Famous Flyers - Zeppelin

- The Zeppelins

In the spring of 1838 an enormous iron framed ship set out from Bristol, heading to New York. The 'Great Western' was designed by the great engineer Brunel, also responsible for the Great Western Railway, the Clifton suspension bridge, Paddington railway station, and many other Victorian engineering marvels. As it turned out, the Great Western's first voyage was delayed by a fire breaking out in the engine room. Another ship, the Sirius, left Cork in Ireland ahead of the Western and headed to New York. By the time the Western was ready to set sail, most of the passengers had cancelled their bookings, with only a handful willing to take the journey. Sirius arrived first in New York, but it was a one off trip for the ship, it returned to sailing between Ireland and Scotland. The Great Western made it to New York the day after the Sirius, and in the following decade made over forty crossings of the ocean, the first steamship to regularly cross the Atlantic with paying customers. She was followed by many more Atlantic steamships over the next century. The steamer was the only way to cross between the old world and the new and the advent of aeroplanes that could cross oceans did not change this. Ships could carry thousands of passengers, planes could carry a few tens of passengers. The heroic flight of Charles Lindbergh had raised the profile of air travel enormously, but the ordinary middle class traveller was only ever likely to fly on a plane when travelling between cities or taking short hops across short stretches of sea, such as the English channel. Even by the 1930s, with over thirty years of improvements to plane designs, including a huge burst of progress during the Great War, and the heroic exploits of the Orteig Prize competitors, the most luxurious of Pan American Airlines seaplanes could carry around thirty passengers. And with such limited numbers the price of a journey on a trans-oceanic sea plane flight was huge; a five figure sum in today's money.

Seaplanes (or flying boats) came to the fore in the 1930s because they addressed two practical problems with air travel; the need to refuel on long oceanic crossings, and the lack of places to land in large cities. These were problems that had also been solved by a completely different form of airborne craft; the airship. Airships had been around for just as long as powered aeroplanes and the two forms of machine shared a great deal in common. Both used a light but strong framework - planes to form a fuselage and wings, airships to contain bags filled with lighter-than-air gases. Both used powerful piston engines to drive propellers, except that airships could steer with their engines. Planes were certainly faster and more agile than airships, but airships promised very large cargo and passenger carrying capacity. Where planes could carry a few dozen people it looked as though a giant airship might be a competitor to the huge ocean going liners. In the 1910s and 1920s it looked as though the future of travel would be shared between small planes buzzing around like insects between airfields, and giant whale-like airships carrying people across oceans.

The name that became synonymous with airships was that of a German count of the late 19th century. Ferdinand von Zeppelin spent most of his life in the German army, and was inspired by seeing hot air balloons being used for reconnaissance during the American Civil War. Airships had been a concept on many Victorian drawing boards throughout the 19th century, but like their winged counterparts were being held back from being fully developed by the limitations of materials and engines. In he 1850s a Frenchman called Henri Giffard had built a working airship, the "Dirigible" (or "directable"); it was over forty metres long, filled with hydrogen gas and powered by a steam engine. Much like George Cayley's glider of the same decade it was a beautiful piece of engineering, but of limited practical use. The Giffard dirigible could only travel at walking pace, could not fly into the wind, and was also filled with extremely volatile hydrogen gas that presented a huge danger in the close proximity of the hot steam engine.

Zeppelin took the concept of the airship seriously and left the army in his middle age to set up a company to make a practical design. It would take many years for Zeppelin to achieve something that worked. He hired an engineer called Theodor Kober to help with the design, and gained a patent on a design by Kober for a rigid airship, made from aluminium , covered in fabric, with multiple gondolas suspended underneath for carrying passengers or cargo. It would take Zeppelin a decade to muster the support, both financial and political, to build a full working rigid airship based on the design. His break came when the German Engineers Association decided to support his plan and attracted other engineers, including experts on metals, and industrial gas suppliers, both essential components of his idea.

