Airships were the future once. In
an era before mass air travel (or transit, as it increasingly feels) airships
provided an alternate means of travelling long distances in the comfort and
style more expected of ocean liners. With good weather conditions an airship
could hit 80 miles an hour. They were how the jet-set travelled before the
invention of the jet engine. A single incident in May 1937 destroyed the dreams
of airship manufacturers everywhere: the Hindenburg
disaster.
The destruction of Hindenburg while mooring in New Jersey brought
the era of passenger travel by airship to an abrupt end. Having made the first
transatlantic flight to the US of the season from Frankfurt in Germany, an
explosive fire tore through Hindenburg
in under a minute. The rigid-framed airship fell 120 metres to the ground
killing 35 of the 97 passengers and crew aboard.
It wasn’t perhaps so much the
accident itself, but that it was the first transport disaster to be caught on
film that destroyed public confidence in this mode of transport. In fact there
had been a worse accident 4 years earlier when the navy airship USS Akron crashed (also in New Jersey)
killing almost 100 people: close to everyone aboard.
This beautiful contemporary
silent newsreel footage explains all. It ends “the pioneer spirit of Hindenburg
must go on!”, but of course, it didn’t.