Of Iron Men and Fabric Ships

XXXV

The reality was that sailing an airship in the 1920s was not all that much different from sailing a tall ship. Certainly the crew of the SV Garthsnaid handling sail while dangling from the rigging over the South Atlantic in 1920 would have related intimately to the crew of the Graf Zeppelin working on a tear in the envelope over the North Atlantic in 1928.

The men who sailed airships had to be iron men even if their ships were not wooden. Being a crewman on an airship --- even an officer --- meant that a man had to work exposed to the elements at risk of being blown off the outer skin of the ship by a random gust of wind. Repairing a tear in the envelope meant going outside of the safer confines of the gondolas or the hull in any kind of weather --- rain, sleet, snow, ice, sunshine, darkness, cold, heat, zephyrs or near-hurricane wind conditions --- to hitch oneself to the ship with leather harnesses and canvas bosun's chairs in order to do what Nineteenth Century sailmakers had done. Hanging off the freeboards or from the underside of the craft, men had to work fast and efficiently if they wanted to save their ship and their own lives. It was not a job for the faint of heart.

Men repairing a tear in the skin of the Graf Zeppelin ,circa 1928. The humps along the centerline were the hydrogen gas valves. A bolt holding the shackle for the crew's safety lines can be clearly seen. Note the man sitting on the port side; he is assisting a fellow crew member hanging nearly out of sight over the curve of the hull. The darker area below the horizon line is the Atlantic Ocean. Tears in the envelope were fairly common, especially after hard weather, and crewmen routinely inspected and repaired the hull during a passage. It was dizzying work. DELAG never lost a passenger to a flight accident, and its crew safety record was nearly flawless as well

Even the engineers routinely found themselves outside of the hull. Since most airships were filled with hydrogen, safety dictated that there be a distance between the combustion engines that drove the ship and the combustible gasbags that kept it afloat. Thus, the motormen were stationed in small gondolas that hung from the body of the ship. To access the gondolas they climbed down ladders (across the open sky) in any kinds of conditions at any time of day. Even the very advanced Hindenburg (LZ-129) required that the engineers cross an open-air catwalk. Only on the American helium airships Akron and Macon were the engines within the hull.

An engine gondola of the Hindenburg. The engineers had to cross the open catwalk at high altitudes in all kinds of conditions in order to run the engines

The earliest airships had spark-advance radios not much more evolved (if at all) than the wireless set aboard the Titanic. To keep the hydrogen gasbags safe from the radio spark, the control gondola was hung below the hull at some distance. In early airships this meant that the skipper and the officers had to climb down out of the hull (again across open sky) down into a hatch in the roof of the bridge gondola. In a flight emergency these acrobatics increased the risk to the ship immeasurably as the Captain tried to reach his bridge with the ship pitching, yawing and rolling. In more advanced airships the skipper usually slept in cramped quarters near the bridge gondola.

The bridge gondola (control car) of the U.S.S. Shenandoah was very small. Built along the lines of a German War Zeppelin of 1917, this circa 1923 vessel had its bridge set at some distance from the hull (unnecessarily since she was a helium ship). To access the bridge, crewmen had to climb down the trunk (top) through a loft ladder (just visible) in the roof. In the War Zeppelins, the trunk was NOT enclosed --- men had to climb from the hull to the gondola down an open air ladder --- an insane exercise in bad weather or in combat conditions

All in all, it took an extraordinary kind of flying sailor to pilot an airship across its ocean of air.