This was nowhere near the only deadly airship disaster, nor was it the last, but that’s not really what ended airship travel. With the advances in airplanes by the end of World War II, lighter-than-air ships just couldn’t compete. Even postwar piston aircraft were cruising at more than 3 times the speed of most airships with range to make nonstop transatlantic crossings, and once the jet age really started to take hold in the ’50s it was all over. I mean, by the ’60s multiple countries had started supersonic passenger aircraft programs. Not a lot of success there, but still there were nowhere near enough customers to support commercial service on airships when faster, cheaper options existed.
Yup, no one is going to hop an airship when they can get somewhere in a fraction of the time. The only difference might be cost, but spinning up a zeppelin industry likely couldn't compete in terms of ticket price compared to jets.
If they have a future it'll be moving stuff, not people. If it's faster than a container ship and can carry more than a plane then it could have a valuable niche.
There are a handful of Zeppelin NT semi-rigid airships flying around nowadays. If you want to see a landing and start, I recorded this a few years ago.
The problem is weight. The heavier the load the bigger the gas bag needs to be to carry that load. The whole thing very quickly gets out of proportion and considering they were using hydrogen the heavier the load the riskier it was.
Modern airships are helium-based, but helium is way too expensive to ever be commercially viable on a large scale.
Hindenburg only carried 70 passengers at its largest configuration, and it could only carry that many because they were forced to use hydrogen as the lifting gas instead of helium because of American export restrictions. Hydrogen carries more but is significantly more dangerous, and likely would not be used in any modern aircraft because of safety reasons. Perhaps modern advances in lighter materials and other weight saving methods could help, but even 100 paying passengers doesn’t seem commercially viable.
358 deaths due to plane crashes in 2022 in the US. Anon included cars so this "commercial" distinction doesn't necessarily hold weight since the crux of the comparison is that other industries have been allowed to operate despite fatal accidents. And cars are included which are individually operated machines and not mass transit.
It's absolutely true. General aviation aircraft crash all the time, more than once a day.
For some reason I couldn't find an FAA Administrator's Fact Book for anything more recent than 2012 (statistics for 2011 on most things, 2010 for some).
In 2011 there were 1450 general aviation accidents, about four a day.
In 2010 there were 450 general aviation fatalities.
i had seen this resource in my search too but i guess in my head accident =/= crash (obviously all crashes are accidents but only some accidents are crashes)? but i guess i was wrong in that assumption maybe
This is what happens when your view of history is essentially the historical equivalent of pop culture. You end up saying idiot things on an idiot website for idiots.
Lots of people died in airships, the Hindenburg was the most exploding and dramatic, but it was not the first and only instance. In fact the Hindenburg was made up of parts from a previous airship that had also crashed.
But also the technology to make rigid airships relatively safe has existed for decades and there's no reason we can't go back to them now except bad PR.
It wasn't just one zeppelin. The US Navy experimented with airship aircraft carriers and both of them were lost in stormy weather. They're giant bags of gas, which means that turbulent air is a big problem.
The Empire State building had a airship mooring point at the top, but the constant updrafts meant the airship would be pointing nose-down while unloading.
They're just too unwieldy in all but the most calm conditions that there's not much use for them beyond writing "Ice Cube is a pimp" in the sky.
It's more the case that back then, nearly every airship ever made ended up crashing in bad weather. Nowadays they're sort of safe since we have much more powerful engines and weather services that can help them avoid the rough stuff, but even then they still can't lift very useful loads.
Looking at what happened to every Zeppelin that Ferdinand von Zeppelin built you start to get a good picture on why it's maybe not the best idea. I got to hand it to him though, dudes got dedication.
LZ1: damaged during initial flight, repaired and flown two more times before investors backed out causing the ship to be sold for scrap.
LZ2: suffered double engine failure and crashed into a mountain. While anchored to the mountain awaiting repairs a storm destroyed it beyond repair.
LZ3: built from salvaged parts of LZ2. Severally damaged in storm. After LZ4's destruction LZ3 was repaired and was accepted by the German military who eventually scrapped it.
LZ4: suffered from chronic engine failure. While repairing the engines a gust of wind blew the ship free of its mooring and struck a tree causing the ship to ignite and burn to the ground.
LZ5: destroyed in a storm.
LZ6: destroyed in its hanger by fire.
LZ7: destroyed after crashing in a thunderstorm.
LZ8: destroyed by wind.
LZ9: this one actually worked and survived for three years before being decommissioned.
LZ10: caught on fire and destroyed after a gust of wind blew its mooring line into itself.
LZ11: destroyed while attempting to move the ship into it's hanger
LZ12 & LZ13: both flew successful careers before being decommissioned a few years later.
LZ14: destroyed in a thunderstorm.
LZ15: destroyed during an emergency landing.
LZ16: was stolen by the French.
LZ17: decommissioned after the war.
LZ18: exploded during its test flight.
LZ19: damaged beyond repair during an emergency landing.
LZ129: the Hindenburg.
LZ127: retired and scrapped after flying over a million miles.
LZ130: flew 30 flights before being dismantled for parts to aid in the war effort.
The Hindenburg was 245m long, carried around 50 crew plus 60 or so passengers. It needs all that length to have enough volume to lift that many people. The laws of physics are a limitation here; even figuring out a vaccum rigid air ship would only slightly improve this (it's a neat engineering problem, but not very practical for a variety of reasons). Maybe the crew size could shrink somewhat, but the fact is that you've got a giant thing for handling around 100 people.
An Airbus a380 is 72m long and carries over 500 passengers and crew.
The Hindenburg made the transatlantic journey in around 100 hours. You could consider it more like a cruise than a flight--you travel there in luxury and don't care that it takes longer. You would expect it to be priced accordingly. In fact, given the smaller passenger size compared to the crew size, I'd expect it to be priced like a river cruise rather than an ocean cruise. Those tend to be more exclusive and priced even higher.
Being ground crew for blimps was a dangerous job. You're holding onto a rope, and then the wind shifts and you get pulled with it. This could certainly be done more safely today with the right equipment. Don't expect the industry to actually do that without stiff regulations stepping in.
Overall, they suck and would only be a luxury travel option. Continental cargo is better done by trains. Trans continental cargo is better done by boats. There isn't much of a use case anywhere.
I'm already buying shares in BlimpX! He's a visionary, first Hyperloop, now BlimpX! What'll be the next thing from 80+ year old popular science mags for the real life Tony Stark will invent?
To be honest it's pretty unfair to compare something built before humans sent anything into space, vs something after we've made it to Mars. There is over 60 years of innovation between the Hindenburg and the airbus.
Airships only make sense in a world in which the economy takes into account ecodestruction. Kind of like wind-powered ships. If we didn't know what GHGs do environmentally, which offset any short-term efficiency gains provided by burning hydrocarons, nobody would ever dream of abandoning these miracle fuels. So you can only examine the efficiency of airships with hydrocarbons off the table entirely.
They do plenty of ecodestruction. If we had them now, they'd be fueled by hydrocarbons. That could hypothetically be batteries in the future, but batteries good enough for that could do equally well in airplanes.
The material used in making them rigid also has a carbon cost.
Same logic applies to nuclear energy. More people fall off of hydroelectric power plants or drown or something, or fall off of wind turbines, than get poisoned by radiation from a nuclear power plant
Nuclear just isn't a good short-term value proposition so most people are dismissive of it. Plants take along time to create and are generally expensive. Not to mention the NIMBYs who would rather dump tons of chemicals into local riverways, air, and land with coal than have a clean-burning nuclear plant within 10 miles of their city.
Wind and Solar are cheaper now, and we won't have to trade a dependence on oil from foreign countries for a dependence on uranium from foreign countries. We won't in the future have to hear about how the people of Kazakhstan will greet us liberators when we invade the country to establish freedom and have to pretend it's merely a coincidence they happen to have the energy resources we're dependent on.
The danger of nuclear isn't so much on the daily stats of what actually went wrong, but in the tiny risk of having huge problems. The worst case scenario for a Chernobyl style disaster is actually losing huge parts of Europe. Even in well run plants, if enough things go wrong at the same time, it could still mean losing the nearest city. These "black swan" events are hard for humans to think clearly about, as we are not used to working with incredibly small chances (like deciding to plan for a 1000 year storm or not).
Coal produces more toxic waste per MWh than nuclear, and it just spews it into the atmosphere, not into nice neatly packaged barrels you can just store in a hole underground...
We know what to do with it, the same thing countries like France do, deep isolation.
The problem with America, is the same problem we have for any federal level infrastructure. The states have too much control and are prone to NIMBY campaigns.
Dumping it under ground doesn't seem like a particularly sophisticated strategy but it's actually perfectly safe. It's not going to leak out or anything it's in massive blocks of concrete.
Worrying about it is pointless.
For we know in 50 years someone will come up with a way to recycle it and it'll be a complete non-issue anyway. This pretty good research on recycling you can a material already so 50 years is not an unreasonable time frame. The current containing solutions are good for thousands of years.
only if you count general aviation, commercial airlines crash less than once a month. OP is clearly just an agent of Big Blimp trying to destroy the reputation of the honorable aviation industry
A lot less if you're only counting advanced democracies. The last multi-casualty commercial plane crash in the US was in 2009, 15 years ago. I only make that multi-casualty caveat because otherwise you get weird one offs like a guy running into a landing strip and getting run over.
Even the one in 2009 was a fairly small propeller plane.
