The Hindernberg

Rather interesting photos Ive never seen before

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I wonder what could be built today using modern materials, technology, and safety features.

I've heard of a couple companies looking to bring back these things, but they seem to fade away as soon as they pop up.

CS

On 6/23/2013 11:11 AM, CS wrote: ...

Lighter than air vehicles are in pretty common in industrial use -- not H2, of course, and most are generally tethered as opposed to free-floating.

And, of course, there's the good ship Goodyear and Snoopy, etc., over the nearest football stadium...

It's all economics, of course. They have limited rough weather capability and the speed for commercial flight makes them a tough market niche. The cost of luxury-type accommodations as were common in the 20s to pre-war years just is now so exorbitant as to probably preclude there being sufficient market shared to make it pay for that target audience.

In the 1920s, the real comparison was with ocean liners, which weren't cheap either.

Joe Gwinn

Ir certainly looks like a more luxurious mode of air travel than being crammed into a sardine can and launched.

As a footnote, the R101 crash raised questions about the suitability of hydrogen. The Hindenberg was designed to use helium but the US had a monopoly on the production of the gas and had banned its export. The Hindenberg was then redesigned to use hydrogen, which Germany could obtain. There were more casualties in the R101 crash, with the greated death toll from an airship coming from the crash of the USS Akron:

There would still be the limitations inposed by the weather. The R101 may have had other problems but the USS Akron's crash came from the severe weather it encountered.

One of the first things I learned messing around with samll planes was if you had a VFR rating and needed to get from point A to point B next Tuesday plan on driving. Airships would be even worse. Ubless the cruising speed could be kicked up drastically, they have a limited ability to avoid or divert around fast moving storm cells.

Die Nazi scum!

Gunner noted:

It's interesting, and those are good pictures, a few of which I've never seen before. But something that troubles me is the statement that they made 17 trips (say, 33 crossings, minus the last one), and transported

Man! They'd have had to cram them in there like sardines to get that many passengers (about 79) plus crew per crossing! The dining room certainly does not look large enough to seat more than 20 or 30 per shift. (looks like 22 seats in the photo). And the kitchen sure isn't big enough to serve that many at once.

I wonder if that one statement isn't inflated.

BTW... I LOVE that statement "chemically treating the fabric..."... Yeah... with dope! I've 'chemically treated' a lot of models with it, and one real J3 Cub!

Lloyd

They didn't use normal aircraft dope though. The stuff they used was closer to liquid thermite! (Iron oxide pigment, Cellulose acetate butyrate and aluminum powder on cotton canvas !)

They had rooms for 72 passengers + 41 crew

"Steve W." fired this volley in news:kq7q8c$bi4$1 @dont-email.me:

Please excuse me, because I'm not making fun of YOU, Steve, but I'm a pyrotechnics guy (for a living), so I'm pretty entertained by that theory

-- which I've heard over and over.

That's not any more flammable than 'normal' aircraft dope -- perhaps less, if it really did not include any nitrocellulose content. Thermite (proper) and thermitic mixtures require MUCH higher ignition temperatures than would be present as a result of a simple hydrogen-air flame. Even if it did finally undergo the thermite reduction reaction, it wouldn't have contributed much to the fire. You have to consider the mass of materials present, not merely what they're made of.

The combination of iron oxide pigment and aluminum leafing flake in a paint hardly turns it into "thermite". It'll burn THROUGH the membrane lots faster than it spreads because of any imagined heat evolution from the 'thermite' content. And the 'thermite' content is well less than the mass of the fabric, itself.

FWIW, the iron oxide was probably used as a cheap opacifier, and the aluminum in small amounts "for pretty". Leafing flakes can cover immense surface areas with tiny amounts of metal.

I use several paint grades, and three or four purely pyrotechnic grades of aluminum flake in my work, as well as a few atomized and granular versions, as well. They range in particle sizes from about .8 microns to about 15-mesh.

Lloyd

I was at Zeppelin a few years back and they were making a smaller airship, I'd estimate about blimp size. In Zeppelin's museum they had pictures of the Goodyear blimp but I'm not sure what the ties are. We were at Zeppelin as a customer tire plant, Zeppelin has silo's and material handling systems used in the tire and rubber industry. In the museum there is a re-creation of part of the cabin compartments of the Hindenburg, they also had some parts from the Hindenburg and parts from other airships they made, and even a Zeppelin car.

RogerN

I've covered a couple of fabric airplanes. Once I found Stits I never went back to dope.

But the term "dope" has a couple of different flavors.

Butyrate isn't all that bad, flammability wise.

But nitrate sure is.

Working with dope, the first coat is often nitrate, to get a better bond on the fabric.

But the nitrate coat didn't have any additives in it. That was in the butyrate coats.

Richard fired this volley in news:Vt2dneNDAsJuSlrMnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

yup... It's explosive. In the nitrate-based dopes, there are several levels of nitration of the cellulose, depending upon the properties required.

It's basically the same stuff as smokeless powder, but the further toward around 13% nitration it moves, the more like smokeless powder it becomes, and the more easily soluble it becomes.

CAB (Butyrate) is not an explosive, just a flammable plastic.

Lloyd

Q. What's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the airship Hindenberg?

A. One is a flaming Nazi gasbag, while the other is just a dirigible.