Rigid airship
During the conflict, rigid airships were tasked with various military duties, which included their participation in Germany's strategic bombing campaign.
The disaster not only destroyed the biggest zeppelin in the world, but the film caused considerable reputation damage to rigid airships in general.
Rigid airships consist of a structural framework usually covered in doped fabric containing a number of gasbags or cells containing a lifting gas.
When the entire envelope is filled with expanded lifting gas, the aircraft is at its pressure height, which is generally the maximum operational ceiling.
[5] Another such individual was the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who had outlined his thoughts of a rigid airship in diary entries from 25 March 1874 through to 1890 when he resigned from the military.
This performed only a single flight on 17 January 1906, during which both engines failed and the zeppelin was compelled to conduct a forced landing in the Allgäu mountains; it was subsequently damaged beyond repair by a storm.
[13] LZ 4 first flew on 20 June 1908, and on 1 July made a spectacular 12 hour cross-country flight during which it was flown over Switzerland to Zürich and then back to Lake Constance.
[14] The disaster took place in front of an estimated 40 to 50 thousand spectators,[15] and produced an extraordinary wave of nationalistic support for von Zeppelin's work.
[18] Commencing such flights in 1910, DELAG was initially limited to offering pleasure cruises in the vicinity of the existing zeppelin bases.
[22][23] Commercial operations came to an abrupt end in Germany due to the outbreak of the First World War, after which DELAG's airships were taken over by the German Army for wartime service.
[25][26] France's only rigid airship was designed by Alsatian engineer Joseph Spiess and constructed by Société Zodiac at the Aérodrome de Saint-Cyr-l'École.
[27] It had a framework of hollow wooden spars braced with wire, and was given the name Zodiac XII but had the name SPIESS painted along the side of the envelope.
It first flew on 13 April 1913, but it became clear that it was underpowered and required more lift, so it was lengthened to 140 m (459 ft 4 in) to accommodate three more gas cells and a second engine was added.
German military airship stations had been established before the conflict and on September 2–3, 1914, the Zeppelin LZ 17 dropped three 200 lb bombs on Antwerp in Belgium.
This and subsequent successes by Britain’s defences led to the development of new Zeppelin designs capable of operating at greater altitudes, but even when these came into service the Germans only carried out a small number of airship raids on Britain during the rest of the war, carrying on the campaign using aeroplanes and reserving their airships for their primary duty of naval patrols over the North Sea and the Baltic.
The last airship that had been ordered amid the First World War was the R80; it was completed in 1920 but was tested to destruction in the following year after it was found to have no commercial use.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was prohibited from building airships with a capacity in excess of 28,000 m3 (1,000,000 cu ft), greatly limiting the company's scope.
They were subsequently confiscated and handed over to Italy and France as war reparations in place of wartime zeppelins which had been sabotaged by their crews in 1919.
The R100 was privately built by Vickers-Armstrongs using existing commercial practices, with a design team led by Barnes Wallis, who had previously co-designed the R80.
R101 was severely overweight, largely due to the decision to use diesel engines to reduce fire risk, and it was decided to lengthen the airship's hull to increase lift.
In October 1930, R101 set off to Karachi on its first overseas flight but crashed in northern France in bad weather killing 48 of the 54 people on board, including the Secretary of State for Air and most of the design team.
[52] Shortly thereafter, DELAG commenced operations with the Graf Zeppelin, being enabled to launch regular, nonstop, transatlantic flights several years before airplanes would be capable of sufficient range to cross the ocean in either direction without stopping.
During 1931, the Graf Zeppelin began offering regular scheduled passenger service between Germany and South America, a route which was continued up until 1937.
USS Shenandoah (ZR-1) was the first rigid airship constructed in America, and served from 1923 to 1925, when it broke up in mid-air in severe weather, killing 14 members of its crew.
the Akron was flown into the sea in bad weather and broke up, resulting in the deaths of over seventy people, including one of the US Navy's proponents of airships, Rear Admiral William A.
[57] Macon also ended up in the sea when it flew into heavy weather with unrepaired damage from an earlier incident, but the introduction of life-jackets following the loss of the Akron meant only two people died.
[58][59] LZ 129 Hindenburg carried passengers, mail and freight on regularly scheduled commercial services from Germany to North and South America.
While the Hindenburg's sister ship, the LZ 130 Graf Zeppelin II, was completed, it would only perform thirty European test and government-sponsored flights before being grounded permanently.
However, by this time, Europe was well on the path to the Second World War, and the United States, the only country with substantial helium reserves, refused to sell the necessary gas.
Following the rapid advances in aviation during and after World War II, fixed-wing heavier-than-air aircraft, able to fly much faster than rigid airships, became the favoured method of international air travel.
