The Airships
Ship of dreams
Despite the fact that the Los Angeles flew across the north Atlantic and its creator Hugo Eckener was given a hero’s welcome on its arrival in the United States, many thought that the Zeppelin was all but confined to history. But Eckener had already been offered a dramatic solution to save the company from ruin. The giant rubber and tyre manufacturer Goodyear had invited him to form a joint venture – to build Zeppelins in the United States.
Joint venture with Goodyear
‘Goodyear had been in the aeronautical supply business,’ says Rick Zitarosa of the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. ‘They had built balloons and blimps for the US Navy and Army. And Goodyear was also a leader in aeronautical engineering and in the development of such things as impermeable fabrics.’
The Goodyear Blimp
www.goodyearblimp.com/history/index.html
This
section of the Goodyear corporate website has a history of its involvement
with airships and blimps, including a number of very good photographs and
the story of the possible British origin for the word ‘blimp’.
Vice president of the US company, P W Litchfield, was convinced that, with Zeppelin’s brilliant technology, Goodyear could take the lead in not only military but also passenger airships. According to airship historian Gordon Vaeth, ‘Paul Weeks Litchfield was absolutely convinced, as were a lot of people, that the future of long-distance and intercontinental flight lay with a rigid airship and not with the aeroplane.’
For Eckener, it was one of the most difficult commercial decisions of his life. ‘Eckener was not entirely thrilled about this in the beginning,’ says historian Dennis Kromm, ‘and some of his directors even less so. But it began to seem like a pretty logical thing.’
The result was the formation, in 1923, of the Goodyear–Zeppelin Corporation. For a one-third stake, Zeppelin handed over its design secrets, along with chief engineer Dr Karl Arnstein and 12 other German experts who had built wartime Zeppelins. On paper, the new alliance of American capital and German know-how was a world-beater. All that was needed was a Navy construction contract to kick-start the enterprise. But the US government’s confidence in the airship was soon to be seriously dented.
The end of the Shenandoah
Throughout 1925, the Navy’s two new airborne flagships – USS Shenandoah and USS Los Angeles – were clocking up more flying time as public relations billboards than in fleet operations. It was a propaganda strategy that was about to backfire tragically.
On 2 September 1925, the Shenandoah took off from Lakehurst for a trip above the Midwest to Minneapolis, for a county fair. The next morning, it encountered terrible storms over south-eastern Ohio. It hit a terrible squall for which a ship of its type had never been designed, and broke into three pieces.
The wreckage was strewn across three crash sites in southern Ohio, the bow and tail landing 12 miles apart. Of the 43-man crew, 14 died including the captain. Over the coming days, souvenir hunters descended on the crash sites and stripped the wreckage bare, leaving little for a Board of Enquiry investigation into the reason for the crash. ‘It was a very traumatic experience,’ says historian Richard van Treuren. ‘But it was always blamed on the weather. The fact that it had been following an airshow circuit instead of flying with the fleet escaped attention.’
But this was not the publicity that the Navy had sought, and the loss of the first American rigid airship darkened optimism in the United States for lighter-than-air machines.
General Umberto Nobile
In 1926, the world’s interest in airships shifted to Italy. Under dictator Benito Mussolini, Italy was expanding its influence both in Europe and on the world stage. Italian shipbuilders were creating state-of-the-art ocean liners and warships, and the military boasted one of the world’s leading airship designers: General Umberto Nobile.
Nobile’s expertise lay in building small versatile airships called semi-rigids. Unlike Zeppelins, which had a full metal frame, semi-rigids had only part of a frame, at the bottom of the envelope. ‘Airship people have never been very enthusiastic about semi-rigid airships,’ says Gordon Vaeth. ‘It’s a hybrid essentially, between a blimp and a large airship. As someone once commented to me, it involves the worst features of both.’
Zeppelin Design: Umberto Nobile and the Italian N-1 Airship
www.fathom.com/feature/121852/
In this 1960 interview, Nobile explains why the German airships were more
successful, and how his post-World War I Italian N-1 airship imitated the
best of German designs with one major difference: a streamlined tail. The
site includes an audio excerpt from this interview.
