Empires of the Sky

by Alexander Rose

  After a few hours, the Schwaben arrived at Bonn, about two-thirds of the way to Düsseldorf, and the crew could finally relax. From there, the scenery was not as spectacular, and the airship ascended into the open air. No longer having to hew to the twists between the cliffs and bends of the river, the Schwaben could fly straight and accelerated past 40 mph.

  The passengers ate well aboard the Schwaben. Borrowing the idea from luxurious ocean liners and first-class Pullman trains, Eckener had introduced decent food (foie gras, caviar, “French fruits,” and Westphalian ham) and an admirable wine list (but no beer, alas, considered by Eckener to be too déclassé for his premium clientele).

  The company was good, too, for the sound of the engines was so muffled that conversation was not difficult. A few people played cards on the newly added tables, while others sent wireless-telegraph messages to their families from the small cabin at the rear next to the lavatory. Every airship of the DELAG had its own tiny post office and official stamp. Souvenir postcards were sold, and receiving a DELAG-stamped card was always a thrill.

  At Düsseldorf, wrote Dienstbach, there was a brief spasm of fear as hands gripped chairs and scared looks were exchanged when the captain turned off the engines and descended headfirst for the airport. The floor was at a steep angle as the bow glided straight for a knot of ground crew. Just as the ship seemed likely to mow them over, another gush of water erupted from the bow tanks and the propellers chugged to life in reverse. The bow tipped up, and the Schwaben came to an obedient halt as the groundsmen took hold of the front ropes and guided the ship onto the docking rails.

  The adventure ended with the same rhythmic marching of the men that had begun the trip, this time into the hangar. After exiting, the passengers found themselves surrounded by excited friends, who ushered them to the droves of taxicabs waiting next to the hangar to take them to their hotels.26

  19. The High Priests

  THANKS TO THE Schwaben, which transformed a struggling airline into a viable business, 1911–12 proved the turning point in the DELAG’s fortunes. Not even the destruction of the “lucky ship” a year after its introduction fazed the company. Having outraced a storm to get to Düsseldorf on June 28, 1912, the Schwaben had unloaded its passengers when “frictional electricity” caused by the chafing of the gas cells’ rubberized cotton skins set it aflame.

  The fallout would have been worse had it not been for Eckener’s ruthless reaction. He urgently told Colsman that he sensed a “noticeable flinching of the public after the catastrophe” and publicly blamed the maintenance crew at the Düsseldorf hangar for the accident. Though it pained him to do so, it was a necessary public-relations move, for “otherwise, we won’t get another dog to enter the ship.”1

  Internally, the accident prompted Zeppelin to switch to “goldbeaters’ skin” to line gas cells. This was a delicate membrane covering the caecum—a food-storage pouch at the entrance to the large intestine—of cattle. Each caecum yielded a skin measuring at most 39 by 6 inches, and up to fifty thousand were required to cover a single gas cell. Sewing together that number of easily tearable skins required skilled handwork—adding to their already prohibitive price.2 In the interests of safety, however, its belated adoption was imperative, and in future the fire risk posed by chafing was reduced to almost nothing.

  To further restore confidence, the company publicly made much of the fact that Schwaben had impressively demonstrated its airworthiness over its year of life. It had flown 480 hours without incident and carried 4,354 passengers (including crew, paying customers, and guests) over 234 flights. The company even innovatively commissioned a five-minute movie shown in theaters that depicted a bird’s-eye view of a trip aboard the Schwaben; people who couldn’t afford an airship ticket lined up to be astounded by the vicarious experience of flying.

  Shortly afterward, Eckener confirmed to Colsman that all was well: Demand for flight reservations aboard the DELAG’s new airships was exceeding pre-accident levels.3 By then, Eckener had the LZ-11 Viktoria Luise (named after the kaiser’s only daughter) as well as the LZ-13 Hansa (after the Hanseatic League, the medieval merchant confederation that had dominated North German and Baltic trade) in service.

