it was only constructed under special circumstances. Although has certainly found use, they still haven't even found the funds to finish a second one which is partially built.

When this option is needed today, helicopters are deployed on cargo aircraft to the area. The helicopters may have to make multiple trips but can do the job. So the subset of cases is even smaller; where heavy cargo needs to be delivered to a remote area and also cannot be split into shipments that helicopters can handle. Deploying a large airship in this manner is also much harder. Either the airship would have to fly itself there, which could take a long time, or it would have to be reduced to a transportable size.

The airship would also need to be protected from the weather somehow. This could require either a very large (and expensive) hangar. Without a hangar, the airship must be tethered, and restraining such a large surface area in the wind would be difficult.

Wind would also affect operation of the airship. Helicopters are of course limited by weather conditions, but wind would have a much greater effect on a large and slow airship.

If the airship could be fairly easily collapsible, it would solve the issues of storage and transportation. However, this is not a simple problem to solve. This would require a large development budget. If you are comparing this to the cost of the 787 development, where are you going to find buyers for 1000 of these airships in order to break even and make them affordable?

The issue is that there needs to be a market for this kind of transportation, which currently competes at least partially with existing helicopters. Why invest in a new type of vehicle when the current option works fine for most cases?