By the turn of the 20th century the Zeppelin company had built it's first prototype rigid airship, the LZ1. The LZ1 was built in a factory in the town of Friedrichshafen, on the shores of Lake Constance in Bavaria. This factory would come to produce the famous Zeppelin ships of the 1930s, but only after a very shaky start for the Zeppelin company. The LZ1 was a very impressive sight floating over the shores of the lake, but it turned out to be a total fiasco. On it's first flight it's structure was found to be severely insufficient to cope with the stresses of the wind turbulence, some of it's controls jammed, and one of it's engines failed. After repairs it was flown two more times but only on short journeys. Investors were not convinced and Zeppelin had to sell off his company and dismantle the LZ1 for scrap. Six years later the indomitable Count von Zeppelin was back with a second airship, LZ2, the first product of a new Zeppelin company and a new designer. Kober had given way to a long time Zeppelin engineer called Ludwig Durr. Durr would design all the subsequent rigid airships of the company.

The structural problems with the LZ1 were caused by the rectangular girders in the frame buckling under stress; Durr changed the design to a triangular girder frame that was much stronger. He also discarded the idea of using moving weight ballast to control the ship's pitch and adopted aeroplane-like ailerons. LZ2 crashed on it's second flight after it's engines failed, but it's design had proven much more airworthy than the first Zeppelin airship. A replacement, LZ3, was quickly built and proved to be a success; it had more stability than LZ2 and successfully flew for hours at a time. The German government was won round to the airship and awarded money to the company, no doubt swayed by German royalty taking journeys on the LZ3. During the winter of 1906 a new problem arose; while the airship was more airworthy, it's floating hangar on Lake Constance wasn't, and the ship was damaged when a storm blew the hangar into it. Ironically yet another setback would seal the future successes of the company. The next Zeppelin, LZ4, was destroyed by a fire; the burnt out shell of it's frame laying crumpled on the ground looks, to modern eyes eerily like the wreck of the Hindenburg twenty years later. LZ4 had flown over many cities and been seen by thousands of people in person. As a consequence huge donations were made from around Germany to the Zeppelin company to continue their work.

Although the German army had bought the LZ3 for military evaluation, the airship was also being considered for civilian use. In 1909 the first ever passenger airline was founded by the Zeppelin company under the rather unromantic name DELAG. The star-crossed history of the airship continued - DELAG's first Zeppelin was destroyed by a hangar fire, the second one crashed after being caught in a thunderstorm, the third was broken in two after being caught by gusts outside it's hangar, the forth also burnt down in a hangar fire. Amazingly none of these incidents resulted in any deaths, or any obvious lack of interest from the public. But the passenger flights were halted by the outbreak of war in 1914. They were replaced by something much less wholesome; bombing raids. Initially these were directed against cites in Belgium but late in 1914 the German navy drew up plans for dropping bombs on English cities, partly as a way of destroying military targets but also as a way to terrorize and demoralise the British public.

The German commanders hoped that airships would become a whole new weapon of war; giant bomb carriers that could fly up to any enemy city and rain down quantities of bombs that aeroplanes could never possibly carry. Nearly one hundred Zeppelin airships were built during the four years of the Great war, and they took part in over fifty raids on British soil. The raids would not be a success from a tactical point of view; by 1916 British air defenses had developed enough to be able to shoot airships down, although for all the advance in technology, quite often it would be the British weather that would thwart the airship menaces. The first attempted raid on London in 1915 had to be called off because of strong headwinds. Zeppelin's could carry a lot of ordnance but were terribly inaccurate. One raid intended for London was instead carried out on the docks of Hull - over two hundred miles away. The airships had a much larger impact from a psychological point of view; this was the first time since Medieval times that the English civilian populations had to worry about a war coming to their doorsteps. Bombing raids on England in 1915 caused great alarm - almost two hundred lives were lost, factories, warehouses, railway stations, and even theatres were destroyed or heavily damaged. Gun emplacements were put up in cities but proved frighteningly impotent against the giant Zeppelins far above them.  Only when explosive incendiary bullets were improved could aeroplanes begin to combat the airships, and when they did the great fear they generated began to be eroded. When the first German airship was downed over London much of the city could see what had happened.

