Latest news with #GrafZeppelin
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Yahoo
Ask Chris: Where did people arrive in L.A. before LAX was built?
When the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce published their map to the L.A. airport shortly before it opened in 1928, there were more than 50 locations to choose from. The Jurassic versions of LGB and VNY were shown, and thrill seekers could board a flying machine in the barley and lima bean fields where LAX is today. Terminal One was built a year later and is still in use by maintenance crews. Artifacts from this era are on view at the Flight Path Museum, not far from Terminal One. That spot, called Mines Field, is also where 61 passengers arrived to great fanfare in 1929 aboard the giant dirigible Graf Zeppelin, which had traveled from Tokyo on a 'round-the-world' expedition. A few years later, blimp tourism exploded with the Hindenburg. It wasn't until 1946 that American Airlines, United and others set up passenger terminals at LAX. Passenger ships from around the world disembarked at General Steamship in San Pedro and, later, Matson in Wilmington, but those slips are gone and those old berths are unrecognizable after decades of freight embiggening. Relics from the 1950s Matson terminal — which was once compared to a Palm Springs resort — remain, including statuary, urns and 'angel' light posts. Route 66 brought interstate traffic to Southern California in 1926, but a century ago, rail was probably the most common way to arrive in L.A. Before Union Station opened in 1939, you could greet visitors at Southern Pacific's Central Station at 5th & Central or Santa Fe's La Grande Station at 2nd & Santa Fe. Stars travelling in from the East liked to disembark at Pasadena's restored Santa Fe Station (which until recently housed the lovely restaurants La Grande Orange and Luggage Room Pizzeria) to avoid the paparazzi. An iconic palm tree salvaged from an earlier SP location downtown, Arcade Depot, was relocated and still sways above the Coliseum. You can also still visit La Grande as a teensy miniature at the Velaslavasay Panorama. All aboard!
News18
06-05-2025
- General
- News18
Why Did Hindenburg Burst Into Flames? Revisiting Airship Disaster That Consumed 36 Lives
Last Updated: On May 3, 1937, the Hindenburg took off from Frankfurt, Germany, for a journey to US as it was heading to the Navy Air Base in Lakehurst, New Jersey. In 1937, people had gathered at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey to witness the grand arrival of the Hindenburg which was Germany's largest airship ever built. But within seconds of approaching, the grand spectacle turned into a horrifying tragedy. The Hindenburg caught fire mid-air and crashed to the ground. Within seconds, the watchers on ground who were cheering were left in shock. The tragedy killed 36 people and left dozens injured. The shocking visuals of the burning airship were captured live by newsreel cameras and reporters at the scene. The moment also brought the era of airships to an end. What Led To The Creation Of The Hindenburg? The concept of airships began in the 1800s. In 1852, a French engineer named Henri Giffard built the first working airship. It used hydrogen gas for lift and had a small steam engine that powered a propeller. It flew at about six miles per hour. Later, German engineers made improvements by adding a metal frame inside the airship. This made the structure stronger but they still had to use hydrogen as it was very light but also highly flammable. These rigid airships could carry many passengers and travel long distances. One of the most famous airships was the Graf Zeppelin which flew around the world in 1929. In the 1930s, it also started the first regular air service across the Atlantic. Its success inspired the building of a larger and more advanced airship which came to be known as the Hindenburg. The Hindenburg made its first flight on May 20, 1936. It flew from Europe to US in just over 78 hours. That year, it completed 17 such flights. What Happened With The Hindenburg? On May 3, 1937, the Hindenburg took off from Frankfurt, Germany, for a journey to US. It was heading to the Navy Air Base in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The massive airship was 804 feet long and carried 36 passengers and 61 crew members. As it arrived at Lakehurst on May 6, the Hindenburg suddenly caught fire while preparing to land. The flames spread quickly after what was likely a spark ignited the hydrogen inside. The airship fell 200 feet to the ground and was destroyed. The entire accident happened in just about 30 seconds. The disaster killed 36 people – 13 passengers, 22 crew members and one person from the ground team. Some died from the fire while others lost their lives after jumping from the airship in a desperate attempt to escape. Many of the survivors were seriously injured. Why Is The Hindenburg Remembered? The Hindenburg was built by the Zeppelin Company and designed to be a luxury airship. It flew with the help of 16 large cotton cells filled with hydrogen. This gas is lighter than air which helped the ship float but it is also very flammable. Hydrogen had been used in airships since 1900 and many believed the Hindenburg was made as safe as possible. Before the Hindenburg, other airships had also crashed. In 1929, Britain's R101 crashed and killed 48 people. A year before that, 52 people died in a French airship called Dixmude. Both ships had used hydrogen. But the worst airship crash was the USS Akron in 1933 which used helium instead of hydrogen. It crashed and killed 73 out of 76 people on board. The Hindenburg stands out because of how the disaster was recorded as reporters and news cameras were present to cover the event. They ended up capturing dramatic photos and video of the explosion and crash. A radio announcer named Herb Morrison was also at the scene and emotionally declared, 'Oh, the humanity!" His voice was broadcast across US as part of the country's first coast-to-coast radio news report. After the disaster, people lost trust in airships and no rigid airships remained in use after World War II. What Else Happened On May 6 In History 1856 – Sigmund Freud, who later became known for developing psychoanalysis, was born. 1889 – People got their first chance to visit the Eiffel Tower as it opened during the Paris World's Fair. 1998 – Apple showed its first iMac to the world which helped bring the company back on track. 2002 – Elon Musk set up SpaceX with the goal of changing how space travel works. top videos View all 2004 – The last episode of the popular show Friends was broadcast and watched by millions. 2023 – King Charles III and Queen Camilla were crowned in Britain's first coronation in nearly 70 years. Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: May 06, 2025, 13:05 IST
