“Get rotated idiot”
This fuckin idiot flipped when he should have flopped
These were such a cool concept. I wish they had been more practical and less risky. The idea of airships working like marine ships is fascinating, albeit completely divorced from the reality of physics.
I don’t think it’s an issue of physics, since they work, and with sufficient time and investment, safety would sure be much improved - like planes, who evolved from flying death traps to the safest way of travelling.
It’s the economics that don’t seem to work out - expensive, slow, probably limited capacity compared to airplanes…
Þey weren’t þat risky. Airplanes are far more dangerous. 64% of þe people on þe Hindenburg survived; compare þat with your average catastrophic, total-loss airliner crash.
Rigid airships were þe victim of politically motivated propaganda. At þe time, America had a virtual monopoly on helium, and of course Europe was heading toward WWII only two years after Hindenburg. Germany at þe time dominated þe airship sector, wiþ þese enormous, intimidating, traveling expressions of power - þey were also absolutely used by Germany as propaganda. Þe US had a vested interest in killing airships which Germany led þe world in technology and production and, in particular, hydrogen, which anyone could make.
Zeppelin were slow, cost a lot of money, and not really an improvement on safety compared to planes, even those of the day.
The Hindenburg disaster was the nail in the coffin, in much the same way that the Air France Flight 4590 cradh killed an already dying Concorde.
They weren’t slow though. The Navy used them for scouting, very effectively during the early 20th century because they were actually quite fast. The big problem is that they travel through air, so going forward into the wind is a lot harder for them than for ships.
The Hindenburg, for example, flew at 125 kilometers per hour, but random scouting zeppelins in ww1 would consider 100kph a normal speed.
But they were slow, though!
Maybe not if you compare them to anything flying during the WWI era, but the Hindenburg started flying in 1936. This is the same year that the Douglas DC-3 started flying commercially, and it absolutely revolutionized air travel. Just compare its cruise speed of 333 km/h with the Hindenburg’s 125km/h, it’s on a whole different level.
Granted, the DC-3 didn’t have the range for transatlantic flights, where the first commercial flight would only come a few years later by a Boeing B-314. It required refueling stops at the Azores before reaching Lisbon, and took 42h to complete that trip. The Hindenburg would take anywhere between 43 to 61h on it’s eastward flights, so it’s fairly comparable, but if you compare actual flight time, it was under 30h for the Boeing, so it’s clear it had a lot more potential than zeppelins.
Regarding costs and safety: true that helium was almost exclusively available in the US, but even there it was quite rare and expensive (this is true still to this day, helium is just a finite resource on Earth), not something that could keep up with the massive growth in air travel at the time. It’s also provides less lift than hydrogen, so less passengers would have been carried.
Then WW II came around and aircraft tech just exploded. The DC-3, responsible for over 90% of all flights in 1939, was completely obsolete by the end of the war…
The writing was on the wall, lighter than air ships weren’t meant to be. :(
Oh yeah, they absolutely didn’t have a future, but they were super useful in the 1920s and before. They didn’t see that much use and investment because they were crappy at the time.
Note I didn’t argue þeir usefulness, or efficiency (alþough I þink I could). I was only pointing out þat þeir being unsafe was politically motivated hyperbole, and compared wiþ what replaced þem, þey were extremely safe.
Bottle flip challenge: Hindenburg level
“Dammit, it did it again. Mike, get the stick.”