The war had proven that the airship would not be of much practical use as a bomber and the Zeppelin company returned to building airships for passenger use. These would not immediately be available for use by German passengers however. War reparations meant the first two post-war Zeppelin's were confiscated and donated to Italy and France. A saviour would come in the unlikely form of United States Navy. Keen to trial airships as giant floating aircraft carriers, Zeppelin LZ126 was flown across the Atlantic in 1924 to the Us Navy Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, commanded by Hugo Eckener, the head of the Zeppelin company - the Count himself had died aged seventy eight in 1917. The LZ126 became the USS Los Angeles and aside from the name the Americans made one major change to the ship - they replaced the highly flammable hydrogen gas used in the ship with far more stable helium gas. The Germans had not used helium in their airships for the simple reason that it was far more expensive, and the vast majority of the world's helium was manufactured in America and Germany would have had to import it.

The Germans would not have their own way when it came to manufacturing airships either. The successful trials of the Los Angeles persuaded the US Navy to build another ship on home soil, in a new hangar at the Lakehurst station. The two hundred metre long 'Shenandoah' had a brief life of two years before being lost in a dramatic crash in a storm in 1925 - while flying over the state of Ohio strong updrafts pushed the ship many hundred of metres above it's design limit and it was torn apart by turbulence. Many of the survivors hung on to the sinking parts of the wreck as it came crashing down to the ground. The setback didn't dissuade the Navy, and in the 1930s two more enormous airships would be built in America. The 'Akron' and the 'Macon' were designed to patrol the coast and carry a fleet of small fighter planes to intercept any enemy threats. Like the Shenandoah the previous decade, both the Akron and Macon lasted two years before crashing in storms. The Akron over the Atlantic off New England, the Macon ditched and sank in the Pacific Ocean off California. Seventy two men died in the crash of the Akron - for all that the Hindenburg's infamous end would come to symbolise the end of the airship era, the Akron crash resulted in a far higher loss of life, and took with it the great champion of airships in the Us Navy, Rear Admiral William Moffett. The loss of the Macon in 1935 was the last straw for the Navy, who abandoned any further rigid airship projects. The British too had experimented with rigid airships; in the 1920s the British Government looked to airships to fly across Europe and Asia to India and onwards to Australia. Two prototypes were built - the R100 and R101. Both ships were commissioned in 1924, and expected to fly by 1926, but delays pushed their maiden flights to 1929. R100 was first to fly, it crossed the Atlantic in 1930 to Canada. Two months later the R101 set out for India, but it only made it as far as Northern France before smashing into a French hillside and burning down to a smouldering hulk. R100 had been designed by Barnes Wallis, the future designer of the famed 'bouncing' bomb of the Dambusters raids of WW2, and was built to a very conventional design. R101 had more innovations in it's design but was overweight and had to be lengthened to create more lift. After it's fiery crash the inquiry concluded that it's fabric covering had been torn on the nose and enough gas had been lost to cause the ship to sink into the ground. Ultimately the inquiry scathingly concluded that the R101 had been rushed into service and was not ready to embark on such a long flight. After a year of waiting the R100 was broken up for scrap and Britain abandoned any more interests in airships.

This left the Germans, and the Zeppelin company, still the only country to use successfully use airships for passenger use. Ironically this peaceful purpose would continue after Germany fell under the control of the Nazis in the 1930s. Ever keen to promote German industry, and to take the credit for any of it's successes, the Nazis poured money into manufacturing and engineering. The Zeppelin company received eleven million Reichsmarks from the government and used the money to create two giant new airships and a new airline, the DZR, a replacement for the original DELAG that had continued after the Great War. Zeppelin chairman Hugo Eckener was not a favourite of the Nazis' - he had considered running against Hitler in the 1932 presidential election. Herman Goering, the newly installed Aviation Minister, created the DZR in order to exert more control over the Zeppelin company, Hugo Eckener, and over one of Germany's most prized machines; the LZ127 'Graf Zeppelin'.