  Viktoria Luise and Hansa were larger than the Schwaben, possessed upgraded and more powerful engines, and had more aerodynamically shaped bows and sterns. Their top speeds ranged between 47 and 50 mph, they carried more passengers, and they enjoyed improved handling. The performance bumps in addition to the growing experience of the DELAG crews meant that Viktoria Luise cut the flight time between Frankfurt and Düsseldorf from the Schwaben’s six hours to just three, handily faster than the train (but at much higher prices).4

  Eckener was confident enough to order an even more advanced airship, the Sachsen (Saxony), which was delivered in the early summer of 1913. Its home base would be Leipzig, while Hansa’s was Hamburg, and Viktoria Luise stayed in Frankfurt.5

  These three hub cities formed an important geographical triangle central to Eckener’s plans to expand. Frankfurt lay in the west of Germany, Hamburg to the north, and Leipzig the east. From Frankfurt, his airships could head for France, Italy, and Britain (and, eventually, the United States); Hamburg was the gateway to Scandinavia; and Leipzig allowed passage to Austria-Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Russia.

  To that end, he dispatched Hansa on the DELAG’s first international flight, on September 19, 1912, to Copenhagen. The following June, Sachsen voyaged to Vienna, arriving in half the time an express train could from almost equidistant Stuttgart.6

  Eckener’s hopes of introducing service to Paris and London were frustrated by international tensions, which reached a fever pitch during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. The British had not forgotten the novelist Dr. Rudolf Martin’s threats to land a Zeppelin-borne invasion force of “350,000 men,” and the French had no truck with ostensibly civilian German airships—which they suspected of performing double duty as the kaiser’s eyes in the sky—overflying their fortifications and compiling accurate bombing maps of their capital.

  Beyond London and Paris, the old dream of transatlantic flights to New York beckoned. With its huge German-immigrant population and friendly relations with Berlin, America was a natural destination for Zeppelins. The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, ten weeks before the Schwaben’s demise, prompted an ambitious reconsideration of the scheme. The Titanic had, notoriously, been touted as unsinkable, and some of the more zealous airship advocates pointed out that while the iceberg had sheared its steel plates like cardboard, you could rip half a dozen gas cells in a Zeppelin and it would remain aloft.7

  Still, the current generation of Zeppelins was too small, too short-ranged, and too underpowered to undertake such a voyage. One would need a true Titanic of the skies to surmount the challenge. Not surprisingly, this type of super-Zeppelin was not yet in the cards, but it was conceivable that the next next-generation airship would enable the great technological and engineering leap forward to make the dream a reality and consign the oceanic cruise liner to the scrap heap of history.

  This airship of the future, some predicted, would be a 1,000-foot, 120-mph behemoth festooned with scores of propellers and room for promenades, amusement areas, game rooms, restaurants, glassed observation platforms, and deck upon deck of luxuriously appointed staterooms, as well as holds sufficient to transport hundreds of tons of profitable cargo.8 By 1925, it was thought, a DELAG airship carrying 150 passengers and 42 crew would circumnavigate the globe in eight days.9

  First things first, though. Successfully forging an Atlantic passage required a great deal of background data. The diligent Professor Hergesell secreted himself aboard a German training cruiser to survey the winds off Florida and the eastern seaboard. It was immediately clear to him that a direct run from Germany to New York was out of the question, because at that latitude in the North Atlantic the airship would be heading right into the prevailing wind. Instead, as Col
umbus had found, the trade winds arcing westward toward the Caribbean would help speed a vessel on its way. The return trip could be completed farther north using the westerlies at the ship’s back.

