"It burst into flames! ... It's fire and it's crashing!"

[Cerridwen]

The Hindenburg - May 6, 1937 - "The Titanic of the Sky"

Hindenburg Statistics

Length
803.8 feet (245 m)

Height
146.7 feet

Diameter
135.2 feet (41 m)

Duraluminum girders
10 miles

Weight
430,850 pounds

Hydrogen gas capacity
7,602,100 cubic feet (200,000 cubic m)


Number of cells
16

Diesel engines
4 Daimler-Benz (4,320-lb and 1,050-hp each)

Top speed
82 mph (132 kmh)

Range
8,000 miles

Price
$3.75 million

Ticket price
$400 one-way
$720 return

Atlantic crossing time
Westbound = 60 hours
Eastbound = 50 hours

-------------

Dining on Board

The delectable food served on board the Hindenburg included the following:

* Patés à la reine
* Carmen salad
* Indian swallow nest soup
* Beef broth with marrow dumplings
* Fresh Black Forest brook trout
* Cold Rhine salmon with spiced sauce and potato salad
* Roast gosling meunière
* Fattened duckling, Bavarian-style, with champagne cabbage
* Venison cutlets Beauval with Berny potatoes
* Tenderloin steak with goose liver sauce, Chateau potatoes and green beans à la princesse
* Iced California melon
* Pears condé with chocolate sauce
* Turkish coffee
* Cakes and liqueurs

----------

Provisions

The following provisions were required for a round trip:

* 440 pounds of fresh meat and poultry
* 220 pounds of fish
* 330 pounds of delicatessen items (including caviar)
* 800 eggs
* 220 pounds of butter
* 220 pounds of cheese and marmalade
* 55 gallons of mineral water
* 33 gallons of milk

link

The Hindenburg was not only longer than the Graf Zeppelin, it was an extra 35 feet wide. This meant it had nearly twice the volume for lifting gas (7,062,000 cubic feet) than the Graf Zeppelin. There was a reason for this. The Hindenburg's designers had decided to fill the new dirigible with helium gas, not hydrogen. Helium, unlike hydrogen, does not burn, making it safer. However, it doesn't produce as much lift as hydrogen, so the extra volume the Hindenburg had for gas was an important feature.

The Hindenburg never got its helium, though. At that time helium was difficult to produce and the United States had a monopoly on the manufacture of it. When the Americans saw that Hitler was in power in Germany, they feared he would use the gas for military purposes and therefore would not sell the Germans the helium necessary to fill the Hindenburg. The Zeppelin Company was forced to redesign the ship for hydrogen and make changes to minimize the possibility of fire.

<snip>

Final Flight

<snip>

The trip went smoothly and by 11:40 A.M. on May 6th the airship was passing over Boston. Landing at the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst was delayed due to bad weather, so the ship's captain, Commander Max Pruss, decided to linger over New York City, giving his passengers spectacular views of the Empire State Building, the Bronx, Harlem, Central Park, the Battery, Times Square, the Statue of Liberty and Ebbets Field (where a game was being played between the Dodgers and the Pittsburgh Pirates).

At 4 P.M. the Hindenburg arrived over Lakehurst, but the weather was still worrisome. Commander Pruss decided to take the ship southeast until he hit shore, then north to Asbury Park, then finally inland back to Lakehurst. At 6:12 Charles E. Rosendahl, Commanding Officer of the Lakehurst N.A.S., sent a message to the Hindenburg: "Conditions now considered suitable for landing." Eleven minutes later a stronger message followed: "Recommend landing now."

more at link

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[Patsy Stone]

1. Herb Morrison -- WLS Chicago

"Oh, the humanity!"

[Cerridwen]

2. More from that famous eyewitness radio report...

..It's practically standing still now. They've dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship, and it's been taken a hold of down on the field by a number of men. It's starting to rain again; the rain had slacked up a little bit. The back motors of the ship are just holding it, just enough to keep it from --"

"It burst into flames! ... It's fire and it's crashing! It's crashing terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It's burning, bursting into flames and is falling on the mooring mast, and all the folks agree that this is terrible. This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world! ...There's smoke, and there's flames, now, and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast...Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here!

[ClassWarrior]

3. My thought exactly Pats...

:hi:

Herb's gone down in history for those three words.

NGU.

[Patsy Stone]

4. And as terrible as that death and destruction was

I still can't get WKRP out of my mind. :)

It's a helicopter, and it's coming this way. It's flying something behind it, I can't quite make it out, it's a large banner and it says, uh - Happy... Thaaaaanksss... giving! ... From ... W ... K ... R... P!! No parachutes yet. Can't be skydivers... I can't tell just yet what they are, but - Oh my God, Johnny, they're turkeys!! Johnny, can you get this? Oh, they're plunging to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car! Oh, the humanity! The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! Not since the Hindenberg tragedy has there been anything like this!"

:hi:

[dogday]

5. Whoever thought Turkeys could not fly?

I still laugh at that one... Priceless.....

[iamthebandfanman]

6. *sigh*

that was a horrible day in cincinnati

:)

[ClassWarrior]

9. They're "hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement..."

That was brilliant writing for a sitcom.

NGU.

[Faygo Kid]

8. Les Nessman -- WKRP Cincinnati

"Turkeys Away!"

"Oh, they're plunging to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car! Oh, the humanity! The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement!"


"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!!!"
-- Arthur Carlson station manager

[tjwash]

17. Funniest. Episode. Ever.

As god is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!

