One possible use...
... is to lift entire prefabricated sections of a building to speed up construction.
The Skycrane helicopters don't have anything like the lifting capacity of this new airship, but they can still do this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Sikorsky_Skycrane_carrying_house_bw.jpg – and that was a hell of a long time ago. Now, imagine what an airship capable of hoisting *250 metric tons* could do...
These airships could make a *huge* difference in construction alone. If you watch any recent "How we built [REALLY TALL BUILDING X]"-type documentary, you'll notice that, especially in tight urban areas (e.g. 'Ground Zero' in NYC, during the construction of the new WTC towers), an awful lot of effort is spent simply ensuring all the materials are brought in on time and in the right order. It's very much like a modern factory production line. If the site is in a tight urban location, you're talking about *hundreds* of trucks and other vehicles that need to be marshalled into and out of the site without causing massive disruption.
Now, imagine what you could do with some larger versions of this airship, rated at, say, 750 or so metric tons each: you could literally hoist entire *prefabricated floors* into place, including cladding and the concrete floor for the floor above. As most of the workers would be at ground level, rather than on some windswept steel skeleton hundreds of feet above the ground, they'd be much safer and could work more quickly without the need to keep unhitching and hitching their safety lines. You could build each floor at a more convenient site, along with the cladding and stairs, and keep only a handful of people on the roof of the previous floor to help guide each new floor into place and bolt it into position.
You could easily complete 5 or more floors in a single day, vastly speeding up the construction process. At present, the fastest average is typically just one floor per day. And that's usually just the steelwork and concrete slabs.
Even with the current model, you could still save a lot of time by lifting entire sections of pre-bolted steelwork into position, instead of just one or two beams at a time, as is currently the norm.
(The down-side of these beasts is that they're going to make the "Monster Moves" documentaries rather dull and predictable: just hoist whatever you're planning to move up into the air and fly it to its destination!)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
