"No Ticket!"

LXIV

On October 12, 1936, the Hindenburg made its last North Atlantic Ferry run of the season. It was not the ship's last flight of the season; that ended on December 7, 1936, when she returned to the Frankfurt Aerodrome from Recife. 

Winter passages across the North Atlantic were considered high-risk ventures, and still are. The North Atlantic may be called "The Pond" and it may be crossed with regularity and impunity, but it is also the nastiest stretch of ocean on Earth, excepting the vast, deserted, and oft-times evil Southern Ocean which lies below 40 Degrees South and surrounds Antarctica. 

In the 1930s, the steamships plying the North Atlantic reduced the number of their runs in the winter months, and even today the biggest Container Ships can be tossed around like toys in the vicious waters of the wintry Western Ocean. 

After the December run home from Recife, the Hindenburg was hangared for three months. She needed scores of tweaks and some redesigning for the 1937 season, which began with two shakedown flights over Germany on March eleventh to knock the cobwebs loose. She made her first crossing of the (South) Atlantic on March 16th, this time to Rio de Janeiro. 

She also tested a new (for her) innovation, a biplane docking and hangaring system much like the one that had existed on the U.S.S. Akron and the U.S.S. Macon. The tests were successful, though she did not carry a plane on subsequent flights. However, the plans for Hindenburg's eventual successor the LZ-138, which were being drawn up at the time, allowed for two biplanes.

On May 3rd she was scheduled to fly to Lakehurst. DZR was anxiously looking forward to inaugurating its second North Atlantic season. But as the date drew closer, the airline realized it would not be flying with a full passenger roster. 

Only 36 passengers were booked to fly to Lakehurst, along with a crew of 61. The ship, which now had accommodations for 72 passengers after its mid-season 1936 refit, would be flying half-empty. It was, however, fully booked for the European return flight, which was scheduled to divert to Britain for the Coronation of King George VI on May 12th.

Part of the reason was that Nazified Germany was fast becoming an unpopular nation among international travelers troubled by the increasingly paranoid and restrictive national atmosphere. Another part was due to a decision of the German government itself, which had grounded Doctor Eckener. He was forbidden to leave Germany, and many of the North Atlantic "regulars" like Lady Grace Drummond-Hay and Kurt Wiegand who would have made the flight "just because," decided not to. Dr. Eckener had Captained every major flight of the Graf Zeppelin safely, and he had been aboard every 1936 flight of the Hindenburg. His absence felt like a bad omen to some.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade featured a segment aboard a biplane-carrying airship that most moviegoers just assumed was the Hindenburg. It was really the planned-for but never built LZ-138. In the segment, Indy (Harrison Ford) and his father Professor Henry Jones (Sean Connery) avoid the Gestapo after Indy tosses a German agent out of a Promenade Deck window ("No ticket!" he explains, causing a rush of passengers to wave papers in their hands). The two men escape the ship by hijacking its biplane. In an ensuing dogfight, Henry, unfamiliar with machine guns, damages his own aircraft: "Son, I tried. But they got us."