[rainbow4321]

7. So why was there a "US embargo on nonflammable helium" back then?

And if there had not been, would the accident never have happened?

http://www.koco.com/news/13264157/detail.html

At 87, Robert Buchanan says he sometimes has trouble remembering what he did 10 minutes ago. But he can recall in vivid detail the day 70 years ago when he watched the luxurious airship Hindenburg erupt into a fireball.

Flames roared across the surface of the mighty German dirigible only 100 or so feet above him, singing his hair as he ran for his life.

"It was a piff-puff, just like someone would leave the gas on and not get the flame to it," said Buchanan, one of the last living members of the ground crew waiting to help the Hindenburg land.

<snip>

The 804-foot-long Hindenburg was cutting-edge technology, with its fabric-covered, metal frame held aloft by more than 7 million cubic feet of lighter-than-air hydrogen. Flammable hydrogen had to be used because of a U.S. embargo on nonflammable helium.

[Cerridwen]

11. National Helium Reserve

The National Helium Reserve is an American strategic reserve of over a billion cubic feet of Helium gas, stored at the Cliffside Storage Facility about 12 miles northwest of Amarillo, Texas in a natural geologic gas storage formation. It was established in 1925 as a supply of lifting gas for airships, and in the 1950s became an important source of coolant during the Space Race and Cold War.

After the "Helium Acts Amendments of 1960" (Public Law 86–777), the U.S. Bureau of Mines arranged for five private plants to recover helium from natural gas. For this helium conservation program, the Bureau built a 425-mile pipeline from Bushton, Kansas to connect those plants with the government's partially depleted Cliffside gas field. This helium-nitrogen mixture was injected and stored in the Cliffside gas field until needed, when it then was further purified.

By 1995, a billion cubic metres of the gas had been collected and the reserve was US$1.4 billion in debt, prompting the Congress of the United States in 1996 to phase out the reserve.<1><2> The resulting "Helium Privatization Act of 1996" (Public Law 104–273) directed the United States Department of the Interior to start liquidating the reserve by 2005. a bit more at link

Thanks for asking. I never knew we had a "helium reserve".

[ClassWarrior]

13. The people who work there sound like chipmunks.

B-)

So why the helium ban at the time of the crash?

NGU.

[Cerridwen]

14. Hee hee...I'm no expert, but what I read at one of the links said...

At that time helium was difficult to produce and the United States had a monopoly on the manufacture of it. When the Americans saw that Hitler was in power in Germany, they feared he would use the gas for military purposes and therefore would not sell the Germans the helium necessary to fill the Hindenburg. (emphasis added)

I presume that's the official story. The U.S. government didn't trust the Nazis. Seems, once upon a time, our government got it right; the outcome, however...

[rainbow4321]

19. Hindenburg's hydrogen gas was "'odorised' with garlic" so leaks could be detected

Hmmm...looks like the post-disaster blame game/political spin was going on back in those days, too.

http://www.hydropole.ch/Hydropole/Intro/Hindenburg.htm


Hydrogen burns invisibly (emitting light in the UV range) so the visible flames of the fire could not have been caused by the hydrogen gas. Also motion picture films show downward burning. Hydrogen, being less dense than air, burns upward. Some speculate that the German government placed the blame on flammable hydrogen in order to cast the U.S. helium embargo in a bad light.

Also, the naturally odorless hydrogen gas in the Hindenburg was 'odorised' with garlic so that any leaks could be detected, and nobody reported any smell of garlic during the flight or at the landing prior to the disaster.

It is also pointed out that none of the victims died burned by hydrogen. Of the 36 victims, 33 died because they jumped or fell out of the airship, two died of burns from the fabric and diesel fuel, and Allen Hagaman of the ground crew was killed when one of the motors fell on him.

Opponents of the "flammable fabric" theory contend that it is a recently developed analysis focused primarily on deflecting public concern about the safety of hydrogen. These opponents contend that the "flammable fabric" theory fails to account for many important facts of the case.

[Warpy]

20. The problem was the doping on the ship's canvas skin

which was necessary to make the cells impermeable to hydrogen. They used oxides of both iron and aluminum in it.

They reproduced the whole thing on an episode of Mythbusters (love that show) and demonstrated that neither the hydrogen nor the doping alone could have produced that fire. What they did demonstrate is that the doping plus hydrogen burned hot enough to produce a patchy thermite reaction. They duplicated the whole thing using a scale model, one of their more eerie stunts.

Also, the Hindenburg used hydrogen because the US refused to export helium, not import it.

[radfringe]

10. not to mock the Hindenburg disaster

but when I read the thread title - I thought you were talking about the bush* misadministration....

[Cerridwen]

12. :D

I think I was talking more about what's been happening to my threads and posts these days.

:rofl:

[hlthe2b]

15. Anyone ever seen pictures INSIDE the Hindenburg?

It sounds fantastic, but I've never seen anything but those shown here...:shrug:

[Cerridwen]

16. My first link goes to a page which has some itty-bitty

black and white pictures. I didn't find anything larger in my quick googling.

edit to add link to some interior shots of the Hindenburg

[hlthe2b]

18. thanks!

Much Appreciated!

[rainbow4321]

21. YouTube video of the crash

"Oh, the humanity" video/audio
http://youtube.com/watch?v=F54rqDh2mWA


Newsreel from 5/10/1936

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V5KXgFLia4

[Cerridwen]

22. Thanks, rainbow4321!

Thank you for adding more information.

:hi: