Airships are go

Back to the future

Courtesy of Hybrid Air Vehicles

The arresting images and black and white film of the Hindenburg disaster unfolding in May 1937, is etched into history. A German manufactured, hydrogen filled Zeppelin erupted into a fireball while trying to dock at the Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey, in the United States.

35 of the 97 people on board, died that day. The publicity which followed was burnt indelibly into the public’s psyche and a new era of passenger transport came to a premature and abrupt end.

What happened to airships?

As a mode of transport, the matter was closed. Blimps, as the US Navy called them, continued to be used for surveillance work during World War Two. The American Blimp Corporation continued to manufacture airships for advertising purposes, while bigger, hi-tech airships continued to be built by Zeppelin in Germany.

Smaller variations like the Goodyear blimp, have been hovering over big sporting events for years in the US. Rich tourists in Germany are still being treated to sight-seeing trips over their countryside, safe in the knowledge that the gas lifting them gently into the air is Helium, an inert gas, not the highly flammable hydrogen, which sits next door in the periodic table.