Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  The crash caused an internal shake-up at the DELAG, with Colsman admitting to his employees that “our pride, our hopes, and intents for this summer [have] been shattered.”13 The hapless Kahlenberg was fired for incompetence, and Eckener took over the company’s day-to-day and flight operations.14

  His first order of business was learning how to fly one of his own products; Zeppelin himself taught him in LZ-6A, the only airship available. After Eckener completed thirty-four flights without incident, an engine failed and LZ-6A went in for repairs but never came out. During a test, an engine roared to life and ignited a small fire. When one of the new workmen mistakenly grabbed a can of fuel to put out the flames, it became a big fire. No one was injured, miraculously, but within minutes LZ-6A was burned to ashes.15

  Eckener, nevertheless, had high hopes for the coming summer season. Deutschland II, or LZ-8, was delivered to Düsseldorf on April 11, 1911, following a triumphant publicity tour of Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Baden-Baden. Brochures advertised 90- to 120-minute flights for 200 marks (more than the average worker’s monthly wages), while pamphlets emphasized the routine safety of the Zeppelin. No one, after all, had ever been killed in a Zeppelin—all the more remarkable considering that almost every week an airplane pilot died.16

  A little more than a month later, on May 16, Eckener was reluctant to bring out the Deutschland II for its twenty-fifth flight—the wind was picking up—but passengers irritated at the delay convinced him to chance it. After he left the hangar, a strong gust hit the airship crossways and it bucked free of the three-hundred-man ground crew holding the ropes. Deutschland II was scooped up and dumped unceremoniously down as divine punishment for Eckener’s hubris. Aside from some scrapes and sprained ankles, no one was injured when the fire department rescued the passengers, but with its spine broken the pride of the DELAG was a pathetic sight. It was beyond repair and had to be written off.17

  As with the LZ-6A fire, Deutschland II’s end was an unfortunate accident unrelated to actual flying, but the record for the DELAG was unimpressive, to say the least. After all, Deutschland had lasted all of a week; LZ-6A, three; and Deutschland II, five. The DELAG was an airline without any airships, and it was becoming difficult to explain away all the mishaps.

  A contentious board meeting followed. The count was furious that his legacy was being wasted on extravagant passenger airships that were rapidly eroding military interest in his wonder weapon. Eckener, however, stood his ground. The accidents, he pointed out, were a symptom of ignorance—had not the count said the same to him after the death of LZ-2?—and overly ambitious expansion. The DELAG, put bluntly, had been flying by the seat of its pants. The company needed to rethink its entire strategy and start again from scratch.

  By a small majority, the board sided with Eckener and voted to throw the dice one last time. It authorized the construction of a new airship—LZ-10, to be christened Schwaben (Swabia) in a patriotic, and placatory, homage to the count’s native region—that would be the last for the DELAG if it, too, were destroyed.

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  WITH A GUILLOTINE’S blade hanging over his neck, Eckener worked fast to right the DELAG.

  First, the Deutschland and Deutschland II accidents had been primarily caused by crew errors and inexperience. Both had been avoidable. Eckener mandated that officers needed more rigorous training in handling ships and henceforth must be tested on their expert knowledge of air temperature, wind patterns, gas behavior, the effects of rain, rudder control, and the like before even going near a gondola. No man could be made a captain until he had at least 150 trips under his belt.18 With veterans in command, flying would become a predictable science. In the meantime, as he had learned, even if the passengers complained, the rule was Safety First: No more taking risks with the airships if bad weather was a possibility.

  Second, for that reason, it was critical to have access to accurate weather forecasting. The airshipmen had all too often been left in the dark as to what awaited them above. There could be no more surprises. The DELAG, Eckener proposed, needed its own private weather information network with observation posts all over Germany. Its primary task was to detect and predict high or changing winds—murderous for any unwitting Zeppelin hitting them head-on or crosswise.

