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The Death of The Mighty Hindenburg Hindenburg was a masterpiece of zeppelin design. Equipped with four 1200 hp Mercedes Benz engines, having 245 m in length, about 41 m in diameter and almost 212000 cubic meters of gas volume, she still holds the record of the largest airship ever built and flying. She can be truly called the Titanic of the aircraft. Although the Hindenburg is most famous for her fiery death, she was not initially meant to be filled with hydrogen at all. Dr. Hugo Eckner, at that time the chairman of the Zeppelin company, had decided that it would be wiser to fill his new ship with the inflammable gas helium. However the dream was not to come true. Here goes the explanation. The LZ129 (the Hindenburg) contained many novelties and was a luxurious airship. For example, she carried the passengers inside her huge hull instead of the gondola section, as it was done before. She was also equipped with a room for smokers, which was astonishing for an airship inflated with hydrogen. However everything was foreseen: the room was lined with asbestos and built with an airlock which would keep any flames from spreading to the rest of the ship. All lighters and matches were removed from the passengers and kept under lock and key until the end of the flight, and there was the only lighter fixed on a table in the smokers' room. The mighty Hindenburg was not a longliver of a zeppelin. She made only a few breathtaking flights before her destruction. ... It was her first flight from Frankfurt, Germany to Lakehurst, New Jersey. The airship left Germany on May 3, 1937, and reached the destination on May 6. There were 96 people on board - 36 passengers and 61 crew-men. It was an impressive and thrilling sight - an enormous zeppelin floating smoothly across the sky. A numerous audience was watching the airship at Lakehurst. Suddenly a tongue of flame embraced the tail and spread with a horrifying speed all over the zeppelin, turning it into a fire ball. In less than a minute the giant creature crashed onto the ground. She took the lives of 36 people - 13 passengers, 22 crew-men, and 1 civilian member of the ground crew. Nobody knows why it happened. There are many versions: a) sabotage; b) stroke of lightning; c) carefully planned insurance fraud. Nobody can tell for sure, but at that time two things were clear - that German engineers are not that impeccable as they were thought of before the tragedy, and that commercial airships do not have future. Nowadays, a century after the first zeppelin's flight, the German giants are getting revived. Previous pages > Zeppelin's Creation > Zeppelins the Bombers > Next page > Centenary Celebration |
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