The North Pole by air
In 1926, the Aeroclub of Norway purchased a Nobile-built airship for famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen: the first to complete the Northwest Passage and the first to reach the South Pole. His ambition now was to become the first to conquer the North Pole by air.
Nobile was contracted to pilot the airship, which had been renamed Norge. On 10 April, Nobile set off for the Arctic island of Spitzbergen, 600 miles from the pole. It was the beginning of one of the greatest, yet controversial, aerial sagas of the 20th century.
Amundsen and his financier, American millionaire adventurer Lincoln Ellsworth, sailed to Spitzbergen where an advance crew had assembled an ingenious hangar for the airship. In early May, the airship arrived at the base camp after an epic flight from Rome via England and the Soviet Union.
Upstaged by Byrd
But Nobile found Amundsen distracted. A few days earlier, a ship had sailed into King’s Bay with a group of unexpected visitors, led by Lieutenant Richard E Byrd of the US Navy. When the American began assembling a Fokker ski-plane, Amundsen realised that he was about to be upstaged by Byrd.
‘At first Byrd wouldn’t tell anybody what he was doing there,’ says Gordon Vaeth. ‘It wasn’t until he’d been there for a few days that he revealed that his purpose was to be the first to fly to the North Pole. He didn’t put it in those words, but said something like “I’m going to beat you fellas to the punch”. A lot of people didn’t like that.’
With the airship still undergoing final preparations, Byrd took off. After less than 16 hours in the air, he returned with the news that he’d succeeded in flying over the North Pole. It was too good to be true. ‘Virtually from the moment that he returned, controversy developed,’ Vaeth says. ‘The Fokker tri-motor plane had a maximum cruising speed of about 70 miles an hour. That particular plane was carrying skis, and that reduced air speed by 2 or perhaps 4 miles per hour. The plane could not – within 15.5 hours – have gone to the North Pole and back within the time that Byrd said that it had taken them.’
Amundsen’s journey of discovery
Amundsen put the Byrd controversy behind him. His mission, he now claimed, was far more daring: to fly over the pole, yes, but to continue on and be the first humans ever to see what lay beyond.
On the morning of 11 May 1926, Amundsen and his crew set off on their journey of discovery. It was to be the most hazardous journey ever attempted in an airship – there would be no turning back for the 16 men on board. At 1.30 the following morning, they reached the pole. In the eerie Arctic light, Amundsen and Ellsworth dropped their national flags, but Nobile upstaged them, dropping an even larger Italian flag given to him by Mussolini. Amundsen – who considered Nobile little more than hired help – was furious.
Beyond the pole, the real journey began. Ahead of them was 1,000 miles of unexplored land. They didn’t have an easy time of it. Ice formed on the propellers, and their rotation threw off ice at the airship’s covering. Fortunately it didn’t puncture any gas cells, but it tore a great many holes along the keel area. After days battling headwinds, snow and fog, the airship made a heavy forced landing near the isolated Alaskan village of Teller. No one was injured, but the valiant airship was beyond repair.
Amundsen was hailed around the world for making the first aerial crossing of the Arctic, but he was far from generous in sharing the credit with Nobile. To Amundsen’s displeasure, the flamboyant Italian airship commander was invited to meet the US president on the way home and, on arrival in Italy, was decorated by Benito Mussolini.
The crash of the Italia
Nobile soon announced that he was preparing another mission to the Arctic – a mission that would thrust Italy to the forefront of polar research. But the grand project would create a political storm that would ultimately see him branded as a traitor and cost the life of his greatest detractor, Amundsen.
In late May 1928, after a number of successful trial flights, Nobile took off from Spitzbergen in his new airship Italia, and 20 hours later, he looked down on the North Pole. However, deteriorating weather soon forced the Italia to turn back for base camp. It never arrived. A call went out from Spitzbergen for assistance. Mussolini refused to help, but six nations sent rescue parties. Even Roald Amundsen put aside his strong anti-Nobile feelings and, in a chartered French seaplane, went in search of his old adversary.
Finally, after weeks of searching, rescuers spotted wreckage – and survivors. A Swedish ski-plane rescued Nobile, but had no room for his eight crewmen. They were later rescued by a Russian ice-breaker, having survived a month on the ice. But six other men who were in the hull had been blown away on the wind and were never found.
