An airship is a lighter-than-air aircraft, a balloon with an engine, thanks to which the airship can move regardless of the direction of air currents.
The very first airships were driven by a steam engine or human muscle power, and since 1900 internal combustion engines began to be widely used.
Airship Meunier, 1784
Jean Baptiste Marie Charles Meunier is considered the inventor of the airship. The Meunier airship was to be made in the shape of an ellipsoid. Controllability had to be achieved using three propellers, manually rotated by the efforts of 80 people.
Giffard's airship, 1852
The designer Giffard borrowed ideas from Meunier back in 1780, but his airship made its first flight after Giffard’s death - 70 years later! It took this long for humanity to invent the first steam engine.
The next first fully controlled free flight on a French military airship with an electric engine was made in 1884. The length of the airship was 52 m, in 23 minutes it flew a distance of 8 km.
These devices were short-lived and extremely fragile. Airships became public transport only twenty years later, when an internal combustion engine, like the ones in modern cars, was invented.
On October 19, 1901, the French aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont flew around the Eiffel Tower at a speed of just over 20 km/h on his Santos-Dumont No. 6 apparatus. Then it was considered an eccentricity, but this particular model of airship became one of the most advanced vehicles for several decades .
The heyday of airships occurred in the 20-30s of the 20th century. Airships were equipped with aviation and, less commonly, diesel engines.
By design, airships are divided into three main types: soft, semi-rigid and rigid.
Rigid airships. A metal frame was assembled (like a bird cage) and covered with fabric on the outside.
Soft airships are essentially like hot air balloons.
Semi-rigid airships have a metal shell at the bottom.
The design of all airships is simple: a huge cigar-shaped tank filled with hydrogen or helium, a cabin and two rotary engines. To lift the balloon into the sky, hydrogen was used, stored inside a rigid frame in numerous compartments or cylinders. Ascent and descent are carried out by tilting the airship with the elevators - the engines then pull it up or down.
Inside the airship or under it there was a cabin with a crew, and here were located
Soft airship (Parseval PL25), 1910
Semi-rigid airship "Norway", 1920
Rigid airship (USS Macon), 1930
Control room. (USS Macon)
Rigid airships could carry more cargo than early airplanes, a position that continued for many decades.
The design of such airships and their development are associated with the name of the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
The German officer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, having visited America during the American Civil War, became interested in the balloons that opponents used for aerial reconnaissance. Having risen into the air, conquered by flying over the Mississippi River, he forever connected his life with aeronautics. Since then, the words “airship” and “zeppelin” have become synonymous.
Zeppelin LZ 1902
Count von Zeppelin dreamed of making airships the transport of the future - comfortable airliners, powerful cargo carriers. He believed that huge airships could also contribute to the achievement of German military power.
Zeppelin spent twenty years to make a decent model of the airship. And in 1906, he built an improved airship, which interested the military.
Zeppelin on Lake Constance
From that moment on, Count Zeppelin retired and began developing and constructing airships. Having created a company for the construction of airships, the count gained fame, he was called “The Greatest German of the 20th Century.”
The Zeppelins were enormous in size and shaped like a cigar.
During the flights of airships, mail was transported. Envelopes were usually stamped with special postage stamps, and a number of states even issued postage stamps designed specifically to pay for mail transported by airships.
View from the gondola of a French airship in 1918
The first air passenger line in Europe, Friedrichshafen - Düsseldorf, along which the airship "Germany" plied, was opened in 1910.
During World War I, the German military used Zeppelins for reconnaissance and bombing missions. Unlike airplanes (the role of bombers was performed by light reconnaissance aircraft, whose pilots took several small bombs with them), airships were already a formidable force at the beginning of the World War.
Airship raid on Calais
The most powerful aeronautical powers were Russia, which had more than two dozen devices in St. Petersburg, and Germany, which had 18 airships.
In 1926, a joint Norwegian-Italian-American expedition led by R. Amundsen on the airship “Norway” designed by Umberto Nobile carried out the first trans-Arctic flight along the route: Spitsbergen Island - North Pole - Alaska.