After the completion and delivery of the LZ126/USS Los Angeles in 1926, Zeppelin had started work on a ship that was to remain in German hands. Overwhelmingly paid for by public donation the LZ127 was similar to the LZ126 but intended for passenger travel rather than military use. To this purpose a large gondola was designed incorporating ten cabins, a dining room and a kitchen, much like a passenger train car. Twenty passengers could squeeze aboard the ship, in conditions that made up in quality what they lacked in space. In the 1923 crash of the US Navy Shenandoah the entire gondola had detached from the main structure of the airship and plummeted to the ground, killing all the crew inside, so all future airships had built the gondola solidly into the structure - it reduced all round visibility but safeguarded against a catastrophic loss of the controls. The ship was completed in 1928 and for the next four years it was tested and used for promotional flights. In contrast to the way the British had rushed the R101 straight into an epic journey, the Graf was tested on several short flights in Germany before crossing the Atlantic to New York. The Graf lived a charmed life and seemed to avoid all the pitfalls that beset so many of it's fellow great airships. It flew in commercial use from 1932 to 1937 without incident, and visited all corners of the globe, including the Russian arctic. Suddenly, despite the setbacks to the US Navy airships it looked as though airships might finally become a viable form of oceanic travel. A new skyscraper in New York - the Empire State Building - was even built with a mooring mast on it's spire in anticipation that airships, and their passengers, would soon be frequent visitors. A trip across the ocean on the great Zeppelin wasn't a cheap ticket, though. Just like the seaplanes that were soon to follow, a passenger would have to fork out the equivalent of about ten thousand dollars in today's money. Most people would have to enjoy looking up at the Graf Zeppelin rather than riding aboard it, and the airline would in fact make most of it's money from transporting air mail. The great ocean liners were still the only realistic way most people had of crossing the oceans.

In 1929 the Graf Zeppelin, in it's second year, had set out on the greatest airship journey yet. With the support of the publishing baron William Randolph Hearst, it departed Lakehurst heading... for Lakehurst. The ship circumnavigated the world over the course of a month from August 7th to August the 29th, heading from Lakehurst, to the Zeppelin home base at Freidrichschafen on Lake Constance, then to Berlin, across the length of Russia and south to Tokyo, then across the Pacific - the first ever non-stop crossing - to San Francisco, and finally over the United States back to New Jersey, a grand total of 20,651 miles in a total elapsed time of 21 days, 5 hours and 31 minutes, the actual flying time was shorter than that. In fact so well had the Zeppelin coped with the journey that the trip would then continue back across the Atlantic a second time to Friedrichshafen. When they came to power the Nazi's saw the adulation that the Graf Zeppelin received wherever it went and realised what a powerful propaganda tool it represented. Although it had been funded by the German public the Nazi's stamped their Swastika on the tail fins and in 1936 Josef Goebbels sent it, and a brand new sister ship, off on a four day tour of Germany to distribute leaflets and broadcast speeches over loadspeakers.

Despite it's many great flights across the world's oceans the Graf Zeppelin had proven more suited for flying to South America than to where the Nazis really wanted it to go - the United States. Flying from east to west the Graf struggled against the prevailing North Atlantic winds and didn't carry enough passengers to really attract the wealthy away from the ocean liners. In 1936, the Zeppelin company provided them with the answer to their problem; the LZ-129. The fire that consumed the hydrogen-filled R101 after it crashed influenced the Zeppelin company to scrap their hydrogen inflated LZ-128 design before it left the drawing board, and start again with a airship that could be inflated with helium. Hopeful that the passage of time from the Great War, and the exploits of the Graf Zeppelin would persuade the cautious Americans to sell them helium freely. The LZ-129 was far larger than the LZ-127; over seven million cubic feet of gas bags, as opposed to three million seven thousand cubic feet. Zeppelin had partnered with the Goodyear rubber company in America to assist building the Navy airships Akron and Macon, and incorporated similar design features in those ships into their new German ship. But where the Americans had wanted to build aircraft hangars into the bottom of their airships the Germans instead built passenger decks. Gone were the cabins crammed into a gondola, the Lz-129 would look like an ocean liner, with two decks for about seventy passengers to occupy - a match for  number that matched the new generation of long-range flying boats that were on the drawing board, except that the airship passenger would have far more space to move about in. Airships seemed to finally be coming of age, the only immediate setback coming when the Americans still refused to sell helium, so the newly named LZ-129 'Hindenburg' would have use hydrogen after all.

