History UsefulNotes / TheHindenburg

The world knows what happened next. With the ''Hindenburg'' only a few feet from its mooring mast, it ignited. The gargantuan fireball was over ''a thousand feet high'', and the impact broke the skyscraper-sized airship's metal skeleton in half. The airship sank steeply, crumpling into the ground. Burning hydrogen rocketed up the axial catwalk and erupted from the bow as the rest of the airship was incinerated from within, the ship's fabric hull bearing the name ''Hindenburg'' melting away from the skeleton. As the Zeppelin sank to the ground, people streamed from the windows of the passenger decks. As panic set in on the ground, US Navy Chief Petty Officer Fred "Bull" Tobin[[note]] Chief Tobin was an experienced airship crewman who had survived the catastrophic crash of the US Navy zeppelin ''Shenendoah'' several years earlier[[/note]] shouted, ''"[[DareToBeBadass Navy men, STAND FAST!]] We have to get those people out of there!"'' and led the sailors into the inferno. Finally, the hydrogen gave out, and the white-hot frame collapsed on the still-burning wreckage as people continued to stumble and jump out and sailors under CPO Tobin rushed to pull people from the decks. [[IntrepidReporter The horrified Morrison kept right on talking through all of this]], describing exactly what was happening until he was overcome with smoke and emotion and had to step inside the hangar to recover himself. (He was back out again in less than two minutes, continued his narration and assisted and interviewed survivors.) In total, the disaster claimed the lives of 35 people aboard the ''Hindenburg'' and one American sailor on the ground, with 62 passengers surviving. Captain Pruss survived the disaster, having [[GoingDownWithTheShip remained on the bridge until the crash]] and managing to carry the radioman out with him, and then running back into the flames to assist other survivors until restrained by rescuers. The entire ordeal lasted thirty seconds. The whole crash was [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H47x9q5-C2k caught on film,]] if you wish to see it. However, Morrison's radio commentary was only dubbed in later, giving it the feeling of live TV coverage of the disaster.

On May 6, 1937, the ship was just about to complete its inaugural flight for the year, flying into Lakehurst Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Due to previous heavy weather conditions, the ship was already late, and Captain Max Pruss had kept in the air for a few additional hours longer than expected while waiting for a thunderstorm at Lakehurst to clear. At around 7 p.m., the ''Hindenburg'' came into Lakehurst and attempted an midair mooring in heavy winds. A crowd of enlisted US sailors assembled to pull the the big zep's handling lines. Newsreel cameras were rolling and veteran radio newscaster Herbert Morrison of WLS (a Chicago radio station) was making a test recording (on special phonograph disks) of what he thought was going to be a routine landing with subsequent passenger interviews.

The ''Hindenburg'' disaster and subsequent World War marked the end of passenger airship flights for decades. It was not the first airship disaster, or even had the greatest death toll in such a disaster, but the fact it was entirely captured on film terrified the public into ever setting foot on an airship again. Although large airships still saw military use until the 1960s, postwar airplane technology had advanced to the point that even the ocean liners that Zeppelins competed against were driven all but extinct. After the disaster, no more Zeppelins were built until the 1990s, when the Zeppelin Company went back into the airship business with their smaller "NT" semi-rigid tourism airships, which have replaced the traditional Goodyear blimps. More recently, they've collaborated with the American company LTA Research to create a modernized [[https://www.ltaresearch.com/ electric Zeppelin]] called the ''Pathfinder 1.'' Despite being less than half the size of the ''Hindenburg,'' it is still the current largest aircraft in the world.