Zeppelins May Yet Fly Again

FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, Germany —  Imagine a slow, scenic glide through the skies in an aircraft that burns little fuel, barely pollutes, affords a good view for all on board and makes no bothersome noise or vibrations.

Sixty years ago, before the advent of the jet engine, the rich did travel in this grand style, aboard the giant “silver cigars” developed by turn-of-the-century German aristocrat and army officer Count Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich von Zeppelin.

Count Zeppelin’s zeppelins made fortnightly flights between Friedrichshafen and Rio de Janeiro, and trips every 24 days from Friedrichshafen to New York. But then came World War II: Count Zeppelin’s bulbous beauties were melted down to make Messerschmitts. By the time the fighting stopped, the world’s love affair with high-speed jet travel had begun.

There are still plenty of hobbyists, aviation buffs and environmentalists who praise the count’s invention to the skies, as it were. The zeppelin is quiet. It’s safe. It’s relatively clean. Its rigid inner framework should, in theory, give it a maneuverability unmatched by the blimp, which uses a different technology--it has no internal frame--and pays its way in the world mainly by hovering over football stadiums and generating corporate goodwill.

But, like the lightbulb that never burns out, the zeppelin concept has never really made it out of the file cabinets where corporations keep the good ideas that won’t turn a buck.

Until now. In this southern German city that owes its prosperity to Count Zeppelin, great-great-grandnephew Wolfgang von Zeppelin is resurrecting his aristocratic ancestor’s gigantic invention.

This spring, the hot-air balloon pilot and industrial engineer will begin the arduous process of getting the zeppelin recertified for modern passenger travel, working hand in hand with the Luftfahrt Bundesamt, the German equivalent of the Federal Aviation Administration, with the aim of gaining its approval.

“This is not a nostalgia enterprise,” says Von Zeppelin, 60, managing director of Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik, a 4-year-old subsidiary of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin, an arm of the industrial empire his ancestor founded in 1908. “I would not spend my best years on a nostalgia project. I am convinced we can create jobs and new profitable enterprises through airship activities.”

If Von Zeppelin gets anywhere, his success will bring back the era of sedate, lighter-than-air travel--not for transatlantic travelers but for day-trippers who want to see single regions of Europe from a 1,000-foot vantage point.

The zeppelins of yore had rabbit warrens of staterooms, restaurants and lounges inside their hulls--only the crew rode in the gondola that hung from the main structure. But Von Zeppelin’s plans call for skipping the bedrooms and seating passengers in a suspended cabin.

“If you can give somebody the chance to see the Matterhorn, Lake Constance and the Neuschwanstein, all in one day, then this is really fast,” he says, referring in the last instance to the famous Bavarian castle whose exuberant gables and towers were the model for the Disneyland centerpiece. “You can’t do it by car or by train.”

Max Mugler, chairman of Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik, says the company is in negotiations with 21 potential buyers--none of which he’ll name. They could eventually pay $7.5 million apiece for zeppelins and use them for tourism and for projects ranging from ozone research in the Arctic to honey collection in the triple-canopy jungles of Malaysia.

Mugler and Von Zeppelin are promoting their creation as a quieter, smoother-riding workhorse than its look-alike and rival, the blimp, which for technical reasons has its engine mounted right on the gondola and thus exposes passengers to noise and vibrations.

Blimp tourism, says Von Zeppelin, is not the heavenly glide that landlubbers might imagine it to be, and blimps do not offer the ideal platform for sensitive scientific instruments that he says his zeppelin will, with its engine mounted far back on the tail.

It is drawbacks like these that have kept blimps from catching on as anything but lovable advertising novelties. Only one company--American Blimp Corp. of Hillsboro, Ore.--has found a way to make blimp-building pay in today’s economy, and its trick has been to make relatively small blimps. They are just big enough to carry an advertising message, but small enough to be brought to earth by small and relatively inexpensive ground crews. These specialized, traveling crews are a big cost factor in blimp-flying. According to Jud Brandreth, American Blimp Corp.’s vice president for marketing, there are only about 20 blimps operating in the world--and no zeppelins.

