The German airship Hindenburg, the largest passenger-carrying vehicle on the planet, was built by the Zeppelin company in 1936 and began carrying passengers the following year. It was larger than an ocean liner and twice as fast.
It was also terribly expensive -- the equivalent of more than $5,000 for a ticket. In the summer of 1937 the Hindenberg made its first trans-Atlantic flight. The mammoth football-shaped airship sailed over the skyscrapers of Manhattan and was preparing to land fifty miles south, at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station. It burst into flame and was consumed in 34 seconds. Of the roughly 150 people aboard, 36 died outright and most of the others were badly burned.
This program tries to discover the causes for you. Terrorism was an obvious consideration. In the mid-1930s, Hitler was gearing up for war, which was not to everyone's liking. And the Hindenburg was kept aloft by huge bags of hydrogen, the first and lightest of the elements. It blows up if you put a match to it, as I recall from some home experiments I did with it. It lifted a thick glass bell-shaped jar, holding about a quart, an inch or so into the air with a satisfying WHACK!, startling all the other sailors dozing in the day room, who then collectively expressed their satisfaction with my experiment.
The investigator here is an air safety expert named Feith, who goes through the variables one by one until he concludes that it was a combination of tight turns while docking, escaping hydrogen, and atmospheric conditions. The explanation is as plausible as any other and better than most.