Arctic Postal History: Umberto Nobile and the search for the Italia
www.south-pole.com/aspp015.htm
The story of the search, with examples (and photographs) of philatelic
treasures associated with it.
For Nobile, the drama was far from over. He was accused not only of incompetence but also of cowardice for allowing himself to be the first rescued. The Fascist press called for him to be court-martialled and shot. While Mussolini honoured the victims’ families and the survivors, Nobile was stripped of all his military honours. Italy’s most famous aviator was finally hounded out of his country and forced to seek sanctuary in the Soviet Union, where his genius was employed building airships for the military.
In one of the tragic ironies of the story, Roald Amundsen never returned from the search. He had perished in the environment he knew better than anyone, looking for a man he had vilified – and believed incapable of survival.
The birth of the Graf Zeppelin
Germany in the mid-1920s was still in crisis. The Weimar government was unable to pay its war reparations – and both the far left and the far right in politics were stirring discontent in the streets.
At Friedrichshafen – the German home of the Zeppelin Company – unemployment was rife. It had been two years since the company had joined forces with Goodyear and the promise of building airships for the American military had not been fulfilled. But Zeppelin chief Hugo Eckener continued to dream of German-built airships.
In late 1926, Germany’s former enemies finally lifted their restrictions on airship construction. To drum up funds, Eckener and former navy air-shipmen travelled throughout Germany and neighbouring countries lecturing about the airship of the future.
Within six months the world’s biggest airship was under construction at Friedrichshafen. Some of the funds had come from public donations, and under pressure from the persuasive Eckener, the cash-strapped government somehow found more than a million marks to help put the pride of Germany back in the air.
‘In addition to being possibly one of the most gifted natural pilots,’ says Rick Zitarosa, ‘Hugo Eckener was also a very shrewd businessman and a consummate politician. He had no problem speaking directly and frankly when it came to asking for what he perceived to be the specific needs for himself, his corporation and the future of the Zeppelin airship.’
On 8 July 1928, Count Zeppelin’s daughter christened the new airship Graf Zeppelin in honour of her father. For Eckener, more was riding on this creation than any previous Zeppelin. ‘Her destiny,’ he said, ‘is to prove once and for all that airships are either the way to the future of air travel or the final downfall of a defective concept.’
Between the old and new worlds
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh had flown the first non-stop crossing from the United States to Paris by aeroplane. Zeppelin and British-built airships had already conquered the north Atlantic years earlier. Now, in October 1928, Hugo Eckener decided to increase the stakes, by attempting the first non-stop intercontinental passenger flight from Europe to the United States.
The Graf Zeppelin was, according to Douglas Botting, author of Dr Eckener’s Dream Machine, ‘not only a technological marvel for its age, it was also the most luxurious flying machine ever. It was like flying in a comfortable first-class Bavarian hotel. The rooms were not big, but they were very luxuriously appointed. You had a lovely dining room and sitting room with first-class starched white table cloths and silver cutlery and beautiful Zeppelin crockery and so on.’
The 20 passengers included five German government officials, and six media representatives. The only woman aboard – British-born Lady Grace Drummond Hay – was a star reporter for the Hearst press.
Her column – radioed daily to New York – captured both the pleasures and privations of the world’s first passenger flight between the old and the new worlds.
It is a huge experiment. The tiny kitchen is only a few feet square and inadequate to supply luxuries for passengers as well as cook for 40 members of the crew. But the passengers are all happy and pleased with the voyage. The Zeppelin swings in space like a cradle, swaying gently to the lullaby of the winds on the silver canvas.
Lady Grace Drummond Hay
The Graf and the great storm
On the evening of the second night, Eckener’s dream turned into a nightmare – and thrust the Graf Zeppelin on to the front of pages of newspapers around the globe. Nearing the mid-Atlantic, the ship received a weather report warning that a storm front was approaching from the north-west. Towards midnight, the entire northern sky was aflame with almost incessant lightning. Hugo Eckener was worried what the next few hours might bring – the Graf Zeppelin was an unproven craft in bad weather.
The next morning, the ship ran straight into the great storm at full speed. The combined impact was 150 miles per hour and sent shock waves through the ship.
