A strange string of thoughts

Okay... so Amy woke up humming the tune to "Those were the days" which got me humming it.  Then I played it on YouTube and that made me think of songs by Doris Day.  So I played a little Doris Day.  In that list she sang a song with a co-star, Gordon MacRae.  It was a lovely song and his voice was really amazing.  I was surprised I had not remembered the actor.  So I looked him up on wikipedia.  His bio sums up with, "Gordon died in 1986 at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska." My home town!  It was just sorta weird.  So I looked up more and found a picture of his headstone in Wyuka Cemetery.  That particular graveyard is the largest I can recall in Lincoln.  Related to that search I found out that his widow died just a couple of week ago (also in Lincoln).

Strange how things work when we start chasing a string of thoughts.

Dominating my thoughts has been Doris Day.  On one side I know virtually all the roles she most fondly remembered for were so completely sexist and stereotyping.  Yet, how could you not dream of that perfect Hollywood world?  Movies have certainly changed.  But I still look back on those films (old even before I discovered them) as some of the best I've seen.  Doris, of course, is an amazing performer.  I do wonder sometimes who the greatest actors of our time will turn out to be.  I think folks will look back on Sandra Bullock in a similar way as Doris Day, but Sandra will never carry a tune the same way.  Hard to say what time will bring.

Doris Day is still knocking around after all these years.  Born in 1922, she'll be 88 this year.  I don't think I discovered her until the mid 80's so she would have been in her 60's already.  Ah the magic of movies... Doris will be stealing the hearts of young fans for at least a 100 years.

The real Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff lived a far from perfect life.  Her story is inspiring by itself.  It highlights many of the flaws remaining in American gender roles at the same time it tells of her ability to overcome.  I only hope I can be so resilient in my own life.  When Doris sings in my mind, I feel I can be.

More from "Dr. Eckner's Dream Machine"

As I’ve read more of “Dr. Eckner’s Dream Machine”, I have come to appreciate much more of the history of the 20’s and 30’s especially from a global perspective.  I must admit when I first picked up the book I wasn’t excited about reading a biography of one of the men responsible for Zeppelins, but (at least in this book) you can see how Hugo Eckner and the rigid airships really become the same story and one can not be told without the other.

In all the history classes I’ve every had we learned about WWII and Hitler… but not a word about Hugo Eckner.  Of all the anti-Nazi supporters, Eckner might have been the only man that could have challenged Hitler openly.  Eckner was so wildly popular that even while thousands of German citizens were being imprisoned or killed, the Nazis could not eliminate him.  Dr. Eckner would loudly and aggressively speak out against what was happening in Germany.  His force of personality which was always that of a good, dedicated man would keep Zeppelin in business even while Germany was broke.  It would be Eckner who could get Americans and other worldly investors to keep his dream alive.

The great irony of the Zeppelins was that massive Germanic funding would ultimately be a contributor to their end.  Once Eckner had proved his design and ability beyond a doubt—only then did the Third Reich take possession of the Zeppelin company.  They could not “fire” him, but they did remove him from business concerns.  With the full weight of the Nazi propaganda engine and the shift climate, Eckner could no longer prevent politics from taking priority over operational perfection and safety.  If Hugo Eckner stood for anything it was the principle that all other concerns were secondary to the safe operation of the rigid airships.  This would always be difficult with powerful men who wanted to maintain a schedule would press to launch on time in bad weather.  Hugo would give to these demands only one, on his first Zeppelin launch.  The ship was destroyed by high winds as it exited the hanger.  He never made the same mistake twice.

When the Hindenburg took to the air, it would never be commanded by Dr. Eckner.  It was forced by Nazi demands to fly untested; it lost two engines on its first overseas trip.  It would fly without helium; we all know how that worked out.  The Hindenburg was doomed from its first days, not by failures of design, weather, or even human error.  It was doomed by politics.  Politics would prevent America from selling helium to the German owned Zeppelin corp.  Politics would force the hands of captains to fly against their expert judgement.  If the disaster had not occurred at Lakehurst then it surely would have happened elsewhere.

After the Hindenburg the world soon erupted in to WWII.  The giant Zeppelins have never returned.  But the reasons for this are rooted in misconception—the idea that these airships were too unsafe, too expensive, or too slow.  They may never be the economically efficient transport that airplanes are today, but we still take cruise ships and trains.  We do it for the joy of the experience and few could deny that a trip in a massive rigid airship over the world would not be an experience of a lifetime.  Many advantages still exist for a commercial airship.  In today’s world of GPS positioning, global weather tracking, and precision electronics, these machines would be every bit the dream that Dr. Eckner would imagine.  I sincerely hope I get to see one someday.

