I have never been in a blimp, zeppelin, airship, or whatever your favorite word is, so I don’t have any point of reference as to how smooth a ride they offer.
I’m sure technology has improved the ride somewhat since the Hindenberg blew up over New Jersey. But even then, people of means were taking rides across the Atlantic, so it must not have been known to bounce people around much… or create many airsick passengers.
Or did it?
This brings me to my questions. Does a zeppelin provide a smooth, lighter than air flight experience for its passengers, does it sway to and fro in a subtle, almost imperceptible movement that could drive people to suffer motion sickness (similar to a large cruise ship), or does it bounce around worse than an airplane when it hits turbulence? Or, is turbulence not really an issue because of the speed and altitude which the airship travels?
One final question… what was the average altitude that a zeppelin would maintain on a trans atlantic flight?
My great aunt came back from her study abroad in Germany on the Hindenburg. According to her it was nothing like flying in a plane or even sailing on an ocean liner. There was no sensation of movement at all; even during “take off”. She was looking out the windows in the starboard lounge when it launched and felt nothing. Basically it was like the airship was stationary and the ground was falling away. Another thing to consider is that Hugo Eckener and DELAG/DZR were very carefull (much more so than the USN) about what kind of conditions they flew in. She only had one small complaint about that flight. And it wasn’t what you think it was.
How smoothly the thing cruises has a lot to do with how smooth the air is. On a calm day it could be pretty smooth, with only a dull vibration from the engines.
OTOH, on a blustery windy day it’d be pretty rough. Unlike an airplane it isn’t punching through the air at any great speed. But it’s also ~ 1000 ft long, so subject to different winds at different speeds at different points on the hull. I’d expect something like the corkscrewing motion of a small ship, say an inter-island ferry. Faster more abrupt motion than a cruise ship, but not the choppy overgrown vibration feel of jetliner turbulence.
Of course with the thing’s slow speeds and low altitudes, it could easily get wrapped up in a typhoon or a thunderstorm & get torn apart. That part of the ride would probably be very exciting.
OTOH, as reported above, takeoff or landing would be a total non-event, unlike it’s climactic nature with a modern jet. For takeoff, they cast off all lines, shift some ballast and up they go. As long as the wind’s not gusty it’d be almost imperceptible.
My only experience with lighter-than-air flight is with hot air balloons, which are not zeppelins (obviously). However, on a calm day launch in a balloon is much as what is described for the Hindenburg - you don’t feel it. The vehicle you’re in is very, very stable feeling with no perception of motion most of the time. The balloon flight I was we had a very, very small perception of breeze or motion when transitioning between air masses going in different directions. In fact, only two of the six of us on board could even perceive it when it was pointed out (said two being pilots used to open-cockpit flight, it could be we were more sensitized to air movement than the average passenger). As zeppelins go up and down with the same basic technique it wouldn’t surprise me if the experience was similar, particularly if you were standing in an enclosed cabin where you would not be able to feel air moving by the ship.
Given its greater mass, an airship should be more stable still. It would take more energy to cause vibration or shift it around. Passengers almost uniformly described it as unbelievably calm and stable.
You don’t want to be in airship in bad weather, period. A lot of them have gone down in weather that an airplane can handle. Goodyear makes some effort to keep theirs away from storms, including physically moving them to a different location. The big passenger zeppelins of the early 20th Century went to some effort to keep theirs out of the way of storms.
Zeppelins would have stayed relatively low for passenger comfort, among other things. That era was before pressurized cabins, and the temperature drops off fairly rapidly as you gain altitude so a few thousand feet off the ground can be surprisingly chilly even in summer. In addition, the efficiency of the lifting gas decreases as altitude increases so there is no benefit to be gained by going to high altitude. The 200 meters mentioned already would be in line with adequate clearance over ground obstacles and there was really no reason to fly higher most of the time. Zeppelins could and did fly high enough at times that crews had problems with hypoxia, but there was no reason to subject paying passengers to that.
Broomstick’s post is in line with everything I read about LTA craft generally and Zeppelins in particular. “Normal” turbulence was not particularly an issue for the same reason that the Queen Mary II doesn’t feel waves like an open skiff or even a 20-foot yacht does. Significant storms, including in particular major up- and downdrafts, were a different story, but the commercial Zeppelin service avoided them.
