‘One of the Worst Catastrophes in the World’ : 50 Years Later, Hindenburg Crash Still Haunts Aviation

LAKEHURST, N.J. —  Fifty years later, the panic-filled voice of broadcaster Herb Morrison still seems to reverberate across New Jersey farmland that would have remained anonymous if not for a few seconds of fire and death:

“It bursts into flames. . . . It’s fire, and it’s crashing. It’s crashing terrible. . . . It’s burning, bursting into flames and it’s falling on the mooring mast. . . . This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh, the flames going, oh, four- to five- hundred feet into the sky.

“It’s a terrific crash . . . the smoke and the flames now, and the frame is crashing down into the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity.”

It was dusk on the humid evening of May 6, 1937, when the majestic zeppelin Hindenburg, the largest aircraft ever built, floated into view of the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, N.J.

Bigger Than 2 Football Fields

The 804-foot-long airship--longer than 2 1/2 football fields--was to be the flagship of a fleet of dirigibles. Plans for bigger zeppelins already were drawn. On its 11th trip to the United States, the $3-million Hindenburg was the epitome of luxury travel.

But the fire that consumed the Hindenburg and 35 of its passengers and crewmen became the final nail in the coffin for zeppelins and ushered in the era of heavier-than-air craft such as airplanes and helicopters.

The tragedy was magnified because Americans could see it on newsreels and hear Morrison’s sobbing account on radio. Although only about one-third of the passengers and crew died, it often is mentioned with the sinking of the Titanic and last year’s shuttle explosion as transportation’s worst disasters.

Half a century later, no one knows for sure what caused the massive fireball. Some suspect sabotage. Others believe a spark ignited stray hydrogen, the explosive lighter-than-air gas that kept the airship afloat. But witnesses to the disaster have little trouble remembering it.

“I seen this big red glow and it went out the nose like a blowtorch. That thing just went boom. It took just 34 seconds,” said John Iannaccone, 76, who was in the 253-man ground crew pulling in the Hindenburg when it exploded.

Thirty-five of the 97 people aboard were killed. One worker on the ground also died. As Iannaccone rushed toward the burning dirigible, a passenger walked by.

“He was burnt completely. He had nothing on him, only his shoes. All his hair was burned off,” Iannaccone said. “We also saw a young girl lying on her stomach. She had been burned on the back from her head to her heels--but just on her back.”

As bottles of liquor and wine in the passenger cabins ignited around him, Iannaccone found an elderly German couple sitting in shock--but unharmed--in their compartment. “We told them, ‘It’s time to come out.’ ”

Verna Thomas, 71, who lived two miles from the airfield, could see passengers waving from the windows just before the disaster.

‘A Terrible Sight’

“Everything blew up from the back right on through. My husband left me with the baby and ran out there. It was a terrible sight. All you did was scream, ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God,’ ” she said.

“It was unbelievable to see how just the structure was there and then it collapsed to the ground. And the people just rolled out and were rolling on the ground.”

Morrison was a 31-year-old newsman for WLS radio in Chicago. After describing the fiery explosions, he ran out to the Hindenburg and tried to talk to survivors even though he couldn’t communicate with most of the German passengers and crew.

“I saw one man running out. His clothes had been all burned off. He just had his shorts on,” he said.

Before the Hindenburg, zeppelins had provided a thrilling sight to a world beset by economic depression, but the romance had already been tempered by a series of deadly crashes.

Have Rigid Frame

Zeppelins, or dirigibles, have a rigid frame over which cloth is stretched--as opposed to blimps, which are bags of air without any structure. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a 19th-Century German infantry officer, devised the rigid hull.

After Zeppelin’s death, Hugo Eckener became the world’s chief dirigible designer. His grandest craft was the LZ-129, which he named for the late German president, Paul von Hindenburg.

The United States and Britain built several zeppelins with disastrous results, but Germany--which used dirigibles to bomb London during World War I--was the world’s foremost builder.

Adolf Hitler personally did not care for the airships, but realized they could be used for Nazi propaganda.

The Hindenburg, which floated along at 84 m.p.h., offered fine meals and was the only aircraft ever equipped with showers for passengers. They paid $400 for a one-way trip from Germany to the United States, the equivalent of nearly $3,000 today. The Nazis believed the Hindenburg would show the world their technical superiority.

Against Eckener’s wishes, huge swastikas were painted on the Hindenburg’s tail. Loudspeakers mounted on the airship promoted Hitler’s programs on flights across Germany.

But Germany had a serious problem. The safest gas to use in dirigibles was helium, and the United States had a worldwide monopoly on the gas it extracted from fields near Fort Worth, Tex.

The Helium Conservation Act of 1925 forbade the United States from exporting the gas, which Congress feared could be used by other nations for military purposes.

So Eckener had to fill the Hindenburg with 7 million cubic feet of volatile hydrogen, which was eight times cheaper than helium but could ignite when mixed with oxygen.

Adding to his difficulties was the political climate, including Hitler’s rise to power. Before its last flight, letters to the German ambassador in Washington warned of sabotage aboard the Hindenburg.

So when the Hindenburg exploded in flames, there were several theories on the cause--explanations that still are debated.

Author Michael Mooney contended that a phosphate bomb had been planted by a leftist crewman to embarrass the Nazis, a theory seconded by witness Verna Thomas.

“We always felt it was a bomb,” she said, explaining that if the zeppelin had not been 12 hours late it would have been on its return trip to Frankfurt at the time of the explosion. “It would have happened overseas and nobody would have known about it.”

But American and German investigative commissions concluded that a spark caused by static electricity ignited leaking hydrogen.

“The loss of the Hindenburg was the final nail in the coffin (for zeppelins),” Iannaccone said. “The fire would have never happened if the Hindenburg was full of helium.”

A zeppelin never again took off on a passenger trip. Even though there had been four dirigible accidents with higher death tolls, the extensive publicity given the Hindenburg accident and problems such as Nazi militarism doomed the zeppelin.

“As much as anything, there is the broader issue of the availability of helium, plus the things that were happening in Europe in the late 1930s,” said Claudia Oakes, aeronautics curator at the Air and Space Museum in Washington.

“If not for (those problems), I think perhaps the zeppelin people could have recovered from the Hindenburg disaster.”

Five decades later, Lakehurst still is a quiet rural town. McDonald’s has a large mural of the Hindenburg and there’s a zeppelin model in the window of Hyland Realty, but few current residents saw the disaster.

The 7,400-acre air base where it occurred, now the Naval Air Engineering Center, tests Navy aircraft and each May 6 acknowledges that it “was put on the map by the Hindenburg,” said Nick Grand, spokesman for the center.

The Navy is considering creation of a surveillance and communications airship reminiscent of a zeppelin. A contract for a prototype probably will be awarded this month and the $200-million program could produce a helium-filled craft that is a mix of blimp and dirigible.

“An airship can stay up indefinitely,” said Navy spokesman Lt. Paul Weishaupt. “And it can take a hit and keep right on going. (A missile) is going to go right on through.”

Iannaccone, who proudly shows off a charred piece of the Hindenburg’s metal structure and a blacked silver teaspoon with a tiny zeppelin insignia, misses the days of the giant airships.

“They had a place. I think they still have a place,” he said.

Eckener, who took an ocean liner to the United States a few days after the disaster, was in shock when he saw the wreckage of the Hindenburg.

“It appeared to me the hopeless end of a great dream,” he wrote later, “a kind of end of the world.”