The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany , bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey , killing 36 passengers and crew-members, on May 6, Frenchman Henri Giffard constructed the first successful airship in His hydrogen-filled blimp carried a three-horsepower steam engine that turned a large propeller and flew at a speed of six miles per hour. Unlike French airships, the German ships had a light framework of metal girders that protected a gas-filled interior.
Large enough to carry substantial numbers of passengers, one of the most famous rigid airships was the Graf Zeppelin, a dirigible that traveled around the world in In the s, the Graf Zeppelin pioneered the first transatlantic air service, leading to the construction of the Hindenburg, a larger passenger airship.
Stretching feet from stern to bow, it carried 36 passengers and crew of While attempting to moor at Lakehurst, the airship suddenly burst into flames, probably after a spark ignited its hydrogen core. Rapidly falling feet to the ground, the hull of the airship incinerated within seconds. Thirteen passengers, 21 crewmen, and 1 civilian member of the ground crew lost their lives, and most of the survivors suffered substantial injuries. Lighter-than-air passenger travel rapidly fell out of favor after the Hindenberg disaster, and no rigid airships survived World War II.
Investigations in the aftermath of the disaster, as well as later reconstructions, confirmed it was the hydrogen combined with inclement weather at Lakehurst that took the airship down. We know that hydrogen was leaking and that it was ignited probably by an electrostatic discharge caused by the weather —there was a thunderstorm at the time of the landing.
According to Grossman, the only real mystery of the Hindenburg disaster is the cause of the leaky hydrogen. Speculations arose soon after the accident that the airship may have been taken down by a saboteur, an enemy of the rising Nazi Germany — after all, it was , only two years before the beginning of World War II. The Zeppelin Co. The company had been received threatening letters in the past, but the firm later abandoned that hypothesis and endorsed the static-spark explanation.
However, conspiracy theories die hard, and the Hindenburg inferno kept stirring the public imagination. Several books have been published over the years looking for a human culprit behind the accident, one of which was turned into the plot for the film "The Hindenburg. But the Hindenburg's fiery demise wasn't the first or only airship disaster. It's crashing terrible. Oh, my. Get out of the way, please.
It's burning and bursting into flames and the It's smoke, and it's in flames now; and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. The official inquiry board settled on the initial assumption: There must have been a hydrogen leak.
The hydrogen mixed with oxygen and encountered something — static electricity, perhaps — that set it alight. Bain knows hydrogen. He first started tinkering with a chemistry set in the fourth grade, and quickly began developing his own fuels for model rockets. After working with Wernher von Braun's team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and with space contractors, NASA hired him to oversee its rocket fueling, leading his friends to joke that he ran the biggest gas station in the world, pumping liquid hydrogen into rockets from Apollo to the space shuttle.
He derives hydrogen for the car from water in his garage. Bain started his Hindenburg research after seeing that plaque in the Smithsonian, first pouring over every photo and film of the disaster he could find. He donned white gloves to read the original board of inquiry transcript, and took notes in pencil pens were prohibited.
He tracked down Hindenburg crew members, passengers and witnesses on the ground. Bain traveled across the United States and to Germany. He also came upon Hindenburg artifacts, which Bain brought to NASA labs where he won the support of 14 of his colleagues to conduct tests ranging from electron microscope analysis to spectrographic analysis, among others, using state-of-the-art machines. What Bain found has led him to point to the coating on the Hindenburg's covering as the fatal flaw, rather than the hydrogen tanks.
That day, the electrical charge was greater because the Hindenburg was coming in for a higher landing than normal, Bain said.
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