To Fly On The Fly

XXII

In the early 20th Century going aloft meant taking your life in your hands. Airships had a slight head start (1900) over airplanes (1903). Early airplanes tended to crash. Even the Wright brothers' Flyer crashed later in the day of its historic first flight on December 17, 1903 (12 seconds of level flight covering a distance of 120 feet at an altitude of 20 feet). Graf von Zeppelin's LZ-1 of 1900 had done much better than that, and unlike Orville Wright he did not find the controls "difficult." 

Most early plane crashes were spectacular, and many a promising young pilot lost his (or more rarely, her) young life when the wings would fall off a craft in straight and level flight for no apparent reason, or the engine would fall through the fuselage having been loosened from its mounts by vibration, or a strut or wire would give way robbing the pilot of control. Some people walked away from crashes by dint of low altitude, low speed and physical toughness, but not many. And aeroplanes (as they were called at the time) evolved slowly.

Louis Bleriot just managed the first airplane crossing of the English Channel in 1909, a feat that had been achieved by an airship in 1785. Bleriot made his solo 26 mile flight the same year that DELAG was founded as an airship passenger airline. 

By 1914, a plane that could lift a pilot and two passengers was considered an amazing machine. At the same time, DELAG's Zeppelins were offering up to 30 passengers service that mimicked --- if it could not yet match --- the best of Atlantic steamships. And no one had ever died in an airship crash. Anyone looking at aviation in 1914 would have surmised that the future belonged to the airship. But airships evolved too fast for their own good.

Airships (unlike many types of planes) never crashed because of any inherent defect in their design. But crash they did, and with depressing regularity --- and with passengers aboard. Of DELAG's fleet of airships alone, the airline lost Deutschland (LZ-7) to engine trouble in 1910, Deutschland II (LZ-8) to a gust of wind that caused it crash into its own hangar in 1911, and Schwaben (LZ-10) its first inter-city craft to a fiery unmanned ground accident in 1912. It was just pure luck that no one was even slightly injured in these crashes and that the hydrogen filled ships did not explode. And despite the problems, people liked the airships and kept flying in them.

Airship crashes have been, when investigated, found to be due almost exclusively to pilot error. In the instance of Deutschland II, the craft was lifting off in raw weather. Especially in high winds, pilots often misjudged ground clearance and flight pitch, not considering that just a fraction of a degree off level in the attitude of the nose might mean that the ship's tail, hundreds of feet behind them was also a hundred feet below --- or above --- them.

In the era of airships, meteorology was an infant science, and the effect of barometric pressure on lifting capacity was only dimly understood. Factors such as wind shear and microbursts were known of, but had no names. Lightning was deadly to a hydrogen airship, as was the simple static electricity that could build up on the craft just from passing through the air. There are modern technologies now that aid airship pilots in flight, technologies that just didn't exist in the Age of Airships. For all their great size, airships were tender and unforgiving craft.

And there were no mock-ups or simulators to teach airship pilots how to fly the big craft. Pilots literally learned to fly on the fly and by the seat of their pants in the control room, while passengers in the rear of the gondola were listening to string quartets and sipping cocktails. 

DELAG put much effort into making is airships comfortable but much less effort into developing inventive ways of training their flight crews. It is a testament to how well DELAG's pilots did learn to fly that the ships were as safe as they were.