  Since the trade winds, Hergesell argued, blew strongest in winter and there were few cyclones between November and July, airships should aim to depart Europe in the colder months, make pit stops for hydrogen and fuel in the Azores, the Canaries, or the Madeiras in the Atlantic, and then head for Puerto Rico or Havana. After that, they would work their way north to Jacksonville, Florida, or New Orleans and thence up the east coast to New York. The whole thing could be accomplished in five to six days, assuming an average speed of 40 mph.10

  One advantage would be that DELAG airships working the summer season in Germany could, instead of being placed in storage each winter, be diverted into revenue-generating Atlantic operations. On the other hand, the route added significantly to distance. For instance, Frankfurt to New York in a straight line was roughly 3,850 miles, but Frankfurt to Puerto Rico alone was 4,600, with another 1,260 miles for Puerto Rico to Jacksonville and 835 from Jacksonville to New York. Since the Viktoria Luise’s maximum range was roughly 700 miles, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, at least until the advent of super-Zeppelins, could be regarded only as a fantasy.

  Eckener’s conservatism—his obsession with careful planning, sound training, precise engineering, and preflight trials—put the brakes on the DELAG’s ambitions to forge a transatlantic crossing. It was a disappointing, if wise, decision, for the dangers of making such a premature attempt had been apparent for all to see in the saga, or rather fiasco, of Walter Wellman’s voyage in October 1910.

  Wellman, a fifty-one-year-old Chicago adventurer with a profound talent for self-deluding self-promotion, almost a caricature of a heroically mustached Victorian Explorer, had built the America, a large semi-rigid that he claimed would fly from New Jersey to Britain.

  Eckener looked upon the America with a mixture of pity, marvel, and befuddlement. None of its crew, with a single exception, had ever been in the air before, and neither had the ship’s cat, a sourly unenthusiastic feline named Kiddo, who, Wellman complained, had “no imagination…no vanity in pioneering.”

  The trip ended predictably. Within a couple of days, Wellman and his doughty skyfarers had to be rescued by a passing steamer.11 Not a man (or Kiddo) was lost, amazingly, but the ill-starred venture proved that the airship business was a quintessentially German specialty, a field in which proficiency, experience, and expertise were to be prized above all.

  The Zeppelin men were beginning to believe themselves high priests jealously guarding the divine secrets of aerial navigation from the pretensions of the amateurish and the vulgarity of the ignorant. The belief that “no one else can do it” was true enough, it seemed, though it would curdle, once they convinced themselves that they knew everything that could be known, into a lethal arrogance in the years to come.

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  MORE PROMISING IN the near term, particularly from the count’s point of view, was that Eckener’s airline success had prompted a reappraisal by the army of its airship requirements. In early 1912, General von Moltke, who had cut airship orders down to three in 1909, now bumped the total to nine more—a huge score for Zeppelin. German High Command had finally decided they could be used for reconnaissance and bombing purposes in a war with France. The first of these new airships, LZ-12 (Z-3), was delivered in July, with the others scheduled over the next two years.12

  Even better: The navy was expressing interest. Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, its reigning supremo, had long dismissed airships as a diversion from building more battleships. Because the wind at sea is stronger than over land, and the distances greater, Tirpitz felt that previous generations of Zeppelins would be of little help in the final showdown he planned between his High Seas Fleet and Britain’s Home Fleet.

  Tirpitz remained skeptical, but at least he was no longer dismissing the idea out of hand. The count, smarting after being sidelined by Colsman and Eckener, made a special effort to convince the admiral by promising him that the company would build him an airship to his own specifications. This put Dürr’s nose out of joint, of course, and he was bitterly affronted when naval personnel began appearing at Friedrichshafen and ordering his mechanics around.

  LZ-14, dubbed L-1 (a naval designation), would be the result. It had nearly 20 percent more gas capacity than Viktoria Luise, was thirty feet longer, and was equipped with specially tuned Maybach engines producing 540 hp rather than the standard 450.