  The count’s friend Professor Hergesell and his colleague Richard Assmann (who’d sat on the 1894 technical committee evaluating Zeppelin’s original airship concept) were dispatched to compile a comprehensive analysis of wind patterns based on twenty years’ worth of records. From its copious tables, the DELAG staff could infer the daily wind direction and strength in almost any location in Germany and build their passenger schedules around it.19

  Piece by piece, the secrets of the air revealed themselves to Eckener and the DELAG. Long-held assumptions that gas-filled vehicles were at the mercy of the winds—still cited by aeroplanists as the proof that airships were unviable—quickly became obsolete. Air currents, Hergesell and Assmann determined, were neither static nor binary. In fact, they changed constantly in terms of force, direction, altitude, and duration, and it was never so simple a matter of there being either an unhelpful headwind or a helpful tailwind. Upon encountering an unfavorable wind, for instance, if a skilled airshipman ascended, descended, or altered course he could find a favorable one.20

  Owing to its singular geography, Germany was composed of “wind-weak” and “wind-strong” districts, they found, and the frequency and paths of storms could be tracked. They discovered hitherto unsuspected “wind-rivers” that Eckener took advantage of when planning his routes. He and his captains would tack from counter-current to current or make up for lost time by switching from one wind-river to a faster one. Eckener eventually became so proficient at wind-running that he was nicknamed the “Pontiff”—for his infallibility.21

  The DELAG began producing new “aeritime” maps of the wind-rivers resembling those of the mariners of old. The strength and direction of winds around a given locality were shaped by the surrounding hills and valleys just as much as tides and currents are by bays and harbors.22 Eckener also commissioned a series of airship-specific maps to be carried aboard all DELAG craft. He had found that ordinary road maps, scaled at a half-inch to the mile, were useless for flying; airships traveled so quickly and so high that even familiar landmarks and countryside were often unrecognizable. DELAG maps now displayed information representing how airshipmen saw the country from above. They were scaled at three miles to the inch, showed terrain heights in various colors, tinted areas that were to be avoided (electricity and telephone wires, for instance), and had rivers, marshes, and forests clearly marked, not so much for location-finding but for how their wind patterns influenced an airship’s behavior. Circles were used to show hydrogen-refilling stations; red silhouettes of an airship, hangars.

  Eckener installed wireless-telegraphy sets in the control room so that captains could communicate with airport hubs for constant weather updates. He also set in motion plans to build aerial lighthouses that would beam searchlights upward to warn of danger areas, luminous signal balloons as direction aids, and painted roofs with a prominent series of letters to indicate location. Just as the advent of the automobile was generating a need for rules of the road, Eckener set out to systematize the rules of the air for the DELAG era to come. Airships would bear red and green lights at the bow and stern, with yellow ones to mark top and bottom; foghorns were installed to prevent collisions in clouds and instructions were distributed to determine right-of-way when airship met airship.23

  Eckener also recognized that the practice of using ground crews to maneuver and restrain airships with nothing more than ropes was a failure, proven many times over since the days of LZ-1. To defend against sudden wind gusts on the ground, when Zeppelins were at their most vulnerable, a new system of docking and launching had to be created. Eckener’s solution was a several-hundred-foot-long metal track extending from th
e hangar along which ran little trolleys whose wheels ran in the hollow underneath the surface of the rail to prevent them being swept away by the pull of the airship. Because they resembled cats scampering along the top of a fence, the trolleys were fondly known as Laufkatzen (running cats). When its cables were tied to the Laufkatzen, the airship was efficiently restrained from lifting, twist and buck as it might.

  And finally, and here Eckener had to tread very carefully, Ludwig Dürr’s old-fashioned methods had to be updated to reflect the kind of new engineering practices befitting a major corporation. Lacking knowledge of the higher mathematics needed for, say, stress analysis of the airship structure, Dürr, a mechanical artisan, had always proceeded by “feel” and intuition, and among his quirks was to never use anything but the simplest drawings to lay out his design. Once the airship was built, his favored technique was to order a dozen test flights and then improvise solutions as problems arose—often entirely avoidable ones caused by relying on what were essentially sketches.

  Dürr may have been a genius at hand-adjusting a recalcitrant rudder or fine-tuning the controls on the fly, and his eccentricities hadn’t mattered in the old days, when there was just one airship, but now that the company wanted to expand its facilities to build several at a time, he needed—though did not want—a team.