It seems to rather drastically. When looking it up the average for commercial aircraft is 0.01 fatalities per 100,000 hours of flight time, however when I looked for data that included non commercial craft that figure jumps to 1.19 per 100,000 hours yielding a fatality, and 6.84 per 100,000 yielding a crash of any sort.
I then googled to find the average daily flight hours, and while I couldn't find that, I did find the total flight hours in 2018, which came out to 91.8 million flight hours, or 251,507 flight hours daily, which should result in an average of 17 crashes per day, and an average of 3 fatalities per day, globally. Also one commercial flight fatality slightly more than every 3 months.
They are kind of impractical nowadays. Nobody wants to get somewhere slow.
For recreational "travel for the sake of travel" it'd be kind of cool. I'd wager that a zeppelin "sky cruise" would be more environmentally friendly than a traditional ocean cruise, and offer way more diverse views. That'd be a real sweet vacation, actually.
Some 15-minute explainer channel (maybe HAI) had a video about risk perception recently, and I think this would be a pretty good example.
It also had an aluminium skin, protected by an iron oxide paint. Those 2 are also the main ingredients in thermite. The skin burnt even faster and more impressively than the hydrogen.
Do we even have enough helium to be using it in zeppelins though? I thought it was in shortage which is bad because it's needed for medical and scientific purposes. Like we shouldn't even be using it in balloons bad.
As of October, the FRA has recorded 742 incident reports for train derailments in 2023. Additionally, railroads reported 59 collisions, 12 fires, and 138 highway-rail-crossing incidents, which could include cars or any other vehicles or people at the crossing site.
Since 1975, an average of 2,808 trains have derailed each year, with a peak of 9,400 derailments in 1978.
I've got to assume most of those are things like single cars falling off the track in the switching yard or something, not major service-interrupting, cargo-damaging, or injury-causing incidents.
If it's so "expensive and valuable" then why have we been using it for decades to fill balloons here in the US? It costs like a few bucks to buy a bunch of balloons and get them filled. I just looked it up and Dollar Tree (a dollar store) will fill them for free as long as the balloons are purchased there.
You can buy a 14.9 cubic foot tank from Amazon for $80 (unfilled of course), which is enough to fill 50 balloons.
You may know this, but the Nazis were forced into using hydrogen instead of helium because the only commercial sources at the time were in he USA and we wouldn't sell it to them. But also, since the ship was built for German propaganda they would have wanted it to be a fully German endeavor.
The Hindenburg was painted with silvery powdered aluminium, to better show off the giant Nazi swastikas on the tail section. When it flew over cities, the on-board loudspeakers broadcast Nazi propaganda announcements, and the crew dropped thousands of small Nazi flags for the school children below. This is not surprising, because the Nazi Minister of Propaganda funded the Hindenburg.
At that time, the US government controlled the only significant supplies of helium (a non-flammable lifting gas), and refused to supply it to the Nazi government. So the Hindenburg had to use flammable hydrogen.
As the Hindenburg came in to Lakehurst on May 6, 1937, there was a storm brewing, and so there was much static electricity in the air - which charged up the aircraft. When the crew dropped the mooring ropes down to the ground, the static electricity was earthed, which set off sparks on the Hindenburg.
The Hindenburg was covered with cotton fabric, that had to be waterproof. So it had been swabbed with cellulose acetate (which happened to be very inflammable) that was then covered with aluminium powder (which is used as rocket fuel to propel the Space Shuttle into orbit). Indeed, the aluminium powder was in tiny flakes, which made them very susceptible to sparking. It was inevitable that a charged atmosphere would ignite the flammable skin.
In all of this, the hydrogen was innocent. In the terrible disaster, the Hindenburg burnt with a red flame. But hydrogen burns with an almost invisible bluish flame. In the Hindenburg disaster, as soon as the hydrogen bladders were opened by the flames, the hydrogen inside would have escaped up and away from the burning airship - and it would not have not contributed to the ensuing fire. The hydrogen was totally innocent. In fact, in 1935, a helium-filled airship with an acetate-aluminium skin burned near Point Sur in California with equal ferocity. The Hindenberg disaster was not caused by the hydrogen.
The lesson is obvious - the next time you build an airship, don't paint the inflammable acetate skin with aluminium rocket fuel.
So MRI helium is scarce because the required purity is very high to get the 4 Kelvin superfluid behavior. Helium for filling balloons (of the party type) is a lot, lot cheaper. I don't know exactly how that translates into airship envelope helium, but you can't take balloon-grade helium and put it in your MRI machine.
Helium is twice as heavy as Hydrogen, much harder to find on earth (it's literally named Helium because until recently it was believed to only exist on the Sun)
So more expensive and you gotta use a lot more of it for the same lifting power, also Hydrogen can be used for this safely, the Nazis just were cutting corners to not have to give any credit to the Americans who at the time had a monopoly on the resources that would have let them go with helium or that would have let them coat the ship safely.
