LZ 129 Hindenburg

Its time for another look at the lost world of 1936 and since today is the 70th aniversary of the death of the LZ 129 Hindenburg, then its time to consider one of the greatest symbols of the pre war period: The rigid dirigible, or as it is more commonly known, the airship.

Airships (as opposed to balloons, or 'blimps') had been around for a long time before the destruction of the Hindenburg in 1937, but what set the Hindenburg and its predessors apart from the trout shaped balloon proposed by Cayley as early as 1810, was the internal skeletal structure that allowed them to grow to monstrous size and carry more cargo, passengers, or bombs. Rigid dirigibles were a development of the semi-rigid airship which was first proposed by Leppich for the Russian government in 1812. Semi-rigid airships were designed with the idea of stiffening the main gas envolope but it took almost a century before the designs worked well enough to actually fly and in 1902, M. Henri Julliot, a French engineer made the first fully operational semi-rigid dirigible; The famous Lebaudy airship.

Meanwhile, a wealthy German aristocrat and cavalry general had become interested in ballooning whilst in the United States. Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf von Zeppelin was drawn to the observation balloons used by the Americans during the Peninsula Campaign of the American Civil War (no doubt generals would travel to watch other people's wars in those days). Later he observed the French using balloons in the Franco Prussian war of 1870-1 and he finally built his first rigid dirigible a few years later, using it to travel across Bodensee (Lake Constance on the Rhine) and whip up some public enthusiasm. This worked so well that Zeppelin was able to finance his next airship solely through donations and a lottery. One might suppose that the crash of the LZ4 at Echterdingen in 1908 might have given people cause for concern, but as it transpired, it only served to further enflame their enthusiasm and a public collection campaign subsequently gave Graf Zeppelin the means to create the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin and in 1914 the worlds first airline DELAG bought seven LZ6 Zeppelins for commercial passenger transport. DELAG quickly staged a promotional voyage with the airship LZ7 'Deutschland' carrying 19 journalists. This voyage ended in a crash but with no fatalities and once again the German public embraced the spirit of the Zeppelins and DELAG continued its operations. I wonder with hindsight if the passengers were actually aware of the dangers of the vast envolope of hydrogen gas above their heads? Henry Cavendish had stumbled across hydrogen all the way back in 1783 and is subsequently creditted with having discovered it. I assume most educated people by 1914 were well aware that hydrogen was a flammable gas. It doesn't seem to have had much impact on their enthusiasm though.

According to a book I own ('Historic Airships' by Peter W Brooks), a total of 162 airships (rigid dirigibles) were ever built and of these some 99 met with a violent end.

13 burned in their sheds

3 were destroyed whilst coming out of their sheds

3 were burned whilst on the ground awaiting take off

15 were destroyed whilst landing

7 caught fire during flight

3 simply fell apart during flight

16 were lost during bad weather.

39 were destroyed during war fighting with 20 being shot down by anti aircraft guns, 15 by other air craft and 4 being bombed in their sheds. The remaining 63 were broken up for various other reasons. Today, not one historical airship still exists.

It didn't take much for these graceful vessels to fall into ruin, bad weather, a spark in the wrong place or just weak metal was all it took. Looking at Brook's numbers its obvious that the big bag of flammable gas was only a part of the dilemma airship builders faced, but looking at history we can see that it was the hydrogen that finally killed the dream.

The question that I often ask myself when considering airships is just why were they so popular? Even today they have an allure that ignores their fundamental weaknesses and dreams of their return, but in 1936, having seen several decades of spectacular failures, these vessels so inspired the public imagination that people were still prepared to fly in them.

I suppose there is no greater symbol of the 1936 period than the Hindenburg. It is practically the physical embodiment of all the hopes and aspirations, the almost blind trust in science and technology that people apparently had in those last halcyon days before the war. The symbolism of the Hindenburg going down in flames at Lakehurst with the vast swastika's on its tail is profound. The biggest, most impressive airship, the very culmination of the design, destroyed in minutes, taking with it the trusting faith that humanity had placed in its own invention. The war would eventually do much more damage to that faith, the Holocaust and the Atomic bombs would forever cripple it, but in 1937, when the Hindenburg came in on its final approach, the golden age of the airship seemed insurmountable. Like the Titanic, it represented the triumph of humanity and a future that would never be.

edited to add:

Its probably appropriate to add that of the 97 people aboard the Hindenburg when she went down, only 35 died. The flames and heat were carried upwards and the gradual descent of the airship gave most of the people on board the opportunity to escape. If you watch the You Tube video above, you might notice a tongue of flame erupting from the nose of the airship. 6 crew men were in the bow preparing to establish connection with the docking tower. They are all killed at that moment.

In 1940 Herman Göring ordered the Hindenburg's sister ship LZ 130 'Graf Zeppelin II', and the keel of LZ 131 (unamed, though most probably to be called 'Adolf Hitler') to be scrapped for their metal in preperation for the war.

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