  Much had changed since the start-up days of LZ-1: Now there was a new generation of engineering statisticians eager to work for the Zeppelin Company. Young specialists like Karl Arnstein, a former bridge engineer, and Paul Jaray, an aerodynamicist, could perform the complex calculations that were beyond Dürr’s abilities, helping to make future versions of airships stronger, lighter, larger, and more capable than ever conceived possible. It took some effort to convince the stubborn Dürr that he needed assistance, but even he eventually realized that Jaray and Arnstein were unmatched assets.

  Many were surprised that Dürr, a tetchy loner, worked so well with these junior upstarts, but together they formed a formidable team by performing complementary roles. Dürr continued in his role as chief designer—the proverbial “big-picture man”—but it would be Arnstein and Jaray who translated his vision into scores of closely penciled pages filled with equations that proved his airships would fly safely. The younger men were always careful to remain respectful when telling their boss that a given design wouldn’t work, and for his part, Dürr was gracious enough to concede occasionally that sometimes even he might be (slightly) wrong.24

  It was Jaray, for example, who gingerly raised the sensitive subject of revising the shape of the airship to improve performance through streamlining. Using statesmanlike diplomacy, he definitively showed that ever since the 1890s the count had been wrong to focus on length rather than width to increase speed and payload. Hence his airships had been narrow at the head (in the mistaken if widespread belief that it disproportionately cut air resistance) and cylindrically long—which was thought to have little effect on drag. Instead of adding yards length-wise, as Dürr had always done, Jaray demonstrated that it was more efficient in terms of reducing air resistance to widen the diameter and keep the body relatively short. Even Dürr admitted the strength of his argument and agreed to adopt a “fatter” profile for subsequent Zeppelins.25

  So, when the Schwaben first emerged from its hangar in mid-1911, just in time for the summer flying season, it was quite a different creature from its predecessors. Eckener had instructed Maybach to have three new 145-hp, six-cylinder engines ready come what may. Specifically designed for airships, they delivered a top speed of 44 mph, about 20 percent faster than the Deutschlands could muster. In concordance with Jaray’s findings, Dürr’s people had also hurriedly removed a twenty-four-foot-long section, making this the first time a Zeppelin airship was shorter and less capacious than its predecessor.

  Whether there would ever be a successor was now in the hands of the Schwaben.

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  THE “LUCKY SHIP,” as Eckener dubbed it, saved the company. From its very first trip, people were agog at the pleasures of flying. A German-American journalist named Carl Dienstbach described for his envious readers what it was like to fly at the very dawn of passenger aviation.

  Thanks to the HAPAG cruise-line partnership, said Dienstbach, he bought a Zeppelin ticket in the United States and eventually turned up at the DELAG office in Frankfurt, which was decorated with pictures of Zeppelins sailing over the secluded valleys of the Black Forest.

  Because ground winds tend to be weakest in the morning, flights departed at 6 A.M. As Dienstbach’s Frankfurt-Düsseldorf flight was predicted to take six hours, the clerk advised travelers to forward their luggage as soon as possible. They could take suitcases on board if they wished, but they were charged an arm and a leg for the extra weight. It was better to make do with a light carry-on bag and a camera. They certainly wouldn’t need heavy overcoats, because the air only turned perceptibly cooler at two thousand feet, higher than the Schwaben would go. Instead many had brought wide-brimmed straw hats to keep the sun off their faces.

  Dienstbach found the Schwaben, aglow with lights, lodged in its hangar, abuzz with activity. The hydrogen storage tanks were kept underneath the concrete floor, from which snaked the long rubber hoses used to fill the gas cells one by one. Other maintenance men pumped water into the ballast bags while a truck brought the gasoline to the rear-engine gondola, then the forward.

  A thunderous roar suddenly echoed through the shed as the engines were tested. At that point, the captain and two fashionably dressed ladies, the first of Dienstbach’s fellow passengers, arrived. It was going to be a full flight, with twenty-four expected. An “able airman” lowered a slender flight of aluminum steps from the lounge door. At their foot stood a steward deferentially helping passengers aboard.

