Vintage Dirigible and Zeppelin Photos

[stephendare]

Feel Free to add any photos you come across!

[BridgeTroll]

  Ya gotta love the Russians...

[Jason]

Now that is what I'd call BIG thinking!

Just imagine the military application for a flying carcraft carrier.

[Ocklawaha]

Absolutely fantastic stuff Stephendare! The Russian model is very "A typical" of most everything planned and built today. The Hindenburg, Graf Zeppelin, Akron, Macon, Los Angeles, Shenandoah, R101, Italia, etc... we're all more inside then outside the skin of the ship. Except for the control car and engineering pods where the big diesel engines we're located, everything else was up inside the body of the ship.

Jason, Imagine if the military implications if they had built the aircraft carriers? They DID! I'll post some photos, if Stephen doesn't beat me to it. (got to eat dinner first). There are photos of plane launches and recovery from a Zeppelin trapeze under the ship with a BIG airplane elevator. These are the USS Akron and Macon.

To the nay Sayer's, also consider these beauty's were killed before the experiments were finished. Moreover they died to early to see the effects of modern avionics, instrument flight, plastics and super light or strong fabrics. The reality of these new age inventions has brought the Zeppelin idea back, if you still don't believe it, check out: Boeing Aircraft, Cargo Lifter, or Zeppelin Aircraft. There is even a whole new class of Blimps (non rigid frame) dirigibles (a steerable powered ship) with FLIR and police department accessory's. Reason? The friendly helicopter can fly at 100 mph, use night vision and flood lights, chase the bad guy and hover over a crime scene for 40 minutes. A Blimp can use night vision and flood lights, chase the bad guy and hover over a crime scene for 4 WEEKS until the bad guy is starved out.

OCKLAWAHA

[stjr]

French dirigible entering its hangar on the Western Front
Is this dirty?

Do women have a love affair with zeppelins?  This picture appears to be subliminally suggestive! 

[stjr]

Stephen, just noticed your little note in the corner of the above picture.  Do "great minds" think alike? 

[stjr]

Short history of the zeppelin: 

Count Zeppelin's airship made its first flight over Lake Constance (or Bodensee) in southern Germany on July 2, 1900.
Courtesy Library of Congress


1899: Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin receives a U.S. patent for his rigid airship design. His name will soon become synonymous with this type of aircraft.

Zeppelin, who received a German patent nearly four years earlier, can more accurately be said to have perfected, rather than invented, the cylindrical-shaped craft. His final designs were based on ideas originally conceived by David Schwartz, a Croatian aviation pioneer employed by the German army.

Upon Schwartz's premature death, Ferdinand von Zeppelin, whose interest in maneuverable balloons went back to his days as a German military observer during the American Civil War, bought the rights to Schwartz's designs from his widow and established a commercial company.

After several false starts, including a couple of near-disastrous demonstrations, Zeppelin's rigid airship was reliable enough to attract interest from the army.

Structural rigidity, i.e., a metal airframe, is what distinguishes a zeppelin from a blimp. Zeppelin airframes were made of a lightweight alloy with a fabric skin stretched over the framework. The lifting gas that provided the buoyancy, either helium or hydrogen, was contained in multiple gas cells.

Rudders and engine-driven propellers moved zeppelins through the air, much as they propel a ship through the seas, with the fastest of them traveling at speeds of up to 90 mph.

The metal framework also allowed zeppelins to be built much larger than a gas-filled blimp. Zeppelin's prototype, LZ1, was 420 feet long. The Hindenburg, with a length of 804 feet, remains the largest aircraft ever to have flown.

Zeppelins were originally used for mail delivery and commercial aviation, which resulted in the founding of the world's first airline, DELAG, in 1909.

With the coming of World War I, the zeppelin was pressed into military service, seeing action most famously as the world's first bomber. Zeppelin raids over England were not particularly effective, but they foreshadowed the mass aerial bombardments of the next big European war.

Other nations, notably the United States and Great Britain, built zeppelins, or dirigibles, but the rigid airship is most closely associated with Germany, where, following World War I, it enjoyed a period of great commercial success as a trans-Atlantic airliner.

