The ability of the airship to cruise at low heights is another comfort the dirigible enjoys over the aeroplane, which, to insure a safe landing in event of engine trouble, usually navigates across country at five thousand feet altitude or more. The most pleasurable height for air cruising is between five hundred and one thousand feet, for from there the perspective of the countryside is not too diminutive.
As regards the safety of travel in lighter-than-air machines, naturally there have been several disasters such as are inevitable in perfecting a new science. The disasters that occur in the air are closely analogous to those of the sea. The greatest dangers to the airship are the wind, storms, and fire. Of these the last is the most dangerous, because hydrogen gas is so highly explosive. That was what caused the destruction of the Akron, with Vaniman and his companions. What caused the explosion that annihilated the crew of twenty-five of the L-11 in September, 1913, is not known. Perhaps the absorption of the rays of the sun caused the gas to expand, bursting the gas-bags. Glossed surfaces now deflect the rays and help to avoid that danger.
The extraordinary point in the long experimentation with Zeppelins was the immunity of the actual crews of the airships from death, until the thirteenth year of the Zeppelin’s existence. Despite the ever-recurring accidents and the frequent loss of life and serious injury among landing parties and the workshop hands, not a single fatality occurred to any of the navigators until September, 1913, when naval Zeppelin L-1, which was actually the fourteenth Zeppelin to be constructed, was wrecked in the North Sea by a squall, her crew of thirteen being drowned.
Most of the minor accidents to Zeppelins were due to poor landings and high winds. At first this was not to be avoided, because of the huge bulk of these air-liners and their great buoyancy and the ease with which the wind could blow them against their moorings. With experience, though, this was eliminated. Indeed, the officers of the passenger-carrying Schwaben never bothered about the weather, and went out when aeroplanes would not dare go up. The Parseval VI made 224 trips about Berlin within two years’ time, remained in the air a total of 342 hours, carried 2,286 passengers, and travelled a distance of 15,000 miles.
To compare this record with the long list of those who have lost their lives in aeroplane flying and experimentation is impossible and of no avail. The radical differences of construction make it much easier for the balloon to avoid disaster than the aeroplane.
Whenever a wing breaks on an aeroplane or whenever the engine on a single-motored machine stops, the aeroplane must fall down or glide to a landing. These defects will undoubtedly be greatly overcome with standardized construction of aircraft and the establishment of proper landing-fields. The hazard, nevertheless, will always be there in some degree.
Such an accident is not frequent with a lighter-than-air machine, which does not depend on its motor but upon gas to keep it afloat. Indeed, an airship may drift hundreds of miles with the wind with all its motors completely shut off—which, by the way, is another reason why the transatlantic fight with the air-currents, which move from America to Europe, seems to be a very feasible possibility for the lighter-than-air craft. The conservation of fuel under such a condition is tremendous.
Courtesy of Flying Magazine.
The R-34, the British rigid dirigible.