BBC News
15-02-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Pathfinder 1: The airship that could usher in a new age
Pathfinder 1, bankrolled by a Google billionaire, is an attempt to revive the airship. A century after terrifying disasters, is a safe-enough bet? On 24 October 2024, a brief post was shared on the social media network LinkedIn. In it Google co-founder Sergey Brin's airship company LTA Research finally announced Pathfinder 1's first if brief untethered flight at Nasa's Moffett Field in California, part of the space agency's Ames Research Center. "This morning, Pathfinder 1 reached another milestone: untethered outdoor flight. This successful test marks another important step in our journey, and we are excited to build on this achievement through our rigorous testing program." Airships are hard to hide. Despite the secrecy, one YouTuber filmed it from the road and uploaded it to the video-sharing site. "Pathfinder 1 is a pretty amazing vehicle," says Alan Shrimpton, editor of the Airship Journal. "It is the first fully rigid airship, certainly of that size, for a very long time, and there was a great expectation that it would fly shortly after it began its outdoor testing programme. "But Alan Weston [founder and former CEO of LTA Research] always said the biggest fault with rigid airships was that people in the past rushed their development and they were not going to make that same mistake. They were going to check it and check it again – and they did." The understated tone in LTA's post belies the historic achievements of Brin's company so far. This was the first flight of the first airship built by the Google cofounder's company, the first time a classic rigid airship of this size had flown since the 1930s, and the first of a new generation of airships. The last giant rigid airship Graf Zeppelin II flew for the final time on 20 August 1939, 12 days before World War Two started, and was scrapped the following year. Rigid airships have a complex metal framework that supports a huge envelope filled with enough hydrogen or helium to lift a sizeable number of passengers, or cargo such as disaster relief, for days at a time. Hydrogen-filled airships are also symbols of the Golden Age of the airship. The era between the world wars when the promoters of the technology beguiled the public with promises of scheduled commercial passenger services between destinations like Europe and North America, and North America and the Pacific, and in some cases delivered on these promises. The Graf Zeppelin flew "the first regularly scheduled, nonstop, intercontinental airline service in the history of the world" between Germany and South America, and was far faster than ocean liners that plied the route. But the crash of the airship Hindenburg in 1937 – which killed 36 people including one person on the ground – showed the drawbacks of the flammable gas used as buoyancy. The airship faded into obscurity; just as conventional aircraft design surged ahead. Eighty-six years later in November 2023, Pathfinder 1 emerged for the first time from the historic Hangar Two at Moffett Field to begin its outdoor flight-testing programme. But the largest aircraft in the world stayed stubbornly tethered to the ground to the frustration of many aviation enthusiasts. Its expected first flight just didn't happen. But thanks to the Google co-founder's deep pockets, LTA Research appears to have the freedom to wait-to-get-it-right that others have not always had. They have used this freedom to, for example, find better materials than lightweight aluminum alloys like duralumin to construct the giant frame of a rigid airship from, and cotton-composite materials and even cow guts to make the envelope out of, and gain a much better understanding of aerodynamics involved in flying very large airships. And it seems like they have been able to cautiously flight test their creation, without the over confidence and pressure from investors that have been a problem in the past. "People said that they could not do it and that it was impossible," says Janne Hietala, CEO of Kelluu Airships, whose 10 autonomous drones, each of which can be transported in a 12m (40ft) sea container, are currently "the world's largest" fleet of airships. "This is a brilliant, very bold attempt to do the hard work, the engineering that is required, to mass-manufacture big airships. I don't think they will build hundreds of those because of the difficulties in mass-manufacturing airships of that size, but it's still possible." Pathfinder 1 is not a historical replica. It is a proof-of-concept airship designed to see if a rigid design can be updated with new materials. In particular, LTA Research wants to solve the thorny problem of how to mass produce aircraft of this size. It wants to build production models in Goodyear Airdock in Akron, Iowa where the great US rigid airships of the 1930s were built. "I've been down to Moffett Field to see Pathfinder 1 twice, and it is really an amazing thing to see in person," says John Geoghegan, author of When Giants Ruled the Sky. "It's very impressive to be able to see the learning they have made from the past even from the outside." The fact that the giant rigid airship does not have tail fins in the traditional cross shape, but at an angle, is an example of such learning, because airships float up and down on a mooring mast and the bottom tail fin used to get damaged. Likewise, the