  Count von Zeppelin, hearkening to Dr. Martin’s description of him as an admiral, insisted on captaining L-1 on its thirty-hour maiden flight on October 7, 1912, but, sadly, L-1 was lost at sea the following September, when almost vertical cold gusts lifted it up and heavy rain brought it down. It was almost a repeat of Captain Kahlenberg’s Deutschland crash into the Teutoburg Forest, but this time those aboard weren’t so fortunate. When the rudders failed, the airship plunged from a height of three hundred feet into the turbulent water off the coast of Heligoland, and while six officers and men were rescued, fourteen drowned, including the head of the new Naval Airship Division. It was the first time anyone had ever been killed on a Zeppelin, yet the disaster was chalked up to an act of God and the company was not blamed.13

  Tirpitz had considered the L-1 quite impressive, but still inadequate, and contracted for a second airship. Felix Pietzker, a naval designer, was chosen to oversee construction at Friedrichshafen—again, over Dürr’s vociferous opposition. Pietzker ignored Dürr’s advice and demanded that the engines be placed closer to the hull and the characteristic Zeppelin external keel—the spine from which the gondolas hung—moved inside the body of the craft to enhance streamlining and speed. These changes were dangerously drastic, complained Dürr, but he was dismissed as a fuddy-duddy who worked too slowly. The count backed his own man, agreeing that the redesign was premature, but Pietzker went ahead with it anyway, and Zeppelin, realizing that further opposition would terminate the project, quietly surrendered.

  A four-engine monster of 840 hp and 20 percent larger than even L-1, L-2 was considered a terrific success until its tenth flight on October 17, 1913.

  Shortly after takeoff at 10:05 A.M., witnesses registered a flame issuing from the front gondola, the fatal prelude to L-2’s plummeting 450 feet to earth, with several fiery explosions shaking its aching, arching body on the way down. The entire complement of twenty-eight, including Pietzker and five Zeppelin executives, burned to death. The subsequent investigation determined that a hydrogen leak had flowed into the tunnel-like internal keel, which lacked exhaust shafts, then into the forward engine car (set, as Dürr had warned, too close to the hull) and was ignited by a carburetor flame.14

  Tirpitz this time did blame the count, who in turn accused the late Pietzker of incompetence. At the otherwise solemn military funeral for the lost crewmen, a livid Zeppelin instigated a very public argument with Tirpitz, and the two came almost to blows. Colsman spent the next few months patching things up with Tirpitz, who eventually agreed to not cancel the naval airship program but refused to ever deal with the count again.

  These two successive fatal disasters seem to have finally knocked the wind out of the once-indefatigable Zeppelin, now seventy-five. He realized that everything does indeed come to an end. When Colsman and Eckener next convened the board, Zeppelin barely raised a word of complaint when he was removed, respectfully but ruthlessly, from day-to-day involvement with his own company. Relegated to the status of the Grand Old Man of German airships, Zeppelin made appearances, usually for publicity, only a few more times over the following years.15

  Perhaps surprisingly, German public opinion remained overwhelmingly favorable toward airships after the L-1 and L-2 accidents. As the years and decades passed, advocates like Eckener would cling ever more tightly to the unshakable principle that there was nothing inherent
ly flawed about the airship concept and that any problems that arose could easily be rectified. In the broader sense, they were right: Airplanes (and automobiles and trains) crashed all the time, too, yet no one thought of them as fatally misconceived. Between 1908 and the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, for instance, more than 500 people would be killed in airplanes but only 42 in rigid airships (L-1 and L-2) and none in a civilian DELAG vessel.16 When you flew in an airplane, you took your life in your hands; not so in a Zeppelin.

  A few years earlier, ground-level gusts had been regarded as the greatest menace to airship safety, but now the role hydrogen had played in the L-2 accident was alarmingly noticeable. Eckener calmed these fears by explaining that hydrogen was only potentially hazardous when, because it was expanding from the sun’s heat or from lowered air pressure, it was expunged from the gas cells to maintain equilibrium and allowed to build up, as in the case of L-2’s internal keel, in an unventilated space.

  Hydrogen, Eckener liked to remind people, is not inherently explosive; it becomes violently volatile only when mixed with at least 15 percent of air. If hydrogen remained contained and pure at a constant temperature and pressure—as Zeppelin specialized in doing—one could light a candle three inches from an insulated gas cell with no fear of fire. Had L-2, in other words, been outfitted with simple vents to allow the accumulating hydrogen to escape from the “tunnel” into the open air, the disaster would never have happened.17