Unlike the United States’ Shenandoah, the Graf Zeppelin stood up to the turbulence, but it did not emerge unscathed: the storm damaged a tail fin. Volunteers, including Eckener’s son, went aloft in 50 knot winds and pelting rain to make urgent repairs. If they failed, the ship would be uncontrollable.
With the Graf losing altitude, Eckener ordered an urgent message to be radioed the US Navy for assistance. Across the United States, the press became intoxicated with the drama unfolding in the north Atlantic. With 21 warships standing by, radio contact was lost with the Graf. But Eckener finally got a second message through to say that all was well and they no longer needed help. After three days and an encounter with yet another a violent storm, the American coastline came into view.
Eckener the conquering hero
Instead of heading directly for Lakehurst, Eckener decided to capitalise on press and public interest by flying over Washington and New York. The din of horns, sirens, whistles and cheers coming from below drowned out the noise of the airship’s engines. Lady Grace Drummond Hay reported: ‘On our arrival in New York, Eckener was terribly emotional, and so was everyone.’
The airship – wildly overdue, exhausted of food and water and bearing a gaping hole in its fin – was triumphant. At dusk, after an epic flight of 5,000 miles, the world’s first intercontinental passenger airship landed safely at Lakehurst.
An estimated 30,000 people were there to greet it, some having waited for 60 hours. Lady Drummond Hay – the first woman to travel the north Atlantic by air – was painted as the heroine of the drama and became a coast-to-coast darling. Eckener was the conquering hero. He dined with President Coolidge and, together with his crew and passengers, paraded up Broadway in a snowstorm of ticker-tape.
With Zeppelin fever gripping America, Eckener hoped to entice financiers and corporations into funding a fleet of transatlantic passenger airships. But this was 1928 – and airships faced stiff competition from ever-faster and more opulent ocean liners – earlier that year, Germany’s Bremen and Europa had both smashed the north Atlantic record. The passage of 4.5 days was roughly the same time taken by the Graf Zeppelin but offered far greater comfort, safety … and profits. But Eckener was an optimist and a showman. On his return flight over the north Atlantic, he wiped more than a day off the fastest passage by liner.
The round-the-world flight
Records, however, were not enough to win backing for his fleet of airships. Eckener decided on the grandest and most audacious of publicity ventures – a feat that would leave ocean liners and every other aircraft in the Graf Zeppelin’s wake. He thought that one of the best things he could do to convince people of the value of airships and the reliability of the Graf Zeppelin was to fly it around the world.
Graf Zeppelin Round-the-World Flight
www.wingnet.org/rtw/rtw001j.htm
Short account of the circumstances of the flight, plus a list of the mileages
of each leg and the postal rates applied to items of mail carried by the
airship.
The round-the-world voyage was partly funded by American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst – his only condition: the flight must officially start and end at Lakehurst, New Jersey. On 15 August 1929, the Graf set off with a crew of 41 and 20 passengers from 10 countries. Australian aviation pioneer and arctic explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins joined the flight to assess the airship’s potential for polar exploration.
Searching for Sir Hubert
www.sirhubert.com
This
odd website about Sir Hubert Wilkins, created by a television production
company, is split into two parts: the story of the Australian pioneer polar
explorer, cinematographer, aviator and humanitarian; and attempts by the
production team to research Sir Hubert’s life. It has a section on
his participation in the Graf’s round-the-world flight.
Lady Drummond Hay – by now a Zeppelin fanatic – was also aboard. She wanted to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world by air:
Ours is a little republic of democracy where professors, kings’ physicians, millionaires and officers and crew live and fraternise in the most amiable harmony.
Lady Grace Drummond Hay
For most of human history, the only way of circumnavigating the world had been by sea. Ferdinand Magellan’s epic 16th-century sea voyage had taken more than three years. More recently, in 1924, two US Army biplanes had hopped around the world in six months. After an effortless first leg east across the Atlantic, Eckener was confident that the Graf Zeppelin was on course to write its own place in history – and would prove the airship’s potential for a worldwide passenger service.
Flying over Siberia
After a stopover at Friedrichshafen, the Graf flew over Berlin to a rapturous welcome. Very few Germans in the street would ever set foot on an airship, but the Graf carried with it the average person’s dream of restoring international respect for the nation.
