15. Filling an Airship With Flammable Gas Might Not Have Been a Bright Idea
By the mid 1930s, rigid airships filled with hydrogen and, commonly known as Zeppelins, had been flying commercial passengers for more than three decades. Tens of thousands of paying customers had flown over a million miles, in over 2000 flights, without a single injury. Zeppelins’ popularity was soaring, and it was widely assumed that they were the wave of the future. The latest milestone was that of Germany’s Zeppelin Company, whose giant airships flew passengers across the Atlantic in luxury and style, in a mere 60 hours – remarkable for commercial travel back then.
Many predicted that airships would dominate global travel. Then catastrophe struck the Hindenburg, the Zeppelin Company’s flagship and the biggest airship ever built – twice as high and three times as long as a Boeing 747 “Jumbo Jet”. On May 6th, 1937, after an uneventful trans-Atlantic flight, the Hindenburg tried to dock with a mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, when it suddenly erupted in flames. It took only 37 seconds from when the first spark appeared for the world’s biggest airship to get consumed by fire.