I’m wondering if there’s a specific term other than “cabin.” The Wikipedia article doesn’t seem to have one listed, but I’m rereading it more closely even now.
Cabin sounds about right.
Gondola?
Are the compartments separate?
For piloting:
Bridge?
Cockpit?
Flightdeck?
For passengers:
can’t think of anything besides cabin.
Fuselage? But I think the encompasses everything but the wings.
More from howstuffworks.com.
Thanks, but gondola was all I needed. Tis for a line of dialogue.
Cool. I really just provided the second link as further confirmation of the term - a Wikipedia disambiguation page seemed to lack authority.
As I think on it, I would have thought the same thing anyway (and I checked the second link first), so your providing it was reasonable and appreciated. (In fact i checked my Concise Oxford, which was at my elbow.)
Paul Parkhead nailed it. Despite the fact that the bridge, crew and passenger compartment was firmly attached to the underside of an airship, it retained the name “gondola” by analogy with the gondolas slung beneath balloons, both free and dirigible. Despite its apparent smallness compared to the large Zeppelin body, it was actually a fairly roomy space, with tiny staterooms for passengers, etc.
Non-rigid (blimp) and semi-rigid airships were essentially large gasbags with engines and gondola slung beneath (the difference is that the semirigids had a structural keel of metal helping shape the gasbag and providing an anchor for the engines and gondola. The rigid airships such as the Zeppelins, though, were a cigar-shaped framework of girders looking for all the world like an Art Deco skyscraper lying on its side, around which a thin silver-painted skin provided wind protection, and within which were slung large ‘cells’ which were inflated with the lifting gas (helium in the U.S., hydrogen elsewhere). Catwalks between the cells gave crew access to the entire frame of the ship. In the Hindenburg and its never-operational sister ship the Graf Zeppelin II, a small part of the interior above the gondola was fitted out with floor, walls, and ceiling and provided additional crew and passenger space.
Depending on the story, it might be best described as the “oubliette.”