aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, April 28, 2007

One BIG airship

Ok, my last for the day on the Hindenberg:

“It was a large, complex machine, three times as long as a Boeing 747,” he said. “Its structure consisted of 12 miles of duralumin, an aircraft alloy, girders joined by over 4 million rivets and 100 miles of brace wires. The outer skin was 40 acres of cotton fabric impregnated with iron oxide, cellulose acetate butyrate and aluminum powder.”

He added that the zeppelin’s 16 cells, made of gas-proof latex-treated cotton, contained seven million cubic feet of hydrogen gas capable of lifting 247,000 pounds. Four Daimler-Benz diesel engines propelled the Hindenburg to a maximum speed of 84 miles an hour. “A crew of 16 operated the ship and there were cabins inside the hull for 50 passengers,” he said. [...]

“It’s important to note that the Hindenburg didn’t explode. It was consumed by rapid combustion; this is evident in photographs. Heat produced in the first burning cell raised the temperature of adjacent cells, causing hydrogen to spill out of pressure-relief valves. It took only 34 seconds for fire to engulf the entire ship.” Thirty-six people were killed.

The crash was the Challenger disaster of its day; or so the analogy occurred to me when I read that “the space shuttle’s solid-rocket booster’s burn rate is about half an inch a second versus the burn rate of 25 feet a second recorded during the Hindenburg accident.”