One of my eccentricities in this life is my fondness for airships. It’s really unfortunate in my mind that the Hindenburg disaster seemingly wrecked any chance of us having a nice lighter-than-air fleet. Zeppelins don’t go up as easily as you might think…Simple bullet strikes won’t necessarily do it — there were cases of German WWI Zeppelins being shot full of holes by attacking British planes, and, while they eventually lost altitude, they didn’t ignite. Even the hydrogen didn’t leak out at the high rate you would expect, as a rigid airship’s gas cells are at atmospheric pressure. (That is why they appear only partially filled when the ship is on the ground, and expand to full volume at what is referred to as “pressure height” — the maximum altitude the airship can reach without triggering automatic valves, or risking rupture of the gas cells…) The RFC/RAF could only reliably down a Zeppelin with MG fire when they used incendiary rounds, or at least a higher proportion of tracer in the MG belts.
There was no smoking aboard the wartime Zeppelins, and the only way around that was to volunteer for duty in the “spy basket”, a vaguely teardrop-shaped car suspended a few hundred feet below the airship. (The theory was that the ship would cruise above the clouds, and the man in the “spy basket”, dangling below the clouds, would serve as a spotter for navigation and bombing, communicating with the ship via a phone line braided into the suspension line for his perch. This was not as successful as it sounds, and the USN abandoned its own version of the idea in the early 30s…) The spotter wore a parachute, but it was generally believed that, if the cable broke, the suspension system would foul the basket opening long enough for the ground to come up and hit you while you were trying to work your way free… So you had to risk your neck for a chance to flick your Bic — better to simply wait until after the ship landed back in Germany!
The post WWI German commercial Zeppelins were rather fanatical about fire safety. IIRC, Graf Zeppelin (LZ-127) was a “smoke-free” airship. Hindenburg (LZ-129) and, I believe, her sister ship Graf Zeppelin II (LZ-129) included a “smoking room” — the only place anybody was permitted to smoke on the airship. This room was asbestos-lined, and you still couldn’t use your own matches or lighter (such implements were temporarily confiscated while you were aboard) — you had to use one of the special lighters that were chained to the tables!
The airships of every non-US nation during this period used hydrogen for two main reasons:
1. Hydrogen, in the purity normally used for filling an airship, will lift approximately 68 lbs per kcf, while helium will lift only 62 lbs per kcf.
2. Helium was found in useful quantity only in the US, and our government had restrictions on export of helium. Even in the US, it wasn’t inexpensive — it generally cost at least ten times what you would pay for an equal amount of hydrogen. This fact was not lost on a penny-pinching Congress, but use of helium in US airships had been mandated, ever since the loss of the Italian-built US military semirigid airship Roma, which struck a high-tension line, and crashed, with heavy loss of life, when her hydrogen cells caught fire. Los Angeles was filled with hydrogen for her delivery flight from Germany, but this was very soon replaced with helium. (However, Congress was slow to fund extraction of enough helium to refill the ship, so the gas from the Shenandoah had to be transferred over to Los Angeles, temporarily grounding that ship. Shenandoah only flew again after Los Angeles went in for overhaul!)
Airships went everywhere, including to the poles. Norge reached the North Pole, as did Italia later on (though Italia crashed on the way back), and even the Graf Zeppelin made an Arctic flight, though she didn’t cross the pole.
A polar expedition was planned for USS Shenandoah (ZR-1) in 1925, soon after the ship finished up a goodwill tour of the Midwest. Unfortunately, the Shenandoah broke up in a squall near Ava, Ohio, on the night of 2-3 September, 1925 (the anniversary of the ship’s commissioning!), killing over a dozen of her crew, including LCDR Zachary Lansdowne, her CO.
A good starting source for airship data is Airship: The Home Page for Lighter Than Air craft (http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/airship.html). If you want to go directly to the German Zeppelin data, try http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zeppelin.html
For a picture of the Los Angeles doing a nose-stand at the high mast at Lakehurst NAS, in New Jersey, see
