On the evening of May 6, 1937, spectators and reporters gathered at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey to catch a glimpse of the cutting edge of air travel. The German airship LZ-129—better known as the Hindenburg—was landing. At 804 feet long (more than three times the length of a Boeing 747 and only 80 feet shorter than the Titanic), the Hindenburg was the largest aircraft ever built. For those watching as the silver giant maneuvered silently toward the mooring mast, it must have seemed like the beginning of an era of modern aviation.
The first experiments with using hydrogen and helium to lift vehicles into the sky were conducted in the late 18th century, but it took more than a century for the technology to become viable for commercial and military use. In 1900 Ferdinand, Graf von Zeppelin, launched his first airship, the rigid-hulled LZ-1. Although the LZ-1 was a mixed success, later models improved, and Zeppelin was eventually commissioned to produce an entire fleet of the airships—which came to be known as Zeppelins—for the German government.
During World War I Germany used Zeppelins to conduct aerial bombing campaigns with London and Paris as the main targets. Although these raids were not especially destructive when compared with later bombing raids by airplanes, they were effective at sowing fear. Zeppelins would appear without warning, looming in the sky while panicked civilians scrambled for cover. Winston Churchill dismissed the threat posed by these “enormous bladders of combustible and explosive gas,” but it took nearly two years for British defenses to find the right ammunition (a burst of alternating incendiary and explosive bullets) to reliably bring the Zeppelins down.
After the war, engineers turned their attention to building airships for long-distance transportation, launching the first transatlantic flight in 1919. Only 10 years later, in 1928, the era of commercial airship travel seemed to begin in earnest with the completion of the Graf Zeppelin, a massive airship capable of carrying dozens of passengers in accommodations similar to those found aboard a luxury ocean liner. For several years the Graf Zeppelin executed mainly well-publicized demonstration flights, including an around-the-world tour in 1929. In 1931 the airship began regularly scheduled commercial service, making nonstop flights between Germany and South America.
In 1936 an even larger airship—the Hindenburg—began transatlantic service. In its first year of operation it carried hundreds of passengers across the ocean in 10 round-trips between the United States and Germany and 7 trips between Germany and Brazil. The fabric skin of the airship was covered with a paint that contained aluminum powder, giving it a silvery appearance. Its tail fins were emblazoned with the swastikas of the Nazi regime. Passenger accommodations included 25 cabins for two passengers each, a restaurant, a bar, and even a smoking lounge, pressurized to keep any flammable gases from getting in. The Hindenburg had been designed to use helium for lift, but American export restrictions on helium meant that the airship had been filled with flammable hydrogen instead.
As the spectators at Lakehurst looked on, this triumph of engineering turned to tragedy. Without warning, an explosion consumed the tail end of the Hindenburg, throwing the craft off-balance and rearing the nose skyward. Flames raced through the body, quickly burning up outer skin and exposing the aluminum structure underneath. The entire airship crashed a few seconds later. Thirty-five of the 97 passengers and crew members aboard and one member of the ground crew were killed.
The entire disaster was captured on newsreel and was also narrated by a radio news reporter named Herb Morrison, who uttered the infamous phrase “Oh, the humanity!” as the Hindenburg crashed.
While the exact cause of the tragedy isn’t known for certain, the most likely theory is that a discharge of atmospheric electricity ignited the airship’s hydrogen gas cells. At the time, some Germans wondered whether the airship had fallen victim to sabotage, but the possibility of foul play was soon ruled out by investigators in the United States.
Zeppelin flights didn’t end immediately with the Hindenburg disaster. But by the late 1930s passenger airplanes had greatly improved in speed, reliability, and operating cost. As airplanes became increasingly popular and safe, airships’ slow speeds, their vulnerability in stormy weather, and the difficulty of procuring steady supplies of helium soon rendered these unusual aircraft obsolete.
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