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.
Actually quite interesting. Much of that I didn't know.
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