airship

View of a uniformed guard watching over the skeletal remains of the German airship Hindenburg, Lakehurst, New Jersey, USA, 1937. It exploded in a ball of flames while attempting to land after a transatlantic flight. The death of all 36 passengers and crew ended the development of the airship as a commercial proposition.

Any aircraft that is lighter than air and power-driven, consisting of an ellipsoidal balloon that forms the streamlined envelope or hull and has below it the propulsion system (propellers), steering mechanism, and space for crew, passengers, and/or cargo. The balloon section is filled with lighter-than-air gas, either the nonflammable helium or, before helium was industrially available in large enough quantities, the easily ignited and flammable hydrogen. The envelope's form is maintained by internal pressure in the nonrigid (blimp) and semirigid (in which the nose and tail sections have a metal framework connected by a rigid keel) types. The rigid type (zeppelin) maintains its form using an internal metal framework. Airships have been used for luxury travel, polar exploration, warfare, and advertising.

Rigid airships predominated from about 1900 until 1940. As the technology developed, the size of the envelope was increased from about 45 m/150 ft to more than 245 m/800 ft for the last two zeppelins built. In 1852 the first successful airship was designed and flown by Henri Giffard of France. In 1900 the first rigid type was designed by Count (Graf) Ferdinand von Zeppelin of Germany (though he did not produce a successful model till his L-24 in1908). Airships were used by both sides during World War I, but they were not seriously used for military purposes after that as they were largely replaced by aeroplanes. The British mainly used small machines for naval reconnaissance and patrolling the North Sea; Germany used Schutte-Lanz and Zeppelin machines for similar patrol work and also for long-range bombing attacks against English and French cities, mainly Paris and London.

In 1919 the first nonstop transatlantic round trip flight was completed by a rigid airship, the British R34. In the early 1920s a large source of helium was discovered in the USA and was substituted for hydrogen, reducing the danger of fire. The first US helium ballon was the C-7 blimp of 1921. In the 1920s and early 1930s luxury zeppelin services took passengers across the Atlantic faster and in greater comfort than the great ocean liners. The successful German airship Graf Zeppelin, completed 1927, was used for transatlantic, cruise, and round-the-world trips. In 1929 it travelled 32,000 km/20,000 mi around the world. It was retired and dismantled after years of trouble-free service, and was replaced by the Hindenburg in 1936.

Several airship accidents were caused by structural break-up during storms and by fire. The last and best known was the Hindenburg, which had been forced to return to the use of flammable hydrogen by a US embargo on helium; it exploded and burned at the mooring mast at Lakehurst, New Jersey, USA, 1937. The last and largest rigid airship was the German Graf Zeppelin II, completed just before World War II; it never saw commercial service but was used as a reconnaissance station off the English coast early in the war (it was the only zeppelin used in the war) and was soon retired and dismantled. Rigid airships, predominant from World War II, are no longer in use but blimps continued in use for coastal and antisubmarine patrol until the 1960s, and advertising blimps can be seen to this day. Recent interest in all types of airship has surfaced (including some with experimental and nontraditional shapes for the envelopes), since they are fuel-efficient, quiet, and capable of lifting enormous loads over great distances.