History of Failures

But not for lack of trying. The postwar history of lighter-than-air transportation is littered with failed attempts. In the energy crisis of the 1970s, for instance, U.S. engineers seriously considered the zeppelin as a fuel-efficient transporter of natural gas and other bulk cargoes. They dropped the idea, though, when it became clear that such airships would have to be gargantuan to be cost-effective, even bigger than Count Zeppelin’s behemoths. No one even had a hangar big enough for building such a whopper, let alone the risk capital.

In the 1980s, Pentagon planners tried again to harness the airship’s promise. The Pentagon is no stranger to airships: The Navy ordered its first zeppelin, the Los Angeles, from Friedrichshafen in 1924 and bought two more from Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. a few years later, in a long-forgotten U.S.-German airship arms race.

The United States had worse luck with the zeppelin than the Germans: There were fatalities during landings, and both Goodyear models were lost during storms at sea. But the Navy managed to get some mileage out of the blimp, at one point running a fleet of 119.

Airships as radar surveillance platforms? Airships as field hospitals? Airships as buses for the rapid deployment force? (Zeppelins are faster than seagoing troop transports.) Airships as airborne bases for the MX missile? . . . The Pentagon considered all of these ideas and scrapped them.

As recently as four years ago, the Navy had Westinghouse under contract to work on an airship for use as a low-flying missile lookout. “But the budget ax fell on that project,” says Norman Mayer, a retired aeronautics consultant who spent a career developing airship concepts for the Navy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“Airships are fundamentally different from airplanes and require specially trained people to fly them,” Mayer says. “That’s one of the reasons the Navy gave them up. They didn’t want to maintain this very specialized group of people who had no practical application in other areas.”

So why should Von Zeppelin’s company, with a staff of 21, rush in where even the Pentagon fears to tread?

The Friedrichshafen operation has a secret weapon: a pot of money that Count Zeppelin set aside before he died in 1917, explicitly for rigid-airship research, back in the days when this corner of Germany was still the kingdom of Wuerttemberg.

Count Zeppelin’s airship operations suffered a serious setback in 1908, when the fourth model to lumber out of its floating hangar here on Lake Constance ran into engine trouble over Stuttgart, tried to make an emergency landing in a thunderstorm, hit a building and was bent hopelessly out of shape.

The subjects of Wuerttemberg felt terrible, for they considered the count a local hero. He had even taken the king on a pioneering zeppelin ride that year--a trip whose impact Wolfgang von Zeppelin compares to “Bill Clinton flying to the moon.” And he had built a model village for his workers to live in, charming little houses with picket fences and heart-shaped cutouts on the shutters.

The public now rushed to help the beleaguered count. “Schoolchildren sent in 10 pennies,” Von Zeppelin says. “Banks sent in thousands of marks. Altogether, [Count] Zeppelin collected 6 million gold marks. This was a lot of money in those days.”

The count used the donations to rebuild his airship business. Later, he paid the public back: He endowed a foundation, owned and controlled by the city of Friedrichshafen, whose profits were to be returned to the city in the form of hospitals, museums, theaters and day-care centers.

But “the initial purpose of this foundation was to promote airship activities,” says Von Zeppelin.

A Change in Empire

After World War II, when the market for zeppelin travel disappeared, the count’s business empire shifted gears, literally, into the business of building automotive transmissions, under the name ZF Friedrichshafen. Today, arms of the company--stretching as far as Detroit and Sao Paulo, Brazil--build car seats, chemical containers, fuel tanks for the European Space Agency’s Ariane rocket and other large industrial products. Citizens of Friedrichshafen give the firm and its various enterprises full credit for putting their town--formerly a small and sleepy royal summer residence--on the map.

But the count’s original company, Luftschiffbau Zeppelin, his foundation and his zeppelin-development endowment were always there, somewhere behind the smokestacks and assembly lines. And the idea that there was a cache of marks, sitting inside a gearshift factory, waiting for the day when management decided the time was right to rebuild the zeppelin, took on the proportions of a Holy Grail legend among airship enthusiasts.

