Hindenberg mystery solved?

by | Mar 6, 2013 | Journal | 7 comments

makes sense in terms of the chain of events

7 Comments

  1. Morven
    Morven on March 6, 2013 at 1:46 pm

    What I’ve found remarkable about the Hindenberg disaster is how small the death toll was, considering: only a third of the people on board died. Probably due to the nature of hydrogen fires (escaping, burning hydrogen rose rapidly when it could) and the fact that the burning airship descended slowly enough to hit the ground relatively softly.

  2. Lord Vorp
    Lord Vorp on March 6, 2013 at 2:32 pm

    This is an incomplete picture of what happened. Yes, there was a spark (and it’s refreshing to see this acknowledged), because it was a stormy night, but there was no initial hydrogen gas leak to catch fire (the hydrogen was doped with an odor, like natural gas is, and nobody reported smelling it). What was quietly determined by the airship company (and not mentioned publicly), and then later determined in the ’90s, is that the composition of the weather-resistant coating of the outer balloon… is nearly identical to Thermite. The internal gas didn’t start the fire from a leak, the balloon surface was ignited by the spark and THEN the gas burned.

    Here’s a Mythbusters video where they demonstrate it. Interestingly, they declare the myth “busted” because they demonstrate that it was not just the skin that was responsible, but that the combined action of both the flammable skin and the (then) burning gas that produced an effect strongly resembling the original disaster.

  4. WOL
    WOL on March 6, 2013 at 4:00 pm

    In a way, the US Government was responsible for the Hindenburg disaster. Helium is found in large quantities under the American Great Plains, a byproduct of natural gas extraction and the United States became the world’s leading supplier. Because of a US military embargo against Germany that restricted helium supplies, the Hindenburg, and all German Zeppelins, were forced to use hydrogen as the lift gas.

  5. Morven
    Morven on March 6, 2013 at 4:39 pm

    One must add that the reason for the ban was the not-entirely-unreasonable fear of enormous Nazi Zeppelin bombers. Given that the Germans used Zeppelins for bombing raids in WW1, this made sense, even though they raids only did minor damage. The vulnerability of the craft to incendiary bullets ended up making them obsolete as bombers. Helium would have changed matters.

    That said, the danger was likely exaggerated; fixed-wing aviation had improved by leaps and bounds since WW1, and fighter aircraft were likely to be able to take out even helium-filled Zeppelins with relative ease.

    The Hindenberg was actually designed to take helium; hydrogen was the stopgap measure.

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