The History of Airships

The History of Airships

The history of airships has its beginnings in the eighteenth century with the first recorded flight of a non-rigid dirigible by Jean-Pierre Blanchard it 1784. The airship consisted of a balloon fitted with a hand powered propeller for propulsion. Attempts at adding propulsion to balloons continued into the nineteenth century with Henri Giffard who was the first person to make an engine powered flight. In 1852, he flew 27 kilometers in a steam powered airship. Twenty years later in 1872, Paul Haenlein flew an airship over Vienna that was powered by an internal combustion engine, the first time such an engine was used to power an aircraft.

In the 1890s Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin began experimenting with rigid airships. This led to the launch of the famous Zeppelins and the “Golden Age of Airships”.

During the first half of the twentieth century airships gained popularity for passenger transport and military uses such as tactical bombing, reconnaissance, surveillance, and communications. During World War I, Germany, France, Italy, and Britain all used airships for various military operations. The Norge, an Italian semi-rigid airship became the first confirmed aircraft to fly over the North Pole. The USS Shenandoah was the first American built rigid airship. It was operated by the United States Navy and first flew in 1923. The Shenandoah was the first airship to fly across North America and was the first dirigible to use helium as a lifting gas.

LZ 129 Hindenburg was a large German commercial passenger-carrying rigid airship, the lead ship of the Hindenburg class, the longest class of flying machine and the largest airship by envelope volume. The airship flew from March 1936 until destroyed by fire 14 months later on May 6, 1937, at the end of the first North American transatlantic journey of its second season of service. In 1937, moments before landing, the Hindenburg, a hydrogen filled rigid airship burst into flames, killing 36 people onboard and becoming one of the most well-known and widely remembered airship disasters of all time.

The public’s confidence in airships was shattered by this disaster. This along with the onset of World War II brought the use of airships for passenger transport to a halt. Airships also saw deployment during the Second World War and were predominantly used by the United States Navy for patrol and convoy escorts for ships to detect enemy U-boats. In the years since the war, airships have seen a decline in popularity and usage. In present day, airships are typically used for advertising, sightseeing, surveillance, and research. A timeline of airship development starting in the 1850s with Henri Giffard’s first engine powered dirigible and ending in the 1960s.