By 1929, airship technology had advanced to a very high level; The airship "Graf Zeppelin" began the first transatlantic flights - flights to America.
LZ 127 "Count Zeppelin"
In 1929, the airship LZ 127 "Graf Zeppelin" made its legendary flight around the world with three intermediate landings. In 20 days, he covered more than 34 thousand kilometers with an average flight speed of about 115 km/h!
Traveling in an airship was different from flying in a modern airplane.
Imagine yourself on board the Hindenburg airship, which was three times longer than a modern Airbus and equal in height to a 13-story building.
You are given not a chair, but a whole cabin with a bed and a toilet. There is no need to fasten your seat belts during takeoff. You can stand in the cabin, walk around the salon or deck, or look out the windows. The restaurant has tables set with silverware and porcelain dishes. There was even a small grand piano in the salon.
Restaurant on the Hindenburg
Salon on the Hindenburg
All these rooms were located in the huge “belly” of the airship, designed for 50 passengers.
Moving at a speed of 130 kilometers per hour at an altitude of 200 meters above sea level, the Hindenburg made its fastest flight across the North Atlantic in 43 hours in 1936.
Engine of the airship "Hindenburg"
One of the biggest enemies of the Zeppelins was bad weather.
Of the twenty-four airships built, eight failed due to bad weather. Nevertheless, Germany still believed in the reliability of the Zeppelins and continued their production.
German naval zeppelin L 20 after a forced landing off the coast of Norway, 1916.
It is often thought that the airships of the 1930s could land vertically, like a helicopter. But this could only be feasible in the complete absence of wind.
In real conditions, landing an airship requires that people on the ground pick up ropes dropped from different points of the airship and tie them to suitable ground objects, then the airship can be pulled to the ground.
The most convenient and safest method of landing (especially for large airships) is mooring to special masts. A rope was dropped from the top of the mooring mast and laid along the ground in the direction of the wind. The airship approached the mast from the leeward side, and a rope was also dropped from its bow. People on the ground tied these two ropes, and then the airship was winched to the mast - its nose was fixed in the docking socket.
Rigid airship ZR 1 "Shenandoah" on the mooring mast
Rigid airship ZR 3 "Los Angeles" (German airship LZ 126) on a cable berth on an aircraft carrier, 1928.
A moored airship can rotate freely around the mast, like a weather vane. The docking unit could move up and down along the mast - this made it possible to lower the airship closer to the ground for loading and unloading and boarding and disembarking passengers.
Mooring masts are the only suitable place to moor airships. After all, airships are huge, and a special hangar-garage for them will not only be colossal in size, but also very expensive! By the way, to bring a relatively small airship into the hangar in a strong wind, the effort of up to 200 people was required.
Attempts to create aircraft carriers began with the appearance of the first zeppelins, whose size suggested the idea that they could well be used for aircraft that at that time were small in size and had an insignificant flight range, limiting their use.
In 1930, experiments began on their creation, and even several flying aircraft carriers were put into operation.
Flying aircraft carrier USS Akron (ZRS-4)
When taking off from an aircraft carrier, the biplane was lowered down on a special crane from the open hatch of the airship, which was in full swing, after which it unhooked and flew on its own.
A fighter at the moment of landing on the aircraft-carrying airship USS Akron (ZRS-4)
When landing, the same actions occurred in reverse order: the biplane, having equalized its speed with the speed of the airship, clung to the hook of a special crane, after which it was pulled inside the hatch.
The creators of airships, neglecting basic safety measures, filled them with unsafe, but cheap hydrogen instead of inert, but expensive and inaccessible helium. In May 1937, a catastrophe occurred that shocked the whole world.
The Hindenburg had already moored to the mast in Lakehurst, when suddenly small flames appeared in the tail section. They exploded the hydrogen in the compartments, and the airship was engulfed in fire. 25 people died.
The crash of the Hindenburg
A newsreel of the disaster lasting 34 seconds - that is how much time passed from the moment the airship caught fire until it fell to the ground - was shown in different countries around the world.
Active operation of airships was stopped. The era of giant airships, which lasted more than 30 years, is over.
