by jodrellblank | 2025-08-08 16:36:50+00:00
I'm particularly salty about the Hindenburg and don't feel as strongly about Chernobyl, Fukushima, Challenger, so if you're referring to those, that's different. The Hindenburg didn't use Hydrogen for cost reasons, it was designed to use more expensive Helium and the US government refused to export Helium to Nazi controlled Germany, so they redesigned it for Hydrogen. I'm not saying that it wasn't representative of air travel at the time, I'm saying air travel at the time was unsafe and airships were well known to be involved in many crashes, and the Hindenburg was not particularly less safe, it's just that aeroplanes were much smaller and carried fewer people and the accidents were less spectacular so they somehow got a pass and aeroplanes were . I'm saying air travel became safer and so would Zeppelin travel have become, by similar means - more careful processes, designs improved on learnings from previous problems, etc.

Look at the state of the world today, AirBus have a Hydrogen powered commercial aircraft[1]. Toyota have Hydrogen powered cars on the streets. People upload safety videos to YouTube of Hydrogen cars turning into four-meter flamethrowers as if that's reassuring[3]. There are many[2] Hydrogen refuelling gas stations in cities in California where ordinary people can plug high pressure Hydrogen hoses into the side of their car and refuel it from a high pressure Hydrogen tank on a street corner. That's not going to be safer when it's a 15 year old car, a spaced-out owner, and a skeezy gas station which has been looking the other way on maintenance for a decade, where people regularly hear gunshots and do burnouts and crash into things. Analysts are talking about the "Hydrogen Economy" and a tripling of demand for Green Hydrogen in the next two decades. But lifting something with Hydrogen? Something the Graf Zeppelin LZ-127 demonstrated could be done safely with 1920s technology? No! That's too dangerous!

Number of cars on the USA roads when Hindenburg burnt? Around 25 million. Now? 285 million, killing 40,000 people every year. A Hindenburg death toll two or three times a day, every day, on average. A 9/11 every couple of months. Nobody is as concerned as they are about airships because there isn't a massive fireball and a reporter saying "oh the humanity". 36 people died 80 years ago in an early air vehicle and it's stop everything, this cannot be allowed to continue! The comparisons are daft in so many ways. Say airships are too slow to be profitable, say they're too big and difficult to maneouvre against the wind. But don't say they were believed to be perfectly safe and turned out to be too dangerous and put that as a considered reasonable position to hold.

Some of the sabotage accusations suggested it was a gunshot, but you know why that's not so plausible? Because you can fire machine guns into Hydrogen blimps and they don't blow up! "LZ-39, though hit several times [by fighter aeroplane gunfire], proceeded to her base despite one or more leaking cells, a few killed in the crew, and a propeller shot off. She was repaired in less than a week. Although damaged, her hydrogen was not set on fire and the “airtight subdivision” provided by the gas cells insured her flotation for the required period. The same was true of the machine gun. Until an explosive ammunition was put into service no airplane attacks on airships with gunfire had been successful."[4]. How many people who say Hydrogen airships are too dangerous realise they can ever take machine gun fire into their gas bags and not burn and keep flying?

[1] https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/energy-transition/hydro...

[2] https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen-locations#/find/neare...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA8dNFiVaF0

[4] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1936/september/vu...