#zeppelins

Chris Becker (b. 1983), “City of Another Time”

Today's post is about something very interesting: Numbers! Well, specific numbers. Specific numbers relating to a specific thing. Okay, you got me, it's an aircraft post again.

I always knew the zeppelins, especially the ones in the Hindenburg class, were an impressive feat of engineering that hasn't really been replicated today (no the new 'zeppelins' don't count they're not rigid airships). And I guess the "why" is pretty obvious for a lot of reasons. Still, I wanted to go into the numbers on exactly what made the zeppelins such an unusual endeavor.

We'll start with the obvious one: The Hindenburg was massive. Well, big. Not lots of mass. It remains the largest single aircraft ever built. I knew that bit. But by how large of a margin? Way more than I'd though. It's 800 feet long! That's nearly three times second place, the Antonov An-225 Mriya (rest in peace). The Hindenburg even starts to rival some things that can't fly, being about half the length of the largest tanker ships today.

But let's talk about the "mass" part of the massive. It's a lighter-than-air ship using lifting gas to fly rather than aerodynamics. At maximum payload, it only weighed about 400,000 pounds. A lot, but the Mriya's max takeoff weight was (yes using past tense there makes me sad) 1.4 million pounds.

Let's focus on a specific one, the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, ten years older than the Hindenburg (1927), a little smaller. So, all of that space, must have lots of room for cargo and passengers, right? Not really. Even 200,000 pounds of useful lift only goes so far. So the next number to be considered here is 20. Because for the Graf Zeppelin, 20 is how many passengers could be berthed. A transatlantic ticket cost about $12,000 in today's money. Hindenburg carried more (40-72), but nowhere near a modern plane.

(Not the inside of the Graf Zeppelin, but rather an American airship before gas cells are installed)

Even more impressive are the flying records the airships set. Graf Zeppelin happily set the record for longest non-stop flight, 6,168 miles, on its first intercontinental trip. It also was able to circumnavigate the globe, setting a speed record for doing that. It carried passengers in the process, at a cool $47,000 (today) per ticket to go back where to you started.