What would the world look like if the Hindenburg hadn't crashed?

Would lighter than air flight have been investigated more? If so, what would the military and social implications have been?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Lighter than air flight had been investigated more. Using Helium instead of Hydrogen. And all we had to show for it was a load of Goodyear blimps.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Perhaps I should be more specific. The zeppelin was a blimp with a rigid structure. Some say it could have turned into a "cruise liner" in the air. Some say there would have been military applications. The helium vs. hydrogen bit was almost negligible, hydrogen just being easier to produce in sufficient quantities.

If this type of craft had been in use for the past near-century, what would it's applications have been over time, and how big would the changes to our history have been?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

The Hindenburg was only filled with Hydrogen after the first world war because of trade embargo's on the sale of helium to the Germans from the US. The Germans improvised using the more unstable gas for this reason alone, if there hadn't of been an embargo the Hindenburg might not of happened.

The Hindenburg as a disaster however did aid the understanding of aviation in regards to ballooning and there are still conspiracy theories in regards to what triggered the explosion

One rather interesting snippet is the US's was testing a new creation, RADAR prior to the arrival of a General display at a US airbase about 80miles(circa.. memories can sometimes give way to guesses) or so away

 

we are running very low of helium so perhaps one day when it runs out hydrogen will have to be used.

 

I don't think that dirigibles would have proven at all useful in WWII, which was right acround the corner.

 

Helium is twice as heavy and more than ten times as expensive as hydrogen, in addition to being a non-renewable and sparsely distributed resource with many other competing uses.

The economics of dirigibles would be much different with hydrogen lift, and the Hindenburg crash mainly prevented that.

 

Let's also keep in mind that the coating on the Hindenberg's skin (substances which we now know by such names as "solid rocket fuel" and "thermite") had as much to do with the disaster as the hydrogen. There's a Mythbusters episode about this somewhere...

 

The economics other than the cost of the lift gas would virtually unchanged. I know it's counterintuitive, but the lift characteristics of the two gases are almost identical. At sea level, they both give about 1kg force (9.8nt) per m^3. The small difference is because lift is generated according to the weight of the displaced air minus the weight of the lifting gas it is displaced by. Since air is so much denser than either H or He, the lift differs by only a percent or two iirc.

 

the world would not have been any different.

 

Hydrogen may have been easier to produce but it was also extremely flammable and subject to pressure sensitive detonation.

 

The lift has very little to do with the economic disadvantages of helium.

Helium is much heavier, which affects construction costs as well as various performance costs (velocity changes, turning and mooring, balance and altitude compensations, etc).

Helium is expensively mined, non-renewable, stored and shipped from its sparse sources, its limited supply competed for by other uses. Hydrogen gas is available almost anywhere, manufacturable at a reasonable price for all its uses in any reasonable quantity.

And so forth.

 

The actual difference between Helium and Hydrogen is not a factor in anything.

They both are so much lighter than air they are practicably interchangeable.

Hydrogen only provides a 8% lift increase over Helium, at the cost of being highly flamable and explosive.

 

What really kills lighter than air vehicles like dirigibles is the low density of the atmosphere, which means that for a significant payload weight the volume of the craft is way too big. This makes it far too vulnerable to wind, storms and the like for such a fragile craft.

 

When the first commercial aircraft that could take you from New York to London in less than 12 hours, it was the death knell of LTA aircraft- regardless of the Hindenberg blowing up or not.

Air cruise ships (that blow up) vs. cruise ships (that can make people wet)... I'll stick to sea level.

 

Actually they would have been excellent as anti submarine platforms, long flight duration, time over convoys, a useful pay load, and a good over head command and control for directing DD, DE, and Corvets in attacks against submerged U-Boats.

 

Iirc, the US did try that before and into early ww2. Most ended up tastefully draped over the landscape/ocean surface. Just too fragile. They'd run into a thunderstorm or squall or some turbulence and break up, then crash.

 

I can certainly see the appeal of that, but didn't the navy basically already have more escort carriers than it knew what to do with?

 

No, it wasn't until after 1943 that CVE's became more numerous, the Navy flew 130 Airships diring the war, and no ship was ever lost under the protection of LTA's.

Just over 250 feet in length, the K-ship was well equipped with communications gear and instruments for "blind" and night flying. Each airship had an ASG-type radar with a 90-mile detection radius, Loran long-range navigations systems, and underwater search equipment, such as sonobuoys and MAD (magnetic anomalyMagnetic Anomaly may refer to:
Kursk Magnetic Anomaly
Tycho Magnetic Anomaly

..... Click the link for more information. detection) gear.

The K-type was the first Navy airship with an internally suspended control car, which was 40 feet long and carried the crew, power source, armaments, and most of the equipment.

The blimp's arsenal usually consisted of four depth charges, two on the control car's external bomb racks and two in the bomb bay, and a .50-caliber aircraft machine gun in the forward turret. Some blimps were equipped with automatic rifles that could be fired from removable windows in the aft of the control car.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/LTA and WWII: role of Navy airships often forgotten-a087423966

 

Not only does hydrogen have about 8% more lifting power than helium at a fraction of the cost for the lifting gas, but it weighs half as much - so the weight of a large dirigible filled with hydrogen is tens of thousands of pounds less than one filled with helium.

That has large effects on the structural requirements, power requirements, and aerodynamic properties of these large and fast moving objects (100 k/h is reasonable).

Example calculation:

Density of hydrogen 90 grams per cubic meter, helium 180.

Vessel gas volume 100,000 meters cubed (half the size of the Hindenburg).

Weight advantage of hydrogen lifting gas: 9 million grams, or about 20,000lbs.

That's a lot of extra weight that needs bracing and handling (out at the end of long leverages, some of it), accelerating and decelerating, etc.