For the record, a quick glossary of LTA terminology: dirigible – noun, originally a clipping from “dirigible [=navigable] balloon,” which might be of any of the three types, which share the fat-cigar shape but differ in structure. non-rigid, used either as adjective or noun, is a simple inflatable balloon/envelope. blimp is the common synonym; the supposed derivation from “type B limp” looks to be an urban legend. Payload and crew are carried in a gondola, attached to the underside of the envelope, generally toward the front. semi-rigid, likewise adjective or noun, is a ship composed of a rigid-framework beneath a non-rigid-style balloon/envelope. There are obvious structural advantages in terms of having engines and control surfaces, plus the gondola, attached to a rigid surface. The contemporary flights in California are made with a semi-rigid. rigid, normally only adjectival, describes a dirigible much larger but with the same general exterior shape. However, it is a thin fabric envelope over a framework of girders, within which are slung tough-skinned cells to be filled with your lifting gas of choice. Crew can walk between and beneath the cells for maintenance, and some ships, notably the Hindenberg, used a relatively small portion of the interior space for cabin and cargo area. airship, before the 1930s used almost exclusively for rigid dirigibles, is now used synonymously with dirigible. Zeppelin, with one exception, means an airship built by Luftschiffebau Zeppelin, of Friedrichshafen, Bavaria. The name derives from the firm’s founder and the inventor of the rigid airship, Ferdinand, Graf (Count) Zeppelin, an army officer who conceived of the idea while observing the Siege of Petersburg VA during the American Civil War from a hot air balloon. There were two other companies making airships in Germany prior to WWI, and “Zeppelin” was more like “Ford”, almost brand name rather than generic. The exception was that Goodyear Zeppelin Corp. of Akron OH, which constructed the three “homegrown” US Navy airships (all of which crashed), licensed, borrowed, or outright stole the name, and the US Navy’s rigid airships bore ZR-1 through ZR-5 numbers (for Zeppelin Rigid) in token of this.
Back in the 90’s I had the opportunity to catch a ride in Bud Air One, the Budweiser blimp. It’s much smaller than a Zeppelin, and the ride was a bit different from what is described higher up in the thread. The cabin was fairly small, and appointed like a small airplane. I don’t remember how many seats there were, maybe eight or ten. All facing forward on either side of a small aisle. I believe the engines were just standard airplane engines, and were mounted directly to the gondola, which made for a noisy cabin. The wind was calm on the ground, but moving at our (low) cruise altitude. The gondola gently swayed back and forth laterally. It was not unlike a large boat or small ship, except there was no up and down, just a slow, gentle side to side sway. The takeoff is the thing I remember the most. I was probably ten at the time, so I don’t remember too many details, but I’ll never forget how steeply that thing climbed. I remember seeing the ground crew quickly pulling a bunch of sandbags out of compartments that must have been under the floor of the gondola, and we slowly began floating. That wasn’t too far off from the experiences of Zeppelin passengers. But then all of a sudden the nose started coming up and the power came on. We kept pitching up and up, and eventually the pilot must have had the nose thirty degrees above the horizon. We slowly and steeply motored up into the sky. At the time, it didn’t seem remarkable because we were moving so slowly, but if I got the chance to do it again I think it would feel very unnatural after having flown airplanes for so many years. The whole flight felt like slow motion. Loud, slow motion.
She thought the aluminum piano sounded terrible. She wasn’t on the flight that crashed. She was also diaspointed that her none of the cabins had windows like she heard the Graf Zepplin did.
Here is a link to our family photo album that shows the Graf Zeppelin next to a Goodyear blimp in California, probably on its around-the-world trip in 1929. My great aunt sent this originally to my great grandmother (her mother-in-law), as is shown on the reverse of the photo. It gives a sense of the scale of that airship!
Would they take something like this? I don’t have any more information other than what is on the back of the photo and a family story. The photographer was probably my Great Uncle; he and his wife passed over 25 years ago.
I’m sure they would. Barring copyright and possible editorial issues (i.e. too many similar pictures of the same thing), Wikipedia takes whatever you give it.
It’d make a great addition for the article on LZ-127 Graf Zepplin to show scale.
Interestingly Goodyear is retiring it’s fleep of blimps and replacing them with semi-rigid zepplins.
Another site that would be glad to have these photos posted:
“By creating a free account on Shorpy you can share your own vintage photographs. Visitors to the site are particularly interested in images from the dawn of photography to the 1940s.”
Thank you all for the links and advice! I sent an email to Goodyear, and they identified the location as Mines Field, which was the precursor to LAX. I am going to talk to other family members some more about it, since these pictures are our “shared treasure”. If we decide to publish, I’ll start a thread in Cafe Society.
And it wasn’t what you think it was.
