Airship Voyages Made Easy

XXXVII

After the Graf Zeppelin's spectacularly successful Atlantic crossing, Dr. Eckener took the ship on a number of promotional cruises.

The Graf Zeppelin, circa 1928, hovering over the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin

Coming in for a scheduled landing in Berlin

The Graf Zeppelin makes an unmoored landing. The bottom of the gondola had a grab rail which ground crew grasped and held in order to keep the unmoored vessel from floating away. Most of the crowd, however, was made up of awed onlookers

Over Barcelona

Visiting Istanbul

Overflying Paris

Over Vienna

Crossing the Danube

She startled football fans at Wembley Stadium (and inspired the cover art for the novel Black Sunday), and then undertook a series of flights around the Mediterranean basin, visiting France, Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Mandatory Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

The Graf Zeppelin passes low over Wembley Stadium during the 1930 World Cup. Although the flyover was planned, the ship came in very low startling the crowd into a near panic and breaking up play on the field. Dr. Eckener later apologized, explaining that he had misjudged the lift capacity of the gas in the prevailing weather conditions, which were relatively hot and humid

In the early 1970s, a struggling author, Thomas Harris, wrote a novel about a Palestinian terrorist attack on the Super Bowl in which the Goodyear Blimp was used as a flying bomb. The book became a bestseller and then a movie with Robert Shaw. Harris went on to write Red Dragon, Silence of The Lambs, and Hannibal. The artwork for Black Sunday is extraordinarily reminiscent of the Graf Zeppelin's flyover of Wembley fifty years earlier

Passing the Tower of David in Jerusalem

It was during one of these cruises that the ship suffered her only major flight emergency. Five of her six Maybach engines quit as she navigated the tricky Rhone River Valley in France. Battling headwinds in the narrow valley and with no certainty that the sixth straining engine wouldn't quit turning her into a helpless balloon, Graf Zeppelin announced a Mayday, after which the French (no friends of the Germans) allowed her to make an emergency landing. It turned out that a faulty part had failed in all but the one engine, and that they all had to be replaced. It was weeks before she left France. 

Although the French Press played up the failure of the mighty German airship, Dr. Eckener again turned lemons into lemonade when he announced that Graf Zeppelin, with her new improved engines, would circle the globe --- and do it in just two weeks' flying time.

DZR, the successor company to DELAG, published this helpful brochure for first time air travelers. On the Graf Zeppelin voyages always seemed to live up to their promise