The second leg – across the Soviet Union – was to be a journey into the unknown: no airship had ever ventured into northern Asiatic skies.
If we didn’t know it was impossible, we might almost think the Zeppelin had flown to the moon or Mars. This view [of Siberia] is positively unearthly.
Sir Hubert Wilkins
Although there was no sign of apprehension on board, a voyage around the world was extremely risky. Eckener knew that such a daring flight – flying the length of Siberia with a contingent of wealthy and influential passengers – could easily backfire. ‘Once you were over Siberian air space,’ says Douglas Botting, ‘you had no back-up systems anywhere. If you came down in that wilderness, you probably would survive the crash, but you wouldn’t be able to survive getting out of there. They were flying over land that had never been seen from the air before, over isolated villages whose residents took one look at this huge flying object and ran in circles, ran into bushes to hide, knelt in crowds outside their churches praying, because this was, in their minds, a machine of the devil.’
After days of flying over the Siberian wastelands, the Graf Zeppelin approached the daunting Stanavoi Mountains. ‘Their way was barred by unmapped mountains over 6,000 feet [1,830 metres] high,’ says Douglas Botting, ‘with no known way through. And Eckener himself described what it was like: “You flew as if you were driving a car: left here, then we take this one up here.” And you had jagged peaks 200 feet [60 metres] on one side of you and 200 feet on the other side, the ground 200 feet below you, millions of cubic feet of explosive hydrogen gas keeping you up.
‘Eckener managed to get just over the pass, over the mountains, and then suddenly the whole ball game changed. Suddenly the vast expanse of the Pacific – blue, sunny, flat, still – hove into sight. And everyone cheered.’
They had travelled 7,000 miles from Berlin – the longest non-stop flight yet made. A journey taking a month by ship – or two weeks by train – had taken the airship less than four days. The world was now a much smaller place.
Across the Pacific non-stop
‘They went on to Japan,’ continues Douglas Botting. ‘and to another monumental welcome. For the residents of Tokyo, the Zeppelin was a machine of wonder and magic. The local press would print more column inches about that visit than about any other event in Japanese history. If Japan’s age-old isolation had come to an end, here was the proof.’
Ahead was another test for the Graf Zeppelin – the first attempt to fly across the Pacific Ocean non-stop. Eckener had barely got up to cruising speed before he went in pursuit of a typhoon that only the day before had passed over Tokyo. By tugging on its rim, like hanging on to a tiger’s tail, he would greatly enhance the ship’s speed. Below, seven steamers of the American Line were strung across the Pacific, providing weather reports on the way.
We owe it to science, humanity and international friendship to forward this noble aerial enterprise. We now offer fervent prayers that the ship will navigate the virgin Pacific in safety to the other shore.
Lady Grace Drummond Hay
Less than three days after departing Tokyo, the Graf Zeppelin flew triumphantly over San Francisco. NBC organised what was at the time the most ambitious live outside broadcast in history, reaching listeners all over the United States and across the world.
Traversing North America
Early the following morning, the Graf Zeppelin, escorted by 50 naval planes, came in to land at Los Angeles. Hearst reporter Karl van Wiegand called it ‘a milestone’:
The Pacific has been conquered. There will be no other ‘first flight’ over that great ocean. This will go down as the greatest of all air adventures up to the present time. It will stir the imagination and inspire coming generations.
For Hugo Eckener, the final leg across the North American continent was of the most concern. There was the unpredictable weather over the deserts of Arizona and Texas and the potential of thunderstorms from the north-east. To make matters worse, the airship was carrying a minimum of fuel and running seriously low on gas and ballast – the basic ingredients of buoyancy and altitude.
‘It actually was more scary for Eckener, the airship commander, than Siberia,’ says Botting. ‘But all went well. They came in over Chicago, which was absolutely jammed solid to see this phenomenon go overhead. Even the hospitals – the dead and dying, as it were – all managed to climb up on to the flat roofs to see it go over.’
After a rapturous welcome in Chicago, Eckener headed straight for New York – to fly over the Statue of Liberty and officially end the voyage.
In only 21 days, the Graf Zeppelin’s passengers had circumnavigated the globe in absolute comfort and safety. And the official flying time of 12 days and 11 minutes was a major milestone in aviation history. ‘It was the most significant aviation event of that era,’ says John Duggan. ‘In political terms, Dr Eckener had done, with this one flight, more for the German image abroad than the Weimar government had done in the previous decade.’