The spectacular explosion of the Hindenburg in 1937 spelled the end of an era, but up until then German airships had flown the Atlantic currents accident-free for a number of years.

The Nazis, too, helped kill off the zeppelin. Even before the end of World War I, fixed-wing aircraft had rendered the zeppelin useless for aerial warfare, making it irrelevant as a new conflict approached. Under direct orders from Hermann Goering, the last zeppelins had been scrapped from the war effort by 1940.

During World War II, the German navy had plans to honor Zeppelin's memory by naming an aircraft carrier for him, but, owing to the shifting fortunes of war, the Graf Zeppelin was never completed.

(Source: Various)

From: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/03/dayintech_0314

[stjr]

Another rendering of the "whale" with an explanation:

French design dynamo Jean-Marie Massaud has created a Manned Cloud. A cruise airship with a hotel for 40 passengers and 15 staff, Massaud worked with the Office National d’Etudes et de Recherche Aérospatiale in this proposal. The design is based on the way whales swim and hence has some resemblance to a very large white whale. The pure concept involves travel that is so quiet that the surrounding world does not realize that the Manned Cloud has passed by.

From: http://www.lostateminor.com/2008/06/25/zeppelin-return/

[stjr]

Graf Zeppelin landing on water during polar flight

In July, 1931, Graf Zeppelin carried a team of scientists from Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Sweden on an exploration of the Arctic, making meteorological observations, measuring variations in the earth’s magnetic field in the latitudes near the North Pole, and making a photographic survey of unmapped regions using a panoramic camera that automatically took several pictures per minute.  (See route of flight.)  The size, payload, and stability of the zeppelin allowed heavy scientific instruments to be carried and used with an accuracy that would not have been possible with the airplanes of the day.

The polar journey, like other zeppelin flights, was largely financed by stamp collectors; Graf Zeppelin carried approximately 50,000 letters sent by philatelists, and made a water-landing to exchange mail with the Soviet icebreaker Malygin, which itself carried a large quantity of mail sent by stamp collectors.

After the three-day Arctic flight, which included a landing in Leningrad, Graf Zeppelin returned to Berlin to a hero’s welcome at Tempelhof airfield, where the ship was met by celebrities including famed polar explorer Admiral Richard Byrd.


Soviet airmail stamp showing Graf Zeppelin and icebreaker Malygin

[stjr]

The zeppelin visits Cairo, Egypt in 1931. Good for a sense of scale:

[stjr]

This one is for Ock.  A Rail Zeppelin!  Now that's a swift looking commuter train.

On June 21, 1931, Franz Kruckenberg's Schienenzeppelin (Rail Zeppelin) set a railway speed record that would stand for 20 years! Traveling on a track between Hamburg and Berlin, the prototype high-speed railcar sped along at 230 km per hour for approximately 20 km.

The Rail Zeppelin was never put into production, but it attracted attention wherever it went. A BMW airplane engine was used to power a four-blade wooden propeller that pushed the light-weight railcar through the air. The construction of the body was similar to the then-popular Zeppelin airships and the interior was spartan; this train was not luxurious.

The failure of the Rail Zeppelin has been attributed to everything from the dangers of using an open propeller in crowded railway stations to competition between Kruckenberg's Flugbahngesellschaft company and the Deutsche Reichsbahn's separate efforts to build a "Fliegende Zuege". The Schienenzeppelin was, however, an important part of the evolution of high speed passenger rail transport and continues to attract the attention of railroad fans and hobbyists.

From: http://www.modellbahn.com/kruckenberg.html

[stjr]

The airship USS Shenandoah was the first American built rigid airship.  Although built in the United States, Shenandoah was based on the design of the German L-49, a World War I high altitude bomber which had been forced down intact in France in October, 1917 and carefully studied.

