Airships Idea for New Mexico
Airships and Travel Food
Upon skim, the piece above doesn't appear to SAY this but I think the best way to establish Diamond Air is make your first airship station in Seattle which has a large population and establish routes from Seattle to the three planned other cities and later connect those smaller cities to each other. In other words, a spoke and hub with Seattle as the hub until it makes sense to complete that diamond-shaped service area.
There's a big balloon festival annually in Albuquerque. It's the most photographed event in the US and Albuquerque is around 500,000 people in a state with not much over 2 million people, so it is by far the largest city in the state.
My thought for Diamond Air was that a basis for drawing passengers is you are flying over Olympic National Forest and giving "an eco friendly air tour of this sensitive biome" and it also fills a much needed service gap between relatively small cities with surprisingly high traffic with connection challenges because of Olympic National Forest. One of those cities has a ferry to Canada.
I've often thought there's probably an overlap in skills for piloting hot air balloons and piloting airships. Adding airships to their tourist business and then if you fly them over areas of interest to tourists you can also connect some of the smaller cities to Albuquerque. This is a potential business opportunity to enhance both tourism and local transportation options.
First, you plan on a spoke and hub system and consider adding other routes organically in the future if and only if it makes sense. If two of your end points are Clovis and Roswell, once you have infrastructure in place in those cities, you explore the possibility of having routes directly between those two cities. But initially, all routes either begin or end in Albuquerque.
The balloon festival business is not far from a train station and that train can connect you to a downtown train station next to where a bunch of busses go. So it's similar to "there's a ferry in Port Angeles to Canada" in that currently there's no good way to get from Seattle to Canada but Seattle has an Amtrak station and a port and an airport. If you can get to that train station via airship, you can then connect to lots of other places.
To find potential destination cities that make sense, you ideally want:
1. Places seeing stupid levels of vehicular traffic because there's insufficient other transit modes. Read up on the insanity in Aberdeen and Port Angeles if you aren't sure what I mean.
2. Routes conducive to doing air tours and giving a running monologue "And out your right-hand windows, you can see blah. Here's a little history..." Things like National Forests, famous places, unique geography. Find something to talk about to make the trip itself a tourist experience and see what you can promote in the destination city as tourist draws.
3. Ideally, someplace where locals or businesses might have reason to take an airship periodically, say to visit mom for a week.
I would try to address both transportation gaps and tourist interest to try to capture as much traffic as possible to try to get it profitable.
It could be started with just ONE airship and the means to land it in Albuquerque and maybe sign up sheets and surveys to start establishing potential routes that have some hope of making financial sense for the business.
The initial airship could be local only for a few weeks or months while you learn about airships, install essential infrastructure, etc.
The rail system goes up to Sante Fe and from there you can catch free busses to cities like Espanola and Taos. I'm not aware of similar commuter bus lines in the southern part of the state.
If it were me, I would try to find destination cities in the southern half of the state so you extend the ability of anyone who wants to travel without a car to go wherever they want within the state rather than competing with existing rail and bus routes in the northern part of the state which has surprisingly good coverage for a place with somewhat sparse population.
Go someplace new not currently readily accessible from Albuquerque and actively advertise that this makes it possible to get from anywhere to almost anywhere else in New Mexico. Even if it's just one page on the website, make sure to spell it out that "You are a short walk (or whatever) to X rail station and this can take you here or there and from there you can get a bus to...."
People outside the US would love to travel without having to rent a car and are used to taking busses and trains but the US is terrible about opacity of that kind of information and Americans routinely claim you cannot get anywhere without a car even if that's not true.
I've seen that claim made about New Mexico and it's not true. Make sure to mention busses within Albuquerque are free, so no need to hassle with figuring out where to get tickets, if you need exact change, etc.
For foreigners, it's not the money. It's the unfamiliar logistics as a stranger in a strange land.
And make sure to frame it as "Get here from...or go to from here." The nearby train station may be how they get to the airship station or how they leave from it for parts elsewhere.