National Geographic: Hindenburg Page #5

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thousands of passengers

more than a million miles-in

perfect safety.

Was the Hindenburg brought down

by an act of sabotage?

As a symbol of the Nazi regime,

it may have been a tempting target

for opponents of Hitler.

Some have even suggested that

Hitler may have ordered

the airship's destruction himself,

perhaps in retaliation for

Hugo Eckener's anti-Nazi statements.

But no solid evidence was ever found

to support either of these notions.

Just four days after the crash,

the Commerce Department convened

a hearing at Lakehurst,

to examine the evidence.

Hugo Eckener headed

the German delegation.

In the end,

the Commission concluded that

the crash was an unfortunate accident,

caused by a discharge of

static electricity,

igniting a leak from

one of the airship's gas cells,

and touching off

an explosive hydrogen fire.

But decades later, a new theory would

emerge to challenge these findings.

Addison Bain is a retired engineer,

the former head of

Hydrogen Programs for NASA.

His expertise led him to

question prevailing ideas

about the Hindenburg disaster.

Well, with my experience

with hydrogen over the years,

starting in about 1960,

and designing systems and writing

safety manuals and that type of thing.

And I'd keep hearing about

the Hindenburg,

what about the Hindenburg,

the hydrogen exploded.

Well, it didn't.

To Addison Bain's trained eye,

the evidence was there all along,

in the photographs of the disaster:

The enormous fireball

that consumed the airship

could not have been produced by

burning hydrogen.

It was very apparent that

it was a very brilliant fire.

Again, that set my suspicions

into motion

because hydrogen generally burns with

an invisible flame.

Perhaps something else had fueled

the Hindenburg fire.

Why did this fire burn

so hot and so fast?

And fire investigators go off and look

for so-called accelerants or chemicals

and that kind of thing

that may have contributed to this.

And that's why I led off into

the chemistry of the airship design,

particularly the outer coating.

To find out what might

have fed the flames,

Bain went to Germany and visited the

Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen.

There, in the archives, among files

of documents and blueprints,

he found the construction diagrams for

another airship-and an important clue.

When I arrived and started going

through drawings on the Hindenburg,

I also found drawings on the LZ130,

the sister ship of the Hindenburg-

the Hindenburg, was LZ129.

But the LZ130 had flown

after the Hindenburg

and it was exactly the same size.

I came across one particular drawing

that outlined the fabric covering

of the hull.

Now following down through the notes

on the left hand side of this drawing,

I come across notes

on the doping process.

They started off with

a coat of iron oxide,

very similar to the Hindenburg

doping process,

but then the next steps were coatings

of powdered aluminum bronze,

not just plain aluminum powder.

I thought, "Ah-ha,

this is interesting."

To Addison Bain,

it indicated that

the airship's designers had serious

questions about the doping compound

used on the outer covering.

They knew a number of problems.

They did a number of modifications

to their design,

all because of

the Hindenburg accident.

But hydrogen had been blamed

for the disaster,

so why did Zeppelin company engineers

focus instead on the fabric-

struggling to make it more

fire-resistant,

and less likely to build up

static electricity?

Did they know more than they let on?

To find out what was really

responsible for the fire,

Addison Bain would head into

the laboratory.

He had managed to secure

some rare artifacts:

actual shreds of

the Hindenburg's skin.

Placing a sample

in an infrared spectrograph,

Bain could analyze the doping

compound on its surface.

And when I discovered that the doping

process that was used on airships,

in general, uses a cellulose

nitrate type compound,

which was basically gunpowder,

and then used a combination of powdered

aluminum in the dopant process.

And I said, "Well, you know,

powdered aluminum is the fuel

used on the space shuttle."

So, here we have rocket fuel,

we've got gunpowder.

And I said to myself,

"Well, there's gotta be more to this.

They must have introduced

some other chemicals

to reduce the flammability

characteristics."

With a scanning electron microscope,

Bain could inspect the skin

at the molecular level.

He found nothing that would have

retarded the Hindenburg's flammability.

But he did manage to learn exactly

what the fabric was composed of

and recreate it.

With this new sample,

he could find out what would happen

if a flame or a spark made contact

with the fabric.

What I'm gonna do is burn a piece of

the lab sample that I prepared earlier.

First thing you'll notice,

it doesn't self-extinguish,

and it starts moving quite rapidly.

Notice the colorization of it-

typical carbon fire.

And another feature

that's very interesting is

the effect of the aluminum

against the iron oxide forms

little balls of thermite-

very highly reactive combination.

Those thermite balls get up to

Very simply, I believe that

the cause of the Hindenburg fire

was static electricity

that was built up on the envelope.

It found a path towards the frame,

across the panels,

and ignited the very,

very sensitive aluminum powder.

That, in combination with

the iron oxide and other chemicals,

was just a rapid chemical fire.

If Addison Bain is right,

then in spite of the official report,

the fire that consumed the Hindenburg

wasn't just an explosion of hydrogen.

It was actually fueled by the

flammable skin of the airship itself.

But even if hydrogen wasn't entirely

to blame,

the Hindenburg disaster sounded the

death knell for passenger airships.

With the outbreak of war,

Germany's last remaining airships

were reduced to scrap.

As for Hugo Eckener,

his glory days were over, too.

One of the world's most celebrated

figures would quietly fade into history.

Today, a subsidiary of the same

company that built the Hindenburg

is once again creating an airship.

In a hangar at Friedrichshafen,

the Zeppelin NT is taking shape.

That shape may be familiar,

but the technology is brand new.

Scott Dannekar is testing

this high-tech dirigible.

The Hindenburg is like an albatross

that has been thrown around our neck

and we've been wearing it

for the last 62 years.

We have to overcome the stigma of the

disaster and the failures of the past.

We have to prove

what an airship is capable of

and we have to prove its success.

And once we do that,

then I think we're well on our way

to restoring airships

to the prominence that

they used to have years ago.

This is a very different

kind of airship:

It features electronic controls

and computerized steering.

Its semirigid design sets it

apart from the familiar blimps

we see at sporting events,

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