Newly elected President Herbert Hoover proclaimed Eckener another Magellan, another Columbus. Lady Drummond Hay was by now the most famous female journalist of her time. She used her popularity to promote the airship as a safe means of passenger transport:
I know that I am the luckiest girl in the world, to have enjoyed the privilege of being the first woman to fly around the earth … People ask me if I was afraid at all during the flight. How could I be? I have such confidence in our silver airship and in Dr Eckener.
Airships to India
Eckener proclaimed that the epic flight of the Graf Zeppelin had ushered in an era of totally reliable intercontinental air travel. But if Britain had its way, Hugo Eckener would not have the skies to himself for long.
Five years earlier, in 1924, the British Empire Exhibition opened at Wembley. It had come as a distraction from the bad news of political unrest in Europe and strikes and high unemployment at home. During the exhibition, Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald, leader of the first Labour government in British history, announced a grand plan to span the vast distances of the empire – with airships. ‘Not just any airships,’ says John Duggan, ‘but state-of-the-art airships – bigger, better, more powerful than anything yet seen in Germany.’
At the Royal Airship Works in Cardington, Bedfordshire, government engineers began construction of the world’s largest flying machine – the R101. Its original design included accommodation for up to 100 passengers and 16 tons of cargo. And its 5 million cubic feet gas capacity would be a third more than that of the Graf Zeppelin.
At Howden in the East Riding, 100 miles to the north, the private firm Vickers was constructing a second airship – the R100. It was to be identical in size but built on a budget that was a third of that of its government-made sister ship, and it would also lack the R101’s innovations in design and passenger comfort. According to John Duggan, ‘Vickers, of course had to build it to a price, not a restraint suffered by the so-called government ship. And so, right from the outset, there was perceived to be competition between the two.’
The R101
Despite her simple design, the privately built airship was a wonderful success and would soon fly across the north Atlantic without incident. The R101, however, was a disaster in the making.
On its first test flights, it was found to be seriously overweight and underpowered. With Minister for Air Lord Thomson eager to show it off with a flight to India, the R101 was sent back into the hangar to be lengthened and fitted with extra gas bags. When the Graf Zeppelin visited Cardington, Hugo Eckener inspected the modifications. He was dismayed at the R101’s continued handling problems and said that ship should not fly in its present shape, that it was an unstable, uncontrollable vehicle. But, according to Gordon Vaeth, ‘nobody was about to make any changes.’
‘The question is,’ says John Duggan, ‘why would the government – and the air minister Lord Thomson, in particular – make the decision to fly to India with the R101 before it had been sufficiently proven? First, there was clearly the pressure born of competition. The R100, the private Vickers ship, had already flown to and from Canada, so there was professional competition and pride: “They’ve done it, therefore we must.” Then there was Lord Thomson himself – a somewhat overbearing figure, a man who made up his mind and knew his mind. He had been born in India, and he had a dream: to return to India one day as vice-consul. What better way to arrive than in an airship, visiting the old empire with this new and highly technical instrument.’
But there were also political reasons for the flight. With Indian nationalists calling for an end to British rule, the massive R101 would impress upon the people of India Britain’s superior power.
Britain’s worst aviation disaster
Whatever his motives, Thomson made the fateful decision to set off for India on 4 October 1930, in an airship that was far from airworthy. Eight hours later, in stormy weather, the R101 was destroyed when it crashed into a field near the French town of Beauvais. Forty-eight men were killed including Lord Thomson; only six crewmen survived the inferno. At Cardington, not far from the hangars that had housed their airship, the victims were buried in a combined grave.
R101 – the final trials and loss of the ship
www.aht.ndirect.co.uk/airships/r101/Crash/R101_Crash.htm
Thorough
account of the disaster, plus maps of the airship’s route
and film footage of the crash site and the funeral.
It had been Britain’s worst aviation disaster and brought to an end the government’s rocky romance with the world’s largest flying machine. It also marked the death knell of the Imperial Airship Programme. The following year, the R100 was unceremoniously steamrollered and sold as scrap metal for a few hundred pounds.
