All the humanity, these were the famous words that echoed around the globe as radio reporter, Herbert Morrison expressed his most shocking horror on witnessing the terrible scenes that New Jersey’s Lakehurst Naval Air Station on the 6th of May 1937.
This was the day that the Hindenburg airship burst into flames as it neared the landing field killing 13 passengers, 22 crews and one member of the grand crew including the director of flight operations Ernst Lehmann. Morrison’s recorded words were made in the altitude and usual footage of the catastrophe. The sound and vision that remained shocking today, 70 years after the event.
The LZ 129 Hindenburg is one of the largest aircraft ever built, the German build zeppelin that have been in service only a year before disaster strike. What many people don’t realize though is the pride to the Hindenburg tragedy Zeppelin airships that took in flying for over 30 years have an impressive safety record. The Graf went into flown over a million miles and circumnavigated the globe and in its first year of service, the Hindenburg had already covered around 200,000 miles.
Carried nearly 2800 passengers and made 17 round trips across the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody really knows what triggered the inferno but several theories of these. Many blame that the fact that the craft was built with the highly flammable hydrogen rather than helium due to a United States military battle and the less volatile guest. It was also the suggestion that the fire was the work of anti-Nazi saboteurs or as the former head of the Zeppelin Company Dr. Hugo Eckener that kept in the kept in its course mishandled the entire landing maneuver.
Was it a static spark, lighting or incendiary paint. What is certain is that the stunning and widely seen footage of the accident has sounded the death mark for the giant passenger carrying air ships after a golden age that it lasted for almost 40 years.
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