Help!: Zeppelins, Dirigibles, Airships, etc.

[Espee]

Why yes, a Goodyear blimp does play a part in the movie "Help!"

 

[TM]

I recently ran the Robert Wise film “The Hindenburg” and found it was as bad a film now as it was when I saw it in original release. The film has no energy, there is no suspense and the acting is uniformly, shall we say, uninspired. The characters were all either dull or unpleasant, eliciting no sympathy. The single exception was Roy Thinnes, playing an undercover Gestapo agent. His was an interesting take on this. Not an over-the-top Nazi, not as the “banality of evil”, more the “nonchalance of evil.” All the other characters were awful and the viewer, or at least this viewer, couldn’t wait for the end.

However, the production design is simply magnificent! Apparently they were able to obtain drawings, blueprints and photographs from the Zeppelin archives. And they used these to lovingly recreate, with obsessive attention to detail, everything about the structure and interiors of the airship. If you read airship books, the pictures are almost always in black and white. In the film, it’s Technicolor!

So just turn off the sound and watch the airship go by.

There was an earlier question in this thread about the possible threat of lightning to an airship filled with helium. I found an answer to this in the book “The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg” by Harold G. Dick with Douglas H. Robinson. Dick was in the unusual position of being the engineer-representative of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber company to the Zeppelin company. They had a joint venture and Dick’s job was to observe everything and report to Goodyear. He flew on many of the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg flights.

Dick addresses the lightning issue in his book: “There were occasions when we believed the ship had been struck by lightning, but strange as it may seem to a layman, there was no particular danger (unless hydrogen was being valved), since the bonded metallic structure of the airship acted as a Faraday Cage”.

Airships generally cruised at an altitude of less than 1,000 feet. If they rise to higher altitudes, hydrogen must be released to bring the airship back down. Each gas bag had a manual and automatic gas valve to release the hydrogen. When approaching a storm, the airship would try to fly at a low altitude. Had they flown at a higher altitude, hydrogen might be released. A lightning bold could ignite the released hydrogen floating above the airship and the ensuing fireball could ignite the cloth skin of the airship, leading potentially to the ignition of the hydrogen gas bags, leading to immediate destruction.

None of this would be a concern with helium, which is inflammable.

Cheers!

Tony

 

[Story]

LAKEHURST, N.J. — History buffs will gather this week near the New Jersey coast to commemorate a major airship disaster.

No, not that one.

Newsreel footage and radio announcer Herbert Morrison’s plaintive cry, “Oh, the humanity!” made the 1937 explosion of the Hindenburg at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station probably the best-known crash of an airship.

But just four years earlier, a Navy airship seemingly jinxed from the start and later celebrated in song crashed only about 40 miles away, claiming more than twice as many lives.

The USS Akron, a 785-foot dirigible, was in its third year of flight when a violent storm sent it plunging tail-first into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after midnight on April 4, 1933.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/04/01/uss-akron-worst-airship-crash.html

http://radio.foxnews.com/2013/04/04/uss-akron-disaster-remembered-80-years-later-video/#.UV2XF8q-WcE

 

[rjb1]

People reading this might want to find a copy of the movie, "Dirigible" (1931) directed by Frank Capra. The basic plot is about competition between Navy aircraft and dirigible pilots for a South Polar expedition. Some great shots of dirigibles and Lakehurst, NJ. Also includes closeups of a hookup of a biplane with a dirigible.
(Also has Fay Wray, pre-"King-Kong". The secondary plot is about competition between Navy aircraft and dirigible pilots for Fay Wray.)

 

[Dixon Cannon]

Time Life “Epic of Flight” book series. The Giant Airships

-dixon cannon

 

[Story]

Hidenburg footage
http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/08/26/the-hindenburg-explodes-1937/

 

[filfoster]

The (online) history of our own US Navy airships is not one of happy landings.

 

[Stanley Doble]

In regard to the problem of flying in storms. Slide Rule touches on this point in its account of the R100's voyage to Canada. They got thorough weather reports and chose their route to take advantage of tail winds and avoid head winds and storms. But on their approach to Montreal they were caught in a thunderstorm and the ship was tossed about a bit. Some damage to the outer cover occurred. The riggers patched up the damage as soon as the storm blew over. Permanent repairs were done at the mooring mast in Montreal.