Galloping technology and escalating fuel costs are fuelling interest in airships as fresh endeavours are made to revive the lighter-than-air behemoths.

Recently, Friedrichshafen was in the news again. The small city in Germany first came into prominence at the beginning of the last century when Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched his first flying machine, a rigid airship from Lake Constance in 1900. Thus began a chapter of aviation history that would propel the town onto the world stage, making it a prominent target for Allied bombs during World War II and ultimately, bequeathed a sizable foundation financed by the successor companies to Count von Zeppelin’s original enterprise.

According to city estimates, the foundation generates between $60 million (Rs 295 crore) and $80 million (Rs 395 crore) per annum for a population of just 57,000 supporting a large number of projects for the overall betterment of its citizens. The threat of losing this foundation prompted town elders to get back into the Zeppelin business two decades ago. Today, the economically crippled enterprise, primarily undertaken to keep the foundation alive, has suddenly hogged the limelight, catapulting the city back in the headlines. Thanks to their low fuel consumption, airships have begun to enjoy renewed attention as an alternative in an era of soaring fuel prices. This is bound to give much needed fillip to the company, ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik, which hitherto had produced only four airships in the last 11 years.

Resuscitated, Zeppelins have been used for a variety of purposes, including air quality testing and crowd surveillance at public events. These have flown approximately 80,000 tourists for panoramic rides, floating serenely across blue skies, but only in selective locales in Germany and Japan. Airship tourism, however, is gathering momentum in other parts of the world as well. The latest Zeppelin is now in London, captivating tourists with a bird’s eye view of the city, and will soon be transported across the Atlantic to its future home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its new owners, Airship Ventures, intend to use it to ferry tourists and carry scientific equipment aloft for testing and research. So are the Brontosaurs making a comeback?

Birth of the blimps
Ungainly and ponderous, airships had been relegated to aviation history, virtually written off after a number of accidents culminating in the fiery Hindenburg disaster in 1937 at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Besides, these had also proved highly inadequate and vulnerable as weapon platforms in war. Post World War II, Germany was totally denied any further development in this field which effectively put paid to the rigid airship design, the technological forte of the Zeppelins. But in some other parts of the world (mostly western), non-rigid airships (also known as blimps) continued to be developed, albeit in much smaller sizes than their rigid brethren. Blimps use pressure levels in excess of the surrounding air pressure in order to retain their shape.

Most airships flying today have a non-rigid design. However, there is another novel, somewhat mixed, semi-rigid design. Like blimps, these also require internal pressure to maintain their shape, but have extended, usually articulated keel frames running along the bottom of the envelope to facilitate suspension of external loads and allow lower internal pressures compared to the non-rigid blimps. The newly resurrected Zeppelins, the NT version, are instances of the semi-rigid design.

For most part of the later half of the last century, nonrigid airships—or blimps—were copiously used for aerial advertising. It was not uncommon to see a majestic Goodyear advertisement (one of the most notable blimp manufacturers) leisurely floating in the sky. As a matter of fact, because of the instant attention-getter as they are, blimps became a major tool in the advertising world for exhibiting various products. But was that to be the ultimate and the only use the airships could be put to? The horrible and incinerating end of the then awe-inspiring Hindenburg had jolted the psyche of the people on both sides of the Atlantic never to attempt this mode of travel again. The meteoric rise in the heavier-than-air and greatly faster airliners acted as a last nail in the coffin of this form of air travel.