While i would love to travel by airship, I dont think there would be a commercial success in airship passenger travel in the near future:
travel times of multiple days means you probably need 2-3x the crew, compared with a plane on a 8h flight
this also means a plane that is 4x as fast can make the same trip 4x more often, bringing in more money for the airline in the same amount of time
you probably can't land on existing airports, because an airship the size of a large building would be crawling accross your airspace blocking all flight traffic, or shaken by the turbulences behind a large jet powered airliner
new technology without any existing infrastructure is much more expensive than building on top of existing things
tickets would be much more expensive than a commercial plane because of the reasons above, the lower passenger capacity and the fact that you have to carry more supplies (water + food for days multiplied by people on board) for a longer trip. Each passenger with cabin and supplies was calculated as 300kg weight on a transatlantic flight on the hindenburg
Hindenburg could not fly in a direct straight line, because it travels at a height of only 400-600m. This means you had to go around high mountain ranges, because people and the combustion engines need oxygen which you dont have much above 4000m. However i dont know if this is still a problem with modern pressurized cabins, or if there is another limitation from the lifting gas...
The other problem with high altitudes is that the wind speeds up there tend to be very strong and fast. Aircraft can overcome them because they can travel at hundreds of kilometers an hour, (but it still has a significant effect on travel time) but airships trundle along at a speed roughly equivalent to that or the motorist on their driving test.
There was a Wendigo video about how it could be used as a way of transporting goods as cargo since it isn't too time sensitive and it could be quite cheap compared to trucks and ships because of fuel iirc. Also for tourism since they can land vertically
If you want to experience what modern zeppelining would be like hire a hot air balloon. That's all they'd exist as, a luxury curiosity like the horse drawn carriage that's been long since passed as a viable competitor in the transit market.
Jet aircraft basically destroyed every economical case you could possibly make for Zeppelins as anything but an alternative way to do balloon tours.
Zepplins were also the first major aerial recon device and they were experimental bombers in WW1 in the same way tractors were fitted with armor forming the first experimental tanks.
The USS Akron was a bigger (repeat) disaster, and was also the first zepplin aircraft carrier.
*edit: corrected like half a dozen fat finger typos I missed the first go. Eesh.
zeppelins, specifically rigid air ships, most blimps are soft body airships.
Have a problem where when even the slightest of winds shows up. All hell breaks loose, because these ships are literally a metaphorical leaf in a tornado in comparison to like, idk, a plane.
I mean they're probably fucking better than the unholy helicopter, to be honest. I'd probably like to see more research generally into hybrid airships, they're kinda sick. I dunno, I mean, on one hand, if we're all constantly complaining about jet fuel consumption being such a big issue, but still want air travel to be a thing, that seems like a pretty good method even if it's slower by some order of magnitude. I might be wrong on that, though, who knows, maybe the tradeoff is worth it, maybe big intercontinental ships are more efficient. Maybe there's some mass market hydrolysis rocket fuel jet idea, that someone might propose, and then it would get used as a way to greenwash basically what would be a normal jet that just runs on hydrogen derived from natural gas.
Somebody else said they could be a good alternative to cargo ships, which may or may not be the move over land, but I dunno, still probably trains beat them out on that 99 times outta 100.
I dunno, maybe if we get graphene, we'll be able to make the big vacuum bubble airships, and that would be really cool, but if we have graphene then we've kinda won a lot of other cool things too, so that's maybe one of the lesser theoretical technologies. Or maybe aluminum solves this?
I think what I've learned from the domestic train industry in america and from listening to podcasts about supersonic jets in the 50's is that none of this is so much a huge technological issue, as much as it is kind of just a political or purely cultural decision. We could have CRTs again, if we really wanted, or even plasma screens, right, but fuck that, you're getting LCD and LCD derivatives now and you're gonna like it. Maybe one thing or the other is "less efficient", right, but that doesn't actually mean anything. It's like freedom, it's a meta-value, it's a proxy for your actual values. If the thing you value most is like, disseminating durable displays all over the place, at a low cost, with low weight, then you're going to opt for LCDs. But if you were more into video quality or motion clarity or a more optimal contrast ratio, you might very well decide on another approach. If you want to read outside without taking a book, you go with e-ink, you don't go with LCD, you know? If that's your priority, if that's your value, if that's your value as shaped by the context. So just saying that zeppelins are "less efficient" than planes is kind of reliant on like, an unspoken definition of efficiency. It's just a simple matter of priorities.
Technically Zeppelin was a company that made passenger blimps or rigid airships, of which the last built was in 1959-1960 as the AEREON III. It was a helium filled design that failed to slow down in a crosswind and turn, leading to it's destruction during the testing phases.