American Zeppelins? The USS Shenandoah

Some of the most amazing American stories of Zeppelins come from the USS Shenandoah launched in 1923.  The Shenandoah was a copy of a German design captured from WWI.  It was built at Lakehurst which would remain the main airship hub until the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.

America was the only country in the world capable of producing enough helium to fill the needs of a Zeppelin style airship—some 2,000,000 cubic feet in 20 gas cells.  Thus the Shenandoah was the first helium filled rigid airship to take the skies. *Yay America* *grin*

A very brief physics lesson: Air pressure decreases as you rise in altitude.  You feel this in your ears when you climb a high mountain pass.  To a balloon this decrease in pressure allows the gas inside to expand—appearing to inflate the balloon further.  With too much expansion the balloon will pop.  This very basic mechanic is a major concern to airship which is essentially a very, very large balloon.  As it rises the gas expands and would rupture without some means to control the pressure inside the Zeppelin gas cells.

Hydrogen was dangerous but it was also very cheap so the German airships would just open valves to reduce the pressure and let the gas dissipate harmlessly.  But helium was like gaseous gold.  Even the rich American military couldn’t afford to vent helium willy-nilly.  Instead they would under-inflate their cells so that by the time they got to cruising altitude they would be at optimal expansion.  But this meant the ships had considerably less lift.  It also meant that the US airship commanders had a strong aversion to venting their helium if they could help it (ominous music).

Indeed this would be a factor in one of the most dramatic scenes of aeronautic history. Lieutenant Commander Zachary Lansdowne would in late 1924 order the removal of several automatic venting valves from the Shenandoah.  While not completely removed, the reduction seriously limited the rate at which helium could be vented.  Under normal conditions this would not have been an issue.  But in Sept 1925 the airship would be caught in a storm over Ohio.  Storms experience radical vertical winds and the Shenandoah would be caught in an updraft.  Rising at 1000 feet per minute the airship could not deflate its gas cells fast enough and basically began “falling” upward.  This ship shot up to over 6,000 feet.  The stress and expansion broke the ship in two.  The aft section would fall to the earth killing all including the captain.  But in a miracle of skill and survival, the bow section remained aloft!

Crippled with no steerage or automatic controls, the ship navigator, Charles Rosendahl assumed command of the 7 men still alive in the front half of the broken Shenandoah. Rosendahl would fight the storm and slowly vent his helium to make a safe landing.  All 7 men with him would survive.  The other 14 men perished.

While the reduced valve capacity probably did not help poor Commander Lansdowne, other experts concluded the design of the Shenandoah probably could not have survived the storm anyway.  The US had copied the design from a WWI “height climber”—an airship designed to make bombing runs from extremely high altitude.  Its frame was lighter and its general dimension (being very long and thin) were not suited to a Midwestern thunderstorm.  The fact that rigid airships were used at all in WWI is a story for another post *grin*.

Charles E. Rosendahl emerged a hero and would be a prominent figure in rigid airships the rest of his life.  He would fly on the first trans-Atlantic flight of the Graf Zeppelin and several trips on the Hindenburg.  His role in history is fixed in this event as he was the commander of Lakehurst the day the Hindenburg crashed.  But that brief moment is but an instant of this man’s long career.  For years he would advocate the use of lighter-than-air rigid airships in spite of the disaster’s he had seen.  Rosendahl knew then that the failures of the past were addressable in the future.  He even wrote a book on it, but I will be hard pressed to find a copy.

Again we see how bad weather encountering a ship not designed for it causes the destruction of a rigid airship.  Today our use of helium is more more affordable; valving off gas would be no issue.  Weather prediction could have steered the ship to safety or kept it out of the sky completely. 

The next post will be about the incredible history of Zeppelins in WWI.

Source Credits: I’m stealing all this info heavily from Dan Grossman’s site (http://www.airships.net) and the book “Dr. Eckner’s Dream Machine”, by Douglas Botting.

Zeppelins: You won't believe it.

Whimsically I decided to read more about blimps.  I thought perhaps New Zealand could stand to have a quirky adventure platform and it sounds like more fun than my day job.  I'll ignore some little details like lacking funds, a pilot's license, or in fact even a rudimentary understanding of weather patterns around New Zealand.