ZR-1 under construction
The L-49 was one of the “height climbers” designed by the Germans late in World War I, when improvements in Allied fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft artillery made it necessary for zeppelins to climb to great altitudes to avoid being shot down.  For the zepeplins to rise to greater heights on a fixed volume of lifting gas, however, the weight and strength of their structures were dramatically reduced.  This decrease in strength was accepted as a wartime necessity, since a structurally weaker zeppelin flying above the reach of enemy aircraft and artillery was safer than a stronger zeppelin that could be easily attacked.  The copying of this design for an American airship, however, may later have had tragic consequences.

Construction of ZR-1 took place during 1922 and 1923; parts were fabricated at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia, and the ship was assembled at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey.  ZR-1 was 680.25 feet long, with a diameter of 79.7 feet, and could carry up to 2,115,174 cubic feet of lifting gas in 20 gas cells.  As originally built the ship carried six Packard 6-cylinder engines â€" five mounted in individual power cars attached to the hull, and one mounted at the rear of the control gondola â€" but the sixth engine was removed in 1924.

ZR-1 under construction
Like all previous zeppelins, ZR-1 had been designed on the assumption that the ship would be operated with hydrogen, but the fiery crash into the Humber River of the hydrogen inflated British R-38 (which was scheduled to become the American Navy’s ZR-2), convinced the Navy to operate the ship with helium, despite the high cost and very limited supply of the gas.

The First Flights of USS Shenandoah
ZR-1 made its first flight on September 4, 1923.  It was the first ascent of a helium inflated rigid airship in history.

ZR-1 made a series of test and demonstration flights in September and early October, 1923 â€" including an appearance at the National Air Races in St. Louis and flights over New York and Washington â€" and on October 10, 1923, the ship was christened USS Shenandoah (an American Indian term meaning “daughter of the stars”) and officially accepted as a commissioned vessel of the United States Navy.

Shenandoah’s first flights were on-the-job training for the American Navy, which had no previous experience operating a rigid airship of its own.


ZR-1 Shenandoah moored to USS Patoka at sea

From: http://www.airships.net/us-navy-rigid-airships/uss-shenandoah  

[Seraphs]

Arent these babies beautiful?

Yes sir, these babies are indeed beautiful!  The white whale is incredible.  However, the super, super colossal airship port blows me away.  Can you imagine something like that existing? 

[stjr]

Jason, Imagine if the military implications if they had built the aircraft carriers? They DID! I'll post some photos, if Stephen doesn't beat me to it. (got to eat dinner first). There are photos of plane launches and recovery from a Zeppelin trapeze under the ship with a BIG airplane elevator. These are the USS Akron and Macon.

Ock, enjoy your dinner.  Here you go, from http://www.airships.net/us-navy-rigid-airships/uss-akron-macon.  A lot more on Zeppelin history at http://www.airships.net/:

N2Y-1 training plane beneath trapeze and T-shaped opening of Akron's hangar deck:


F9C-2 Sparrowhawk seen though hangar deck opening at bottom of hull:


F9C-2 hooked on trapeze (left) and stowed on hangar deck (right):

The United States Navy airships U.S.S. Akron (ZRS-4) and U.S.S. Macon (ZRS-5) were designed for long-range scouting in support of fleet operations. Often referred to as flying aircraft carriers, each ship carried F9C-2 Curtiss Sparrowhawk biplanes which could be launched and recovered in flight, greatly extending the range over which the Akron and Macon could scout the open ocean for enemy vessels.

Development of the Akron and Macon
The Akron and Macon grew out of the Five Year Plan proposed by the U. S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, which had been approved by the United States Congress in 1926, and which authorized the construction of two large rigid airships.

The Navy contest to design and build the two new ships was won by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation, a joint venture and patent sharing arrangement between the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin and the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Corporation which had been created in 1923.  (There was no serious competition for the contract, and it was clear to everyone involved in the process that Goodyear-Zeppelin was the only firm with the ability to design and construct these ships for the Navy.)  Goodyear-Zeppelin and the United States Navy signed a contract for the construction of two large rigid airships on October 16, 1928.

USS Akron:


USS Macon:

[stjr]

Here is another shot:


F9C Sparrowhawk approaches retractable trapeze assembly

From: http://bluejacket.com/usn_avi_lta.html