For decades, Count Zeppelin’s trustees waited. “Until 1987, the opinion was that it was impossible to build an airship,” says Von Zeppelin. “The risk is too great. Helium doesn’t have enough lift. It is a mistake to invest any money.”

There was also a major psychological hurdle to be crossed in 1987: the 50th anniversary of the explosion of the Hindenburg, the last of the great German zeppelins.

Although the Hindenburg was designed to be filled with nonflammable helium, the United States had a monopoly on that buoyant gas--and America stopped selling it to Germany in 1937 for fear Hitler would employ the zeppelin for military use. So the Germans filled the Hindenburg with flammable hydrogen, and on May 6, 1937, the 804-foot-long airship burst into its famous fireball at a New Jersey airfield, killing 36 people.

No one knows what caused the explosion. Radio broadcaster Herb Morrison’s tearful eyewitness account of the accident has been replayed countless times, giving many Americans the idea that zeppelin travel must have been like taking wing strapped to a huge bomb.

A bad rap, say zeppelinists.

“This irritates us,” says Mike Rentell, secretary of the Airship Assn., a group in England that promotes the cause of lighter-than-air transportation. He points out that hydrogen fires rush up and that the Hindenburg plummeted down and away from the blaze. “More than two-thirds of the [Hindenburg] passengers survived.”

In any case, the hydrogen issue is moot today, since the U.S. ban on helium exports to Germany is long gone, and Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik’s modern airship will be buoyed by that nonflammable gas.

Once that 50th anniversary was safely past, engineers and market researchers in Friedrichshafen set to work, taking into account new materials and design features of the last half a century of aviation and space technology.

In 1993, they decided a market was there and began working full-bore on a prototype. The rudder fins, gondola, mooring antenna, engine and carbon-fiber skeleton have been built in a huge Friedrichshafen exhibition hall normally used for boat displays. The high cost of such construction sites is a major reason no one else builds zeppelins these days.

These pieces are being tested against lightning strikes and other stresses; when they pass, they will be assembled.

A key element of the new technology is the use of swiveling propellers mounted at three points on the zeppelin’s rigid frame. These devices are supposed to let the new zeppelin turn on a pfennig while hovering, much as a helicopter does but without the rotor noise.

The swiveling propellers are also supposed to solve one of the intrinsic problems of the old zeppelin and of blimps: Because the airships are steered by rudders, they lose their maneuverability when slowing down for landing. The count’s zeppelins needed to be wrestled to the ground, Gulliver-style, by hundreds of men wielding long ropes.

Even American Blimp Corp. needs ground crews of seven to land its smallest blimp.

Von Zeppelin says his firm is shooting for landing crews of three or four, which would provide a significant operating cost advantage. “But we still have to prove it,” he admits. The first test flights will come this spring.

“It’s a risky venture,” says the U.S. Navy’s Mayer, who notes that American Blimp Corp. already offers one model of the zeppelin’s rival product for about $3 million. “If the competition can make [an airship] for half the price, then that dampens your enthusiasm.”

But Mayer and the many amateur fans of lighter-than-air travel are hoping that Von Zeppelin--with his unique combination of family history, civic and foundation support, modern technology and zeppelin-vs.-blimp design advantages--will finally beat the substantial economic odds.

“There’s a feeling that if any company can make a viable rigid airship, then the zeppelin folks have a head start,” says Eric Brothers, editor of the specialty newsletter Buoyant Flight.

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Lighter Than Air

Charts compares a model A-600 blimp and Wolfgang von Zeppelin’s comparably sized prototype LZ N07. Both are much smaller than the big airships made by the Zeppelin concern made nearly a century ago.

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A-600 LZ-N07 Zeppelin Length 65 yards 82 yards Volume: 8,626 cubic yards 10,717 cubic yards Speed: 56 mph 80 mph Propulsion: Two 255-horsepower engines Three 200-horsepower engines Capacity: Six passengers, two pilots 12 passengers, two pilots Fuel tanks: 550 lbs. fuel 1320 lbs. fuel

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Source: Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik