Having recently learned a bit more than I intended to about blimps and zepplins (the husband is an enthusiast - even called up Goodyear once and had a nice, long chat with some of the blimp guys there), I think the storm problem can’t be blamed entirely on the airships themselves.
First of all - when was the last time you heard abou the Goodyear blimp crashing? They’ve been flying those things for decades without loss of life or major injury. Second, the Graf Zepplin did more than one round-the-world trip successfully and never crashed - it was disassembled for the aluminium during WWII and converted into fighter planes. (The Graf used just hydrogen for lift, too - and never caught fire. It CAN be done, just wasn’t done properly often enough)
The problem was, to my mind, more a problem with weather knowledge - both a lack of understanding of how much weather airships could and could not withstand, and much less accurate weather predictions. In the 1920’s and 30’s folks would press ahead into bad weather “to get the job done” or because they were ordered to do so - these days, with a much better understanding of weather hazards, we’ll just stop flying until conditions improve. If things are getting real nasty - say, a hurricaine is on the way - aircraft may be moved out of the danger zone ahead of time, when the weather is still clear. They didn’t have observation satellites and computer models back then, frequently they didn’t know a bad storm was just over the horizon and on its way. This is in keeping with most of the big airship accidents happening in bad weather.
There was also a dreadful lack of comprehension that these behomoths had weight limits. One particular English effort barely staggered off the ground from the start and the overloading was definitely a factor in the resulting crash. If ya’ll are interested I could dig up more details. To be honest, many folks these days display a lack of understanding that aircraft have weight limits - the Aylia (sp?) crash in the Carribean being just one tragic example.
Fact is, a lot of the early aircraft designs were terrible by our standards. That’s why we don’t build airplanes like they used to back in 1910. They’re dangerous. My goodness, seat belts weren’t even required until sometime in the 1920’s! There were instances of people falling out of these things! Some of the re-enactors building replicas for the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ flight have been discovering that authentic replicas also carry authentic risks. No one has been killed during this replica frenzy, but some bones have been broken and at least one guy had to be pulled out of a treetop. These are not amateurs, mind you - these are guys with thousands of flight hours in many different aircraft, with extensive experience in building airplanes, who are crashing these things. No wonder the death rate in the early years was so high.
The big thing about the Wrights, to my mind, is not their flight of 1903 (although that is significant) but that they stuck with it and improved their design. They were the first ones to get a fully controllable machine up in the air and flying for a 1/2 hour or hour at a time, and able to do it again and again and again. They showed flight could be repeatable and reliable, and THAT is what launched the aviation industry.