The Famous Hindenburg Disaster (May 6, 1937)

The Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937 brought an abrupt end to the age of the rigid airship. After more than 30 years of passenger travel on German commercial zeppelins (during which tens of thousands of passengers flew over a million miles on more than 2,000 flights without a single injury) the era of the passenger zeppelin came to an end in a few fiery minutes. The exact cause of the accident has not been determined, but one thing is clear.   Hindenburg began its last flight on May 3, 1937 and 61 officers, crew members, and trainees. The ship left the Frankfurt airfield at 7:16 PM and flew over Cologne, and then crossed the Netherlands before following the English Channel past the chalky cliffs of Beachy Head in southern England, and then heading out over the Atlantic shortly after 2:00 AM the next day. By noon on May 6th the ship had reached Boston, and by 3:00 PM Hindenburg was over the skyscrapers of Manhattan in New York City.   The ship flew south from New York and arrived at the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey at around 4:15 PM, but the poor weather conditions at the field concerned the Hindenburg’s commander, Captain Max Pruss, and also Lakehurst’s commanding officer, Charles Roseendahl, who sent a message to the ship recommending a delay in landing until conditions improved.  Captain Pruss departed the Lakehurst area and took his ship over the beaches and coast of New Jersey to wait out the storm.  By 6:00 PM conditions had improved; at 6:12 Rosendahl sent Pruss a message relaying temperature, pressure, visibility, and winds which Rosendahl considered “suitable for landing.”  At 6:22 Rosendahl radioed Pruss “Recommend landing now,” and at 7:08 Rosendahl sent a message to the ship strongly recommending the “earliest possible landing.”   A few minutes after the landing lines were dropped, R.H. Ward, in charge of the port bow landing party, noticed what he described as a wave-like fluttering of the outer cover on the port side, between frames 62 and 77, which contained gas cell number 5 .  He testified at the Commerce Department inquiry that it appeared to him as if gas were pushing against the cover, having escaped from a gas cell.  Ground crew member R.W. Antrim, who was at the top of the mooring mast, also testified that he saw that the covering behind the rear port engine fluttering.   At 7:25 PM, the first visible external flames appeared. Reports vary, but most witnesses saw the first flames either at the top of the hull just forward of the vertical fin (near the ventilation shaft between cells 4 and 5) or between the rear port engine and the port fin (in the area of gas cells 4 and 5, where Ward and Antrim had seen the fluttering).   The fire quickly spread and soon engulfed the tail of the ship, but the ship remained level for a few more seconds before the tail began to sink and the nose pointed upward to the sky, with a blowtorch of flame erupting from the bow where twelve crew members were stationed, including the six who were sent forward to keep ship in trim. The fire spread so quickly — consuming the ship in less than a minute — that survival was largely a matter of where one happened to be located when the fire broke out. Passengers and crew members began jumping out the promenade windows to escape the burning ship, and most of the passengers and all of the crew who were in the public rooms on A Deck at the time of the fire — close to the promenade windows — did survive.  Those who were deeper inside the ship, in the passenger cabins at the center of the decks or the crew spaces along the keel, generally died in the fire.   As the ship settled to the ground, less than 30 seconds after the first flames were observed, those who had jumped from the burning craft scrambled for safety, as did members of the ground crew who had been positioned on the field below the ship. Hindenburg left Frankfurt with 97 souls onboard; 62 survived the crash at Lakehurst, although many suffered serious injuries.  Thirteen, of the 36, passengers and twenty-two, of the 61 crew, died as a result of the crash, along with one member of the civilian landing party.   Prior to the Hindenburg disaster, the public seemed remarkably forgiving of the accident-prone zeppelin, and the glamorous and speedy Hindenburg was still greeted with public enthusiasm despite a long list of previous airship accidents. But while airships like the British R-101, on which 48 people died, or the USS Akron, on which 73 were killed, crashed at sea or in the darkness of night, far from witnesses or cameras, the crash of the Hindenburg was captured on film, and millions of people around the world saw the dramatic explosion which consumed the ship and its passengers.   THE VIDEO is BELOW: