The development of explosive bullets, fitted to Allied fighters from 1916, however, led to the destruction of what Winston Churchill had mocked as “enormous bladders of combustible and explosive gas”. A new terror had been born: death and destruction of civilian populations and their cities from the air. Soon, the name Zeppelin became one to be feared as these seemingly impregnable machines rained down bombs on cities stretching from St Petersburg to London. In 1909, Zeppelin even founded the world’s first airline.Īnd then in World War One, the Zeppelin – intended by its inventor as a harbinger of international peace – was pressed into service with the Imperial German Army and Navy. Despite early accidents, the revolutionary Zeppelins were soon turned into reliable and attractive machines. The Hindenburg, like every other Zeppelin except the very first, was designed by Dr Ludwig Durr, who had joined Count Ferdinand Zeppelin in 1900 as an assistant on the development and construction of LZ-1 (Luftschiff Zeppelin 1), which made its maiden flight from Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance in July 1900. Her engines – four, 16-cylinder Daimler-Benz diesels adapted from the latest motor torpedo boats – were each attended by a crew which stayed with them throughout each flight, an ear-splitting job that involved walking out of the hull to the engine pontoons along tiny aluminium catwalks exposed to the elements, out of sight and mind of those quaffing Maybach cocktails in the airship’s well-stocked bar. The flight deck was equipped with an early form of autopilot, while the aircraft was able to lift prodigious loads of cargo, mail and luggage, and even passengers’ cars, up and across the Atlantic. Her cotton cloth skin was impregnated with aluminium powder to repel radiation and ultra-violet light: it made the airship sparkle. Her structure was shaped from rings and struts of lightweight duralumin coated in bright blue protective paint. Technically, too, the Hindenburg, which usually took off weighing 232 tons (210,000 kg), was an advanced design in several ways. And, they offered the kind of accommodation that makes even the latest jet airliner seem pinched and mean-minded. They could circumnavigate the world, as the Graf Zeppelin did in the summer of 1929, in 21 leisurely days. They appeared to cruise through the air effortlessly. These long, sleek, silver machines could be beautiful, their design a masterpiece of lightweight construction. If only the Hindenburg had been borne aloft by helium, perhaps we would be cruising around the world today, when not in a hurry, in serene and supremely elegant airships.ĭespite the fate of the ill-starred Hindenburg, it is not difficult to see the attraction of the legendary Zeppelins. The Germans had no alternative but to inflate the enormous gelatine-coated cotton gas cells inside the lighter-than-air Hindenburg and its sibling Zeppelins with hydrogen. Helium was, and remains, the ideal gas for airships, whether rigid with internal skeletons like the Graf Zeppelin or deflatable like the ‘blimps’ used for anti-aircraft defence in World War Two and for aerial advertising today. Their fate was caught on sensational cinema newsreels shown around the world, as terrifying to watch today as they were a lifetime ago. Its substitute, highly flammable hydrogen, ensured the death of those hapless passengers and their crew in 1937. The great sadness of the Lakehurst tragedy lies in the US government’s steadfast refusal to supply foreign countries, including Germany, with non-flammable helium gas. The German government, however, withdrew the Graf Zeppelin and went on to scrap the ambitious Hindenburg II in 1940. Remarkably, passengers still requested tickets for transatlantic flights from Germany to the US or South America aboard the Hindenburg’s older sibling, the Graf Zeppelin, named after the inventor of these impressive machines that caught the public imagination between the two world wars, and haunt it still. The sudden and dramatic end of this supremely elegant German ‘airliner’ was, perhaps, the aerial equivalent of the sinking of the Titanic a quarter of a century earlier. Thirty-five of the 97 people on board were killed. This colossal German aircraft burst into flames on while landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, after a successful Atlantic crossing. Test flights over California in recent months of the prototype Aeroscraft, the first of a new generation of fully rigid airships, have encouraged a new wave of enthusiasm for a form of aerial transport effectively killed off by the fiery fate of the Hindenburg, the most imposing of all pre-war Zeppelins.
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