For a brief period in the early Twentieth Century it seemed as if the
future of air travel lay with the giant airships of Count von Zeppelin.
The First World War ended that dream, fixed wing aircraft superseding
the slow moving and unwieldy airships. As weapons of war the Zeppelins
were never truly successful although they did manage to terrify huge
numbers of unknowing and naïve civilians--perhaps more by imagination
than by any practical manifestation of their power.
The Zeppelin crews of the First World War spent hours in the air, cold
and hungry--and with the prospect of a horrendous death, either by fire
or by falling thousands of feet to the ground, ever present. As vehicles
of mass destruction the Zeppelins were remarkably ineffective. Their
real value, lay in their ability to make silent reconnaissance missions
over enemy territory and sea lanes. In the postwar days the public began
to realize that airships offered a form of air travel that was
comfortable, mostly stable and, sometimes, even luxurious. 'The Graf
Zeppelin' and the 'Hindenburg' were the height of elegance.
Unfortunately, they had two major defects--they were vulnerable to the
elements and, due to the hydrogen that kept them aloft, they were also
highly flammable. The 'Hindenburg' disaster of 1937 effectively spelled
the end of the giant airship as a commercial enterprise but for almost
half a century these wonderful machines had cruised elegantly through
the clouds.
