19. A Business Upturn That Ended in Sudden Catastrophe
DELAG overcame its wartime and postwar setbacks and went back to business. By 1928, it had designed and built airships capable of nonstop transatlantic flights, years before passenger airplanes had the range to do the same. By the mid-1930s, DELAG had flown commercial passengers for three decades. Its Zeppelins had carried tens of thousands of paying passengers over a million miles, in more than 2,000 flights, without a single injury. As their rigid airships’ popularity soared ever higher, it was widely assumed that they were the wave of the future. Things looked rosy for the company, but there was an overlooked problem.
DELAG’s latest milestone by the mid-1930s was posh giant airships. They flew passengers across the Atlantic in luxury and style, in a mere 60 hours – remarkable for commercial travel back then. Many predicted that airships would dominate global travel. Then catastrophe struck the Hindenburg, DELAG’s flagship and the biggest airship ever built – twice as high and three times as long as a Boeing 747 Jumbo jet. On May 6th, 1937, after an uneventful trans-Atlantic flight, the Hindenburg tried to dock with a mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Out of the blue, it suddenly erupted in flames.