airship's engines are no longer inline but staggered along its length to reduce the wind, drag and vibration that they used to cause. Like many other new designs, it uses helium as a lifting gas to prevent the infernos that doomed the Golden Age of the airship. Helium is less flammable than hydrogen, but there is a trade-off for this increased safety. It generates less lift than hydrogen, and it is in short supply. This makes it very expensive to fill the envelope of an airship with. "There's a lot of baggage around airships, and a lot of people who have pre-set ideas about them, and so these guys are being incredibly careful and extremely cautious about the information they release," Geoghegan adds. "They do not want to do anything to contribute any more negative publicity. For the public always remember the airship disasters and not the successful flights." Pathfinder 1's first untethered flight also has significance for the wider lighter-than-air community, which has for a long time had little more than glossy CGI graphics of large airships to show investors. That it has occurred at a time when high-profile airship companies such as Flying Whales "appear to be struggling to… build a flagship production facility" is a good morale boost for the sector, says Shrimpton. "Investors tell so many people going out to try to get funding for their lighter-than-air projects that yes, it's interesting, I can see the benefits of it, but show me one that is flying today… now they can." "It is fantastic that LTA Research is making so much progress using modern technology to solve these problems," says Diana Little, co-founder of airship startup Anumá Aerospace. "It reminds people about the capabilities of lighter-than-air flight. "Aviation is an industry desperately looking for a decarbonisation solution and airships are part of that solution," Little adds. The first flight of Pathfinder 1 has been at least 12 years in the making. Brin's interest in airships seems to have begun in 2012 around the same time as a modern semi-rigid Zeppelin NT (New Technology) airship began tourist flights from Moffett Field. The following year he founded LTA Research Ltd and in 2017 his airship company began to lease space at Moffett Field and research began at the Akron Airdock. There they built a 12-engine, 50ft-long (15m) electric "baby airship" to test their technology. No one had built aircraft like these giant rigid airships for decades. So, it took time for the engineers to learn how to do this, particularly with a focus on safety and not repeating the mistakes of the past. In the 1930s, the materials used to create the such rigid airship's framework and envelope which were simply not strong enough to deal with the stresses of flight. The use of computerised controls, new and much stronger lightweight materials like carbon fibre and titanium to construct the complex skeleton of the rigid airship are just some of the ways the giant rigid airship has been brought into the 21st Century. So too are the use of flame-retardant synthetic materials for the envelope of the airship, sensors to monitor the helium and engines that can be rotated to provide vectored thrust. The knowledge and skills of the great engineers of the past had to be relearned by LTA – together with the latest research and technology – in order to design the airship and work out how to mass produce even larger craft in the future. Rather than expect their engineers to work at the top of unsteady 85ft-high (26m) ladders to build these ships like they did in the 1930s, LTA have designed a massive cradle-like structure that allows the workers to stay on the ground while the giant ships are slowly rotated in front of them. To do this they needed to find the skilled workers who were willing to join a risky project that may one day make aviation history, and are continuing to seek them today. In 2017 work started at Moffett Field on LTA's smallest airship Pathfinder 1, and planning began in Akron on the Pathfinder 3, its successor which is planned to be one-third-larger. (There is no Pathfinder 2.) But a fully-fledged return of large airships is not yet a given. "I am crossing my fingers," says Shrimpton, "but if Pathfinder 1 suffered a failure in flight everybody would point to it and say, 'See once again, a large airship crashes – it is not safe,' which would provide an almost insurmountable hurdle for the whole passenger/cargo-carrying airship industry." The same applies to other airship companies, such as Flying Whales, whose airship has not even been built yet. "They need to get over that same hurdle and prove to the public that they have a vehicle that is safe, like LTA Research is doing." Geoghegan is more sanguine about it. "Interest in airships is cyclical," he says. "Every 10 or 15 years a company comes along that is working in the airship category and a couple more sprout up. Some get prototypes flying. But none of them ever pan out. "So, there is a lot of skittishness among the investor community about building these things. It is in part about the technology, is it robust enough to work. Then, second, what is the business application? Is there a market that exists that would financially support airships on this scale? More like this:• The giant hangar poised for an aviation revolution• The huge shed built for an Arctic airship• How airships could return to our crowded skies "We keep hearing the same things trotted out. One is for tourism. One is for disaster relief. One is that it will be a green, non-polluting alternative to conventional aircraft, and the fourth one is specialised cargo. "But I remain to be convinced that there's an economic case for these things." The engineering challenges that LTA faces certainly remain significant. "In the end, for LTA Research it is proof that their design worked, and a milestone for their staff, who worked tirelessly for three or four years to bring the design to fruition," says Shrimpton. But Pathfinder could have much wider implications if it successfully takes to the skies. "It is really important. It is something the whole airship industry needs – to be seen in the sky." --
