Airships and aircraft would both have to wait until the early years of the 20th century when sufficiently powerful internal combustion engines would be developed. One of the pioneers of this field was WilhelmMaybach, who happened to be based in the same area of Germany as one Count von Zeppelin.
Zeppelin had been obsessed with the idea of powered, rigid airships for years. After being forced out of a three-decade military career due to a political spat, he was free to devote himself to his passion, which he also saw as a way to restore his honour.
It turned out he had exactly the right mixture to make it work. Connections, obsession, timing, proximity to Maybach for engines and the world’s greatest chemical industry for hydrogen, and most of all lunatic optimism. Even so, it was a near thing. Zeppelin’s early struggles to get his idea off the ground mirror those of modern hardware success stories. He put everything he had into the project, eventually mortgaging his wife’s estate to pay for construction costs. He struggled to win over institutions but persevered anyway. He almost failed after technical problems destroyed his first two airships, but his third finally worked in 1906. This unlocked enough public support and government funding to keep scaling up.
[...]
The German government poured huge amounts of money into Zeppelin construction during the war, producing dozens of ships. It was the largest fleet of rigids ever built. But by the later years of the conflict, Britain and France had fighter aircraft with incendiary ammunition which could easily chase down and set fire to a Zeppelin (a death sentence for the entire crew). More sophisticated anti-aircraft defences were built in cities, with networks of searchlights and high-velocity guns. Many Zeppelins were lost almost as soon as they were sent into the field and a morbid atmosphere developed amongst the crews, most of whom would be killed pointlessly during the course of the war. A typical example was L-19, whose first and only mission destroyed a British pub and several farm animals; during the return journey its engines failed and it crashed at sea, killing the entire crew.
[...]
The pattern throughout the first few decades of the 20th century was for countries to become interested in airship development, build a handful of ships that the Germans considered inferior pieces of junk, destroy some in terrible crashes, see how expensive the whole enterprise was, and give up. The cost wasn’t just about the shipbuilding. Constructing an airship hangar was a vast expense, a landing site had a ground crew of dozens to hundreds of men, and ships valved thousands of cubic feet of hydrogen into the air on every voyage for buoyancy control.
A good example of this pattern is Britain. Large airships were seen as a way to unify the far-flung British Empire, and two parallel programs were spun up in the 1920s to build prototypes: one government and one private. The novelist Nevil Shute (best known today for On the Beach) and Barnes Wallis (later to develop the “dambuster” bouncing bomb during World War II) both worked in senior roles on the private program. The “capitalist” ship, R100, was more conservative, while the “socialist” R101 pushed boundaries with innovative structural designs and extensive use of prefabrication, as well as a more refined aerodynamic shape. However, both were significantly delayed and did not fly until 1929. In 1930, R101 crashed on its first long-distance flight to India, coming down over France and killing virtually the entire design team as well as a thicket of important officials. The death toll of 48 was a dozen higher than the Hindenburg disaster. British involvement in airship development ended overnight; R100 was grounded and scrapped in 1931. One aspect of this that was repeated in other contexts was that all the leading airship advocates in Britain were killed in R101’s crash, leaving the movement rudderless.
[...]
Another question is safety. In my view, this is a mixed picture. Airships were remarkably safe, given that they were well-built ships operated as civilian vessels by experienced crews. Just like other kinds of air travel it took time and experience to develop safe practice for handling airships. Most nations never had enough Zeppelins to learn these lessons before their programs were wound down: their first attempts were usually flawed designs piloted by captains who didn’t really know what they were doing. This was the root cause of many program-ending disasters.
But with a good ship and crew, all the main risks - weather, hydrogen, dangerous thermals, engine failure, and so on - could be managed. Graf Zeppelin, which crossed the Atlantic over 140 times with zero injuries, is proof of this. The flipside is that safety was not so much about big decisions like using helium instead of hydrogen or avoiding storms entirely, but about getting every little thing right. Eckener’s airship operations were more like a modern airline in this regard. This explains the dozens of airships that crashed almost immediately after being completed.
[...]
This contrasts with aircraft. Early planes crashed all the time and killed huge numbers of people. Air travel got off the ground because of a population of early adopters who were willing to risk a meaningful chance of death to get to their destinations slightly faster or see the world from above. But that was OK, because aircraft were much easier to build, so huge numbers were constructed by an ecosystem of competitors. Compare this to airships, where only a couple of hundred were ever built and Zeppelin maintained a decades-long monopoly on the technological state of the art. Aircraft offered many more chances to learn how to fly them properly and so they eventually became safe, despite being much more dangerous than airships in the beginning.
This is another point that deserves emphasis. For a couple of decades at the beginning of the 20th century, expert consensus was that airships were the future and aircraft were too short-ranged and dangerous to be consequential. “Aircraft guys” were crackpots. Compared to the devil-may-care world of early aircraft, airships were a picture of comfort and safety: commercial airship passengers went 27 years without a single injury until the Hindenburg disaster.
[...]
I do think airships could have played a bigger role in the early 20th century had wars not kept getting in the way. This is yet another way World War I destroyed civilization and condemned us to the bad timeline, but DELAG was doing well and likely would have continued growing rapidly had war not broken out. It’s not inconceivable that this could have led to a profitable business operating dozens of airships and transatlantic routes in the 1920s. This happened a second time with the Nazis, who screwed everything up just as Eckener was starting to succeed with the Hindenburg. But aircraft were good enough at this point that Zeppelins were doomed anyway.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]