Hindenburg took to the skies for the first time on March 4th 1936, at Freidrichshafen. It's name was not yet painted on the nose, but the Nazi swastika adorned the tail; Goebbels had given two million government marks to ensure the airship's swift completion. The Nazi's had also moved Hugo Eckener into the largely symbolic position of company chairman, leaving the day to day operations in the hands of Eckener's deputy, the more controllable, in their eyes, Ernst Lehman. Lehman's tenure in charge did not begin well; under his command the Hindenburg damaged it's tail on a propaganda flight. Shortly afterwards the new airship put in a more successful appearance over the Berlin Olympic games. Lehman's willingness to prioritise Nazi propaganda flights above testing led to more trouble on the first Atlantic journey to the South America when several of the ship's diesel engines failed, and the ship came close to having to be ditched in the Sahara desert on it's return leg. Hindenburg eventually made thirty four Atlantic crossings in 1936. The airship's fantastic journey time to America of two and a half days was a sensation, nearly half the time it took the fastest of the ocean liners to manage the journey. The future looked very bright for the transatlantic German airship, already another ship, the LZ-130, was under construction ready to join the Hindenburg.

In March 1937 the Hindenburg flew to Rio de Janeiro for the first transatlantic journey of the new season. Between them the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin were scheduled to fly over thirty long-distance journeys in 1937. On May 3rd the Hindenburg set off for Lakehurst on the first flight of the year to North America. In command was Commander Max Pruss, with thirty six passengers and forty crew, with another twenty one crew members being trained in anticipation of them forming the crew of the LZ-130. Also aboard was the head of the company Ernst Lehmann. Three days later the Hindenburg arrived over the shores of North America, and spent the afternoon of the 6th of March flying down the eastern seaboard past Boston and overlying Manhattan a few hours later. The ship arrived to land at Lakehurst around four PM, but Captain Pruss decided to turn around and wait off the shore for a thunderstorm near the landing site to clear. Around seven PM the Hindenburg approached Lakehurst again, circling around the field to head into the easterly winds. All of the great rigid airships required a delicate balancing act to land safely; ballast water would be dropped, and gas vented from the gasbags to lower the ship slowly. At twenty past seven the ship was floating around three hundred feet from the ground and the landing lines were dropped to the ground crew below. A few minutes later witnesses spotted a small fire glowing at the base the ship's top rear tail fin. Within seconds the flame spread through the rear hydrogen bags and set the entire tail on fire. The tail immediately began to fall, while the nose stayed bouyant and momentarily level. The fire spread forward rapidly as a gigantic ball of flame exploded into the sky. As the ship fell the fire burst through the front of the nose and the ship sank rapidly into the ground, consuming the passenger decks and control gondola in moments.

To watching onlookers it seemed as though nobody could possibly have survived the astonishingly swift and total devastation, but amazingly over half the occupants made it out of the crashing Hindenburg. The origin of the fire in the tail helped survivors chances; the ship had sank close to the ground before the fire reached the passenger decks. Plus the fact that many passengers were standing at the windows watching the landing and could scramble out to safety as the ship crashed down. Many of those who perished were crew stationed deep inside the bowels of the ship with no quick way to exit. Amongst the victims was Ernst Lehman who died in hospital the day after the disaster. The crash spelled the beginning of the end for the era of the airship. The newsreel films of the disaster were shown all over the world, and killed off any further public interest in Zeppelins. No more passenger flights were ever attempted. The Graf Zeppelin was withdrawn from service, the LZ-130, or 'Graf Zeppelin II', never entered it. Within a year of the beginning of the Second World War both had been scrapped, and the Zeppelin company would vanish. The name would be resurrected in 1990s Germany for a company building smaller ships. The USS Los Angeles had been flown intermittently by the US Navy until 1939 but it too was scrapped in 1940. Today the only remaining evidence of the era of giant rigid airships are their former hangars, now fulfilling other uses; the Lakehurst Hangar, the Goodyear Airdock in Akron Ohio, the Zeppelin hangar in Rio de Janeiro, the R100 and R101 hangar at Cardington England, and the Macon hangar at Moffett Field California, later to become the heart NASA's Ames research facility.