If the Hindenberg had never blown up would we still have zeppelin travel today? What do you think the chances are of zeppelin travel being revived? With helium instead of hydrogen of course.
No; for the same reason we no longer have flying boats in commercial service. Aviation advanced to give us faster means of getting across the oceans.
About zero. There is some interest amongst aviation enthusiasts. (I’d like to fly around the works in a zeppelin.) But it’s just doesn’t do what other vehicles do better. That is, a ship carried more cargo, and a jet goes faster, and an ocean liner gets people places in luxury slowly. Heck, there are lots of blimps; and I don’t know how to even get a ride in one.
Rigid airship travel was, for all practical purposes, already dead by 1937, due to a string of disasters (in addition to the Hindenberg, the R-101, the Macon, the Akron, and the Shenandoah were all lost in-flight.)
The Hindenberg would have been converted to war usage at the start of WWII (as the Graf Zeppelin II was in reality), and that would have been the end of that.
There may be a small role for “boutique” airship travel. But when you look at costs, speeds and carrying capacity, they are hopelessly outclassed by other transportation methods.
There was an excellent thread that explored this stuff in GQ less than a month ago; search GQ for “airship” if someone doesn’t provide a link.
You would probably need to have some sort of extinction level event happen , where the logistics infrastructure for heavier than air travel, was gone. As well, hydrogen would most likely still be used, regardless of the hindenburg experience, if the ELE were to happen, importation of helium might not be even available.
Declan
The Hindenberg didn’t really burn due to hydrogen, it was the flammable paint used on the outside of the airship.
http://www.hydrogennow.org/Facts/Safety-1.htm
Granted, this is a site promoting hydrogen usage, but this has been reported many times by many journals, this was just a nice source of the info.
You can take a Zepelin NT ride http://www.zeppelinflug.de/pages/E/haupt.htm
Oh, and Chaulk’s still uses flying boats commercially: http://www.chalksoceanairways.com/
Brian