For as long as mankind has been looking up to the sky, we've been trying to figure out
how to fly.
Safe air travel is commonplace today, but along the way, there were some incredibly
dangerous contraptions.
Keep watching to discover the deadliest airship accidents in history.
In 1925, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen met Italian aviator Umberto Nobile.
After one successful joint flight, Nobile made plans to take the newly built airship
Italia on another journey, without Amundsen.
He left in 1928, and the airship was almost immediately damaged while over the Alps, a
sign that was ignored by everyone on board.
The crew made it to the North Pole, but it wasn't long after they started heading back
that the Italia was pushed off course as winds picked up.
Ice started building up on the airship's skin, the engines started to fail, and the added
weight led to a crash that happened while they were still a two-hour flight from their
base.
The gondola was sliced off by the ice, and the balloon headed off into the sky again,
along with six crewmen.
Another died instantly in the impact, and nine more were stranded on the ice, most with
severe injuries.
Word that the expedition was missing eventually got back to civilization, and among those
who suited up to head out to search was Amundsen.
Ultimately, the rescue operation would be somewhat successful.
Eight of the original crewmen were rescued, but Norway's greatest explorer was now counted
among the missing.
Amundsen, who was just one of several good Samaritans who died in the rescue attempt,
was never heard from again, and his remains were never recovered.
It's almost too crazy to believe, but in 1926, Congress approved the development of two airships
that weren't just airships.
They were also aircraft carriers capable of hooking planes and hefting them into their
cargo bays.
The USS Akron was christened in 1931; a year later, it suffered a crash that smashed a
lower fin.
And that would only be the first of multiple problems.
A deadly incident happened later in the same year, when on May 11, 1932, the ship unexpectedly
rose up.
Three ground crew members were hauled into the air, with two of them dying after falling
from the ship's mooring lines.
Training exercises demonstrated again and again that the Akron wasn't the vehicle that
officials had hoped for.
But it nevertheless continued to make publicity appearances designed to get the public on
board with this whole airship idea.
Then on April 3, 1933, the Akron headed off on a mission along the eastern seaboard.
Within hours, a storm swept through, and the ship crashed about 20 miles off the coast
of New Jersey, with 73 of the 76 people on board dying in the cold Atlantic waters.
Just a few weeks before Admiral William Moffett died on board the USS Akron, his wife christened
the Akron's sister ship, the USS Macon.
The Macon started out doing a good job at what it was designed to do, which included
acting as a long-range scout.
Unfortunately, the Macon had a few modifications compared to the design of the Akron.
One of them, an upper fin that was no longer attached to the main body of the airship,
would cause a fatal crash.
The upper fin was first damaged by severe winds in Texas, and even though repairs were
desperately needed, they didn't happen.
Just a few months later, the Macon was caught in a storm over California.
The damaged fin failed, leading to a series of events where helium was lost, the crew
frantically scrambled to jettison weight, and the Macon crashed on the opposite coast
just like its sister ship had.
There were 83 people on board, but only two casualties, a drastic difference from the
death toll of the Akron, which was credited to the addition of life jackets to the essential
cargo.
As a result of the Macon's catastrophic failure, the Navy decided to put an end to its plans
to use airships as long-range scouting vessels attached to maritime fleets.
Today, the Macon remains at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
The airship known as the Roma was built by the Italian government and sold to the United
States in 1921.
It was the largest semi-rigid airship ever built.
But for all its impressive bulk, it also had some serious problems.
First and foremost were engine difficulties so bad that they prompted one regular crew
member, Staff Sergeant Marion J. Beall, to write to a friend,
"This ship is a death trap.
It's going down one of these days, and only three or four of us are coming out alive."
Beall was absolutely correct.
The crash happened near Norfolk, Virginia on February 21, 1922.
The Roma was sitting at 1,500 feet when it started to nosedive, and on its way to the
ground, it connected with electric lines.
The resulting fire quickly swept through the hydrogen-filled ship and killed 34 people.
Of the 11 who survived, most were badly injured.
The military launched an investigation into the crash, discovering that - big surprise
- it was a terrible idea to float an entire ship on highly flammable gas.
"FIRE BAD!"
It was a late summer afternoon in 1921 when thousands of people headed out to see the
test flight of the British airship known simply as R38.
It had been sold to the United States at the end of World War I, but though doubts were
expressed about the design, only a limited series of tests were conducted to make sure
it was sound.
During one of those tests, tragedy struck.
On August 24, the airship was partway through the test flight when fog made landing impossible,
and the stress caused by a tight turn at high speed snapped the ship in half.
The resulting explosion was so powerful that it was felt all across the city of Hull.
Windows shattered, people were knocked to the ground, and some were injured by flying
glass and debris.
