Secrets of the Dead: “Hindenburg’s Fatal Flaws” (WNET-TV, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched a recent Secrets of the Dead episode called “Hindenburg’s Fatal Flaws,” about the catastrophic crash of the German dirigible Hindenburg in Lakehurt, New Jersey in 1937 that basically killed off the airship as a form of transportation. Some of the elements of the story are familiar – notably the decision of the designers at the Zeppelin company, makers of the Hindenburg, to fill it with highly explosive and flammable hydrogen gas as the lifting element instead of the more stable (but also heavier and more expensive) helium – while others aren’t. A dirigible – or, to use its alternate name, an airship – is basically a super-sized balloon, made of gigantic gas bags enclosed in an aluminum frame covered with fabric. It’s one of those preposterous creations that is enormous but also delicate: every step of its construction had to be done just perfectly for the craft to function reliably. One of the key elements is the fabric covering, which in the case of the Hindenburg was applied while the company’s expert on that part of its construction was off in the United States doing another job. The lexx experienced people in charge of covering the Hindenburg never got the fabric taut enough over the frame to work properly, and as a result the fabric rippled when the craft flew.

To get the fabric to stay put it was covered with two coats of something called “airplane dope,” which was used in early planes to waterproof their fabric-covered wings. I remember another documentary on the Hindenburg Charles and I watched together years ago which said part of the problem was the composition of the “airplane dope,” which essentially reproduced the chemical formula for gunpowder and thereby made the Hindenburg even riskier – if ignited (as it was in the fatal crash by a lightning flash) it would combust itself and also set off anything flammable contained inside it, like hydrogen. Part of the problem with the Hindenburg is that, while it was begun in 1931 (two years before the Nazi takeover, when its namesake, German Field Marshal Paul von Hundenburg, was still president of Germany), it was brought to completion under the Nazis. The Nazis in general, and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in particular, saw the Hindenburg – the largest aircraft built to that time (in fact it may still be the largest aircraft ever) – as an enormous propaganda tool.

They launched it in 1936 and did only minimal testing before putting it into commercial service – where it became a status symbol for the rich and famous, as the Titanic (another craft whose disastrous fate may have been sealed by the sheer size of the thing – one documentary I saw on the Titanic suggested that it drew so much water in its wake it literally pulled floating objects towards it, and instead of just crashing into an iceberg it may have pulled the iceberg towards itself, so a spur on the iceberg opened it like a can opener and sank it) had been before and the Concorde supersonic airliner and the SpaceX rocket have been since. Another problem was the landing site chosen in the U.S.: the Naval base at Lakehurst, New Jersey, just 12 miles off the Atlantic coast and a location frequently beset by storms and lightning. One of the interviewees on this show said that a landing site for dirigibles should be at least 100 miles inland so it isn’t buffeted by coastal winds. Between the rotten weather at the landing site, the rush to get the Hindenburg docked and turned around for its next eastward flight (at which a lot of dignitaries were scheduled to fly so they could attend the coronation of Britain’s new king, George VI) and the ritten weather conditions – you landed an airship by lowering ropes that were grabbed by members of a ground crew who literally had to pull the huge craft down, and the storm the Hindenburg sailed into made these ropes wet and allowed them to conduct electricity from the lightning – as well as the wear on the air bags and the crude patches that had been applied to keep them from leaking and allowing hydrogen to collect between the gas bags and the fabric cover – the stage was set for the much-filmed disaster everyone remembers.

One aspect the show didn’t mention is that plenty of other dirigibles had crashed: the U.S. Navy had built three of them – the Shenandoah, Akron and Macon – and all three of them crashed, too. They didn’t explode because the Navy was using helium instead of hydrogen as the lifting gas, but they were still destroyed – suggesting that even if the mistakes made with the Hindenburg were avoided, lighter-than-air travel in crafts this size was simply not practical. The explosive crash of the Hindenburg, and the newsreels around the world that showed the craft’s fiery death, killed the whole idea of passenger dirigibles in ways other travel disasters hadn’t (they kept building and sailing ocean liners after the Titanic), and there’s a certain sadness at the loss of these behemoths even though the whole idea of flying across the Atlantic and carrying tourists in what amounted to a gigantic balloon seems preposterous. But then so does the idea (at least to me; I’ve flown so rarely I’ve never lost my child-like sense of wonder about the whole concept of airplanes) that a machine weighing hundred of times the weight of air can nonetheless lift off and move through it.