Some were constructed by a rival firm, Luftschiffbau Schutte-Lanz G.m.b.H., which employed a framework of laminated plywood instead of the aluminum alloy used in Zeppelins. The vast amount of literature devoted to German airships can easily, and has, led to the belief that these were the dominant LTA craft of the Great War. This type was also used, although in far fewer numbers, by the U.S. Navy and the French and Italian armies and navies. The German army and navy also had a handful. The demise is usually blamed on the Hindenburg disaster 6 although that had been preceded by the loss of a number of American, British, French and Italian rigids.
All airships flying today are non-rigid types, popularly known as blimps.
12 at the Capel air station and then mimicked aloud the sound It had made. Modern airships serve a number of utilitarian functions, but they remain relative oddities in the sky and are generally known only as flying billboards and for flashing advertising messages and transmitting television images of sporting events. 7 Space precludes a list of sources, but I will be glad to supply a bibliography to anyone interested. The first of the French airships was powered by a steam engine, the next two by human muscle and the fourth, and most successful, by an electric motor. The airship, however, like the airplane, did not become a truly viable proposition until the advent of the internal combustion engine.