  This unnamed steward was another of Eckener’s innovations. He was Heinrich Kubis, and he was the world’s first flight attendant. Punctilious and dapper, Kubis was then in his early twenties and had worked as a waiter at the most fashionable hotels in Europe—the Carlton in London and the Ritz in Paris were both on his résumé. He would go on to serve as chief steward on every passenger Zeppelin for the next two and a half decades, including the Hindenburg.

  A carnival atmosphere prevailed as the passengers waved to their cheering friends standing below and the ground crew took their positions. At 6 A.M. on the nose, a siren wailed and all stood clear. The ground crew distributed themselves around the hull and took hold of the trailing ropes. Another siren blast. The two great portals at the front of the hangar groaned and rumbled as they opened, powered by motors. A third siren blast.

  The airship beast began to stir. Those aboard realized they were moving only if they watched the girders of the hangar pass slowly by. The men along the hull took the ropes over their shoulders, dug their heels into the ground, pulled with all their might, and began to haul the twenty-ton mass forward. As the airship glided above the new track, it pulled and strained against the Laufkatzen but remained stable.

  Outside, the airship had to be calibrated for balance. Gas temperature and weight needed measuring so that ballast could be added or subtracted to keep it trimmed. At that point, a gush of water erupted from the bow so that the front of the Schwaben was inclined slightly to aid with lift. The engines were throttled out, a final blast of the siren sounded, and the ground crew released the Schwaben from its chains. Very slowly, very gently, it levitated. The propellers began turning, at first hesitantly but soon becoming transparent disks, and the airship rose higher and higher, leaving Frankfurt behind.

  In the lounge the sensation was like being on a ship moving away from the shoreline and entering the ocean proper, where the invigorating winds flow freely. Every passenger aboard a Zeppelin found the absolute clarity and purity of the atmosphere at 1,500 feet as startling as moving from New York City air to Rocky Mountain air. Those who had also flown in an airplane—admittedly, a tiny number�
��said that it couldn’t compare to the experience of flying in an airship.

  Airplanes buzz and rattle, and in them, explained Waldemar Kaempffert, an American science writer, one was always conscious of a feeling of movement and gravity. An airplane pilot “must meet every little gust of wind, and ride over it like a boat over billows. Now and then a swirl, a big wave in the invisible sea of air, catches us. A movement of the lever, which controls at once the front rudder and the ailerons…and we ride over the wave, and glide on again. It is as if we are carried by an intangible hand up and over an obstacle that we cannot see.”

  In contrast, in a Zeppelin, a sense of weightlessness prevailed. For Dienstbach, flying in an airship felt like the “floating fancies of a dream” as flocks of curious birds flew level with you and passengers yearned to touch the clouds above. For Thomas Baldwin, another journalist who sought to convey the experience of flying in an era when so few people had ever left the ground, a passenger believes he “could step from cloud to cloud as I have stepped from stone to stone in the bed of a shallow rivulet.” He had even leaned over the side, and instead of feeling dizziness or a fear of falling, as from a tall building, “I experienced a feeling of buoyancy like floating on the water.”

  There was a modest breeze in the lounge, thanks to a few open windows, yet as the Schwaben passed over the plains below it seemed motionless. As it entered the mountain passes the engines roared periodically as the ship changed course to cope with the shifting gusts. The crew and officers worked most urgently at this stage, because negotiating the Rhine Valley was no easy task.

  At the Rhine “knee” near Bingen, where the river narrows and bends north, there was always a treacherous wind over the water, which could change direction in an instant, and the verdant side valleys hid dangerous wind eddies. For the passengers, though, it was glorious. On a small island guarding the sacred entrance to the mystical Rhine, the setting for Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, was the Mouse Tower, so named because there a cruel archbishop was once deservedly eaten by ravenous rodents. To the right loomed Ehrenfels Castle, a ruined pile of ancient pedigree, and a little farther on, to the left, the grand Rheinstein Castle, a royal favorite with a working portcullis and drawbridge.