Eyewitness reports described the R38 twisting in midair with the appearance of a "great
wrinkle like a twisted and rolled newspaper" across the bulk.
The ship crashed into the Humber River, and despite rescue efforts led by the locals,
44 of the 49 people on board died in the accident.
They were buried in a mass grave close to the crash site.
The tragedy not only ended Britain's interest in using airships in its military, it also
led to the closure of the Howden military base.
Nothing remains of the airship hangars today.
A tragic fate befell the Wingfoot Air Express on July 21, 1919.
It was a blimp owned by Goodyear, and on that fateful day, it was floating above Chicago
as part of a test flight, and some people were even lucky enough to get a ride.
But that luck didn't last, because around 5:00 PM, flames burst from the middle of the
airship.
It was above the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank at the time, and it plummeted straight
through the bank's glass roof.
There were five people on board, and although they all jumped, only two survived.
There were also bystanders among the casualties, including eight regular bank employees and
two teenage messengers.
Eyewitness reports noted that the ship's two engines only exploded when they hit the bank
floor, sending people running for the exits as their clothes burned.
Journalist George Putnam Stone had been dropped off by the crew just before the ship took
off on what would be its final flight.
He later recounted that when they'd run out of parachutes, he boldly opted to go without
one.
Because, as he said,
"Who ever heard of one of these things falling?"
Twenty minutes later, it was - you guessed it - burning.
"Frankenstein not thankful for fire.
Frankenstein fear fire."
The German zeppelin Dixmude was built with hostile intentions.
Constructed during the final years of World War I, it was supposed to be dispatched on
bombing runs over New York City.
That never happened, though, and after it was surrendered to the French, it spent several
years on the ground.
It wasn't until 1923 that the Dixmude was ready to fly, as it headed to the Algerian
oasis town of In Salah.
It dropped off a mail bag as it cruised over, but the ship and the 52 people on board never
made it to their next planned stop.
Scattered reports suggested that it had been caught in a storm and pushed off-course deeper
into Africa.
The truth was almost successfully covered up by the French government, until a few fishermen
pulled the body of the ship's commander out of the water near Sicily.
The commander's death was confirmed by Italian authorities, which made the French backtrack
a bit on the story they'd been telling.
The Dixmude hadn't been sighted heading inland over Africa after all, and it eventually emerged
that a group of Sicilian railway workers and a local hunter had witnessed the final moments
of the airship.
They saw lightning on the horizon, along with a burning cloud and falling debris, which
was all that remained of the Dixmude.
When the British R101 airship crashed in 1930, it killed 48 people, including one man who
could've changed the course of airship history if he had survived.
That was Lord Thomson of Cardington, who was one of the most vocal proponents of the development
of airship technology.
The R101 was built in the English town of Cardington, and Lord Thomson had been so sure
of its success that he'd thrown all of his weight into promoting the craft as the next
great advancement in aeronautics.
Despite a slew of technological advancements used in the construction of the R101, its
maiden voyage ended in flames.
It left England and headed to France on a first leg of what was supposed to be a luxury
cruise to India, but it quickly ran into problems with the wind.
The crew was able to recover from one dive, but not a second.
After an initial crash, the twisted structure pushed one of the engines into the hydrogen-filled
balloon, which erupted into flames.
There were only six survivors.
Maybe the worst part?
Following the crash of the R38, the British military considered a number of new safety
measures to ensure the tragedy didn't happen again.
But they didn't implement any of them, and instead willfully ignored the most obvious
lesson of them all.
"Fire bad!”
When the USS Shenandoah was built, it was groundbreaking.
America's first helium-filled rigid ship, it was 680 feet long, almost the length of
two football fields.
It was in the process of being displayed to the public when it was destroyed in the skies
over Ohio.
The Shenandoah was on an 11-state tour when on September 3, 1925, it stumbled into a weather
phenomenon known as a line squall.
Heavy winds lifted it even higher, twisting it, shattering its structure, and tossing
it back to earth, where pieces of the wreckage were scattered over Noble County, Ohio, killing
14 of the 43 people on board.
Reaction to the crash wasn't exactly Ohio's proudest moment.
The owner of the land where the Shenandoah crashed started charging curious people to
come onto his property.
And souvenir hunters descended on the crash site in numbers that ultimately led to soldiers
from a nearby military base being called out to try to protect the site.
But alas, as the Associated Press reported,
"Cables, platforms, joints, gasoline tanks, electric communications wires — everything
detachable was gone."
In 2020, Air & Space Magazine reported that pieces of the Shenandoah were still being
recovered.
The Hindenburg is surely the most famous of all airship disasters, but it was actually
less deadly than you might suspect.
There were 97 people on board when things started to go sideways and