@vaiyt
See people, vaiyt's getting it.
You'll notice that on my list, incomplete as it is, there are exactly zero Hybrid Airships designed to exceed 25,000 feet. And those are military, the cargo freighter itself can't get past 11,000 feet.
Airships are the highest-altitude craft in the world, but that comes at a terrible cost. For an airship to reach 75,000 feet and still have a usable payload(like ISIS's office-building-sized radar array), it has to be HUGE, yet extremely lightweight, because the Helium expands and simultaneously loses lift as you increase altitude. So you have to start out with the vast majority of the hull filled with air on the ground which weighs you down. The small amount of helium you DO have becomes less and less powerful as it fills out the hull in expansion.
End result? A high-altitude airship has terrible performance and payload compared to it's lower-atmosphere brethren. But it is unreachable by weather or enemy fire at those altitudes, and it's endurance is measured in YEARS.
EDIT: @Person
See the list. We do have lots of airplanes, yes, but we also have a explosively growing Airship armada(flotilla? Fleet? Whatever you call a bunch of Zeppelins). It is often overlooked. However, the CSTDT aspect of this is that the airship he's talking about has extremely improbable abilities and is obviously fictional.
