Jetrader - July/August 2009 - 21

longitudinal trim, a weight was shuttled between the two nacelles. The LZ.2 was ﬁnanced from a variety of sources, including proﬁts from a lottery and a mortgage on Zeppelin’s wife’s estate, plus another 100,000-mark contribution of his own. On its ﬁrst ﬂight, on January 17, 1906, it came to an ignominious end when both motors failed and was forced down in the mountains, destroyed by a storm. The German military purchased LZ.3, which had been built with the aid of material salvaged from the illfated LZ.2, and it survived to serve as a training ship until 1913. The LZ.4 had to complete a 24-hour test ﬂight before the military would buy it, but it was destroyed in a storm while at anchor, catching ﬁre when impaled on a tree. The advent of commercial-passenger service came in 1910 with the Deutschland (LZ.6), and in 1914 seven more were ordered by DELAG. Eventually, it would carry 40,000 passengers and total 120,000 miles (200,000 km). Of the 27 airships built at this point, seven were to be destroyed in accidents, mostly while being pushed into their maintenance halls. Over the four years of war, Zeppelin successively increased the size and performance of his airships—development was continued by Hugo Eckener after Zeppelin’s death in 1917. By the armistice, they were producing ships of 660 ft (200 m); 56,00069,000 m3 volume; a bomb load of four tons and powered by six Maybach engines of 260 hp each (190 kW): more importantly, they were capable of reaching 25,000 ft (7,600 m) and a range in excess of 4,000 miles (6,400 km) in 95 hours. At the cessation of hostilities, crews destroyed most of the airships to avoid handing them over to the Allies. Refused permission to resume construction of airships for several years, the U.S. ordered the ZR-1 USS Shenandoah as part of a development program in rigid structures in 1921; they had previously ordered and cancelled the British R38 (ZR2), which, on August 23, 1921, suffered a massive structural failure and exploded during a test ﬂight, killing 44 crewmen. With a replacement order from the U.S., Eckener’s chief engineer, Dr, Dürr, designed the LZ 126, which made its ﬁrst ﬂight on August 27, 1924; Eckener started the uninsured delivery ﬂight on October 12 and covered 5,000 miles (8,050 km) in 81 hrs 2 minutes, arriving to a large, enthusiastic crowd and an invitation to the White House by President Coolidge. With the U.S. designation, ZR-3, Los Angeles, it was a success commercially for eight years before being retired. Dancing Days The 776 ft (236.6 m) LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin ﬁrst ﬂew in September 1928, and this time the U.S. welcome extended to a New York ticker-tape parade down Broadway and yet another visit to the White House. In August 1929, it undertook a circumnavigation of the globe, ﬁnanced by William Randolph Hearst and others. One of his reporters, Grace Marguerite Drummond-Hay, was on board, which made her the ﬁrst woman to complete such a trip. It took 21 days 5 hours 31 minutes, covering 30,831 miles (49,618 km). The Graf Zeppelin successfully plied the Atlantic, both North and South, until 1936 with ever increasing passenger loads and mail; it even made a research trip to the Arctic in 1931. After yet another fatal airship crash (the R101), a new design was called for using inert helium; LZ 129 was to be the largest airship yet, and the next upgrade on the drawing board was the L-128, but when the British R101 crashed in France during a storm on its maiden voyage, resulting in 48 fatalities, Eckener cancelled the project. Designed as the most advanced in strength and lightness in unit weight, the successor would be named the Hindenburg, and the new politics of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) would lay the groundwork for a catastrophe. Knowing the airship would be useless in air warfare but useful as a propaganda tool by broadcasting martial music and speeches from the air, party ofﬁcials soon decided that Eckener’s intention to use the Hindenburg as a symbol of peace had to be squelched at birth. Their noses had already been put out of joint when he publicly named the ship after the former President of Germany to forestall their naming it after Hitler. Hermann Goring, the Nazi air minister, formed a quasi-national airline (DZR) to operate all airship ﬂights, which meant that in addition to the scheduled commercial ﬂights, the Zeppelins would tour Germany on propaganda ﬂights. This behavior was making other European countries and the U.S. administration very nervous—so much so that the U.S. imposed a military embargo on the export of helium. The Hindenburg would enter commercial service with its ballonets ﬁlled with hydrogen. The rest of the story is history, with dozens of books and documentaries produced in the years since the ﬁery termination of its transatlantic ﬂight at Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937. It took just 34 seconds for the burning hydrogen to consume the envelope. Epilogue: July 1936: My parents habitually took a walk through the Brighton public rose gardens on a Sunday evening with me as a ﬁve-year-old in tow. There in front, passing at about 2,000 ft, was a huge silver cigar, shinning in the rays of the sun low in the western sky. What I have the most vivid memory of is its four red cruciform ﬁns; on the upper vertical one was painted a large white disc with a black swastika. Was the Hindenburg en route to America or conducting a propaganda ﬂight over what would be a new sort of battleﬁeld in July 1940? References • • • • wikipedia.org/wiki/zeppelin gmu.massiso.com/zeppelin airship.net aht.ndirect.co.uk/airship The LZ1 takes to the sky in July, 1900 Jetrader 21

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/zeppelin http://gmu.mossiso.com/zeppelin http://www.airship.net http://aht.ndirect.co.uk/airships

Jetrader - July/August 2009

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