UNHAPPY LANDINGS T
HE world’s longest aircraft, the Airlander 10 aeroplane/airship hybrid, was damaged during a recent test flight when it landed on its nose. According to Travelmole, the 92m-long craft hit the ground while landing at its base in Bedfordshire during an otherwise routine test flight. Apart from the accident, which damaged the cockpit, the flight had gone “really well”, said a source at Hybrid Air Vehicles, the developer.
The company plans to have 10 of the aircraft in service by 2021. The Airlander has been designed to carry passengers and freight and will be able to remain airborne for five days.
The vessel is a result of renewed interest in airships, which back in the 1920s and early ’30s were regarded as the future of long-distance air travel.
Germany led the way with its Zeppelins, named for German airship pioneer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. The first passenger-carrying Zeppelin entered service in 1910 with Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG, the world’s first commercial airline. By the time war broke out in 1914, the craft had safely carried 10 000 passengers.
During the war, Germany pressed its Zeppelins into service as reconnaissance aircraft and bombers. Bombing raids on Paris and London were more of a psychological than a material threat, and the sight of the huge airships cruising high above the capitals at night, dropping bombs, struck fear into people’s hearts.
After the war, both Germany and Britain pursued airship programmes. The Germans, naturally, had the edge and in August 1929 the Zeppelin company’s airship Graf Zeppelin took off from Lakehurst, New Jersey, and flew around the world, via Tokyo and Los Angeles, in 21 days.
Airship design peaked with the Hindenburg, a 260m-long giant built by the Zeppelin company and launched in March 1936. It carried up to 50 passengers in luxury accommodation that rivalled the best ocean liners of the day, and made regular flights across the Atlantic.
The future of airship travel seemed assured until the afternoon of May 6 1937 when the Hindenburg caught fire while docking in Lakehurst and plunged to the ground in a pillar of fire, killing 36 people.
As well as using helium instead of highly flammable hydrogen, modern airships bear little resemblance to the Zeppelins of the 1930s. Even so, it may take a sustained marketing campaign to get people to fly in them — something not helped by recent events in Bedfordshire.