I quickly discovered that a blimp is not a Zeppelin and that really a Zeppelin is officially a "lighter than air rigid airship".  However, this is far to clunky a name.  Even as LTARA.  Officially, the only "Zeppelins" are the airships made by the German corporation of the same name which was originally founded by Count Von Zeppelin *before* the 1900's in 1898 although the first flight was in the summer of 1900.  It failed many of it's original engineering goals and was later dismantled.  This was a far better fate that most of the Zeppelins. 

It is difficult for us to imagine a world without flight, but this was exactly the case in June 1900.  No one knew exactly what to expect from winds or weather or machine.  Most would be pilots never left the ground, so in this respect Zeppelin had been an instant success--the rigid airship did indeed fly.

What I have found so fascinating about the topic is that we basically knew nothing of aerodynamic engineering.  We didn't really understand wind patterns in the air, combustion engines, fuels, air tight fabrics, etc, etc.  The list of things we had not discovered or fully understood is staggering... and yet they flew.  It is probably most compariable to the moon shots that we did just 40 years after the last of the big Zeppelins in 1937.

1937 may be the date we all remember--perhaps the only Zeppelin we can clearly recall, the Hindenberg.  But I do not want to dwell on this bit of history, it is already overdone.  I will say only this, we experience plane crashes every year with far, far greater loss of life than the 38 that died in the Hindenberg crash.  No one has doomed the airplane as an "unsafe mode of transit." I think we can look back now and appreciate the Zeppelins for the technological marvels they were without considering them as a universally a deadly contraption.

The airship you probably never heard about was the Graf Zeppelin, but it would be this ship that would complete the first nearly non-stop circumnavigation of the world.  The first to fly over the trackless mass of Siberia.  The first to carry passengers around the world. It flew over a million miles and carried thousands of passengers.  It had a flawless record all the years of its operation.

The biggest flaw of the Zeppelins appears to be that they would not suited as warmachines.  Without military budgets that are unfettered by concepts like "profitability", the extreme expense of the airship made development difficult.  Even if you could come up with something brilliant, the airplane would quickly become faster and more agile.  In combat, a rigid airship will simply never be more than a very easy target.  Thus they have faded from memory.  Strange that so grand a machine would be so utterly abandoned mostly on the basis of lack of wartime usefulness.

The Graf Zeppelin was 776 feet long.  The Hindenberg was 803 feet long.  A 747 is a wee 231 feet.  Nothing so large has ever flown since.  What I hadn't realized by this factoid was that you essentially had an object the size of the Titanic (886 feet) in the air exposed to altitudinal winds.  The wind loading is immense which of course means you'd need a great deal of power to simple keep course let alone make headway in rough weather.  And rough weather would be the downfall of many airships.  While we may tend to think of this as yet another flaw, we have to again remember that we knew virtually nothing about piloting in the 20's and 30's.  Weather science was in its infancy.  The pilots of the airships had only learned from each other and copious amounts of experience.  We still close airports in bad weather today even with our modern science and precise instrumentation.  Had we known then what we know now simply about weather prediction, we could have prevented scores of airship accidents.

The next greatest flaw of the Zeppelins was, of course, the hydrogen used to achieve lighter than air flight.  No one would do such a thing today.  They didn't even want to do it then, they knew Helium was better, but at the time, no one could produce a million cubic feet of Helium at a constant enough rate to construct Helium airships.  All the "blimps" you see today are, understandably, helium filled.

A blimp, by the way, is non-rigid airship.  That is, it doesn't have frame.  You fill it taught like a balloon and strap some motors to the bottom.  It works the same way, but the size is more severely limited.  The size cuts down on total potential lift and that cuts down on commercial application.  So you generally only see them as camera platforms and floating billboards.  But none of these you've seen in our lifetimes is even half the size of one of the old Zeppelins.

It may also interest you to know that the original Zeppelin corporation is still alive and making rigid airships.  Their current model is much smaller, but can carry 14 passengers for short sight seeing trips.  It may be nothing like the grandeur of the Graf Zeppelin, but it probably is only keeping the dream alive.

I've rambled on about some facts and figures.  I've vaguely suggested that a modern rigid airship could be built with a vastly higher degree of safety than the was available in 1937.  But I've told little of the truly adventurous stories around the Zeppelins.  I'll save those for some future posts.  Of course, Wiki is fabulous and you'll find anything you want that way too.  But I'll write about it all again--it is my blog after all.