During the past few years there has been a surprising amount of discussion about the possibility of reviving airships. A number of schemes for new designs of rigid airship have been canvassed, all of them postulating important advances in lighter-than-air technology as compared with the ‘state-of-the-art’ at the time rigid airship development was abandoned just before the Second World War. Consideration of the factors responsible for the airship's failure may throw useful light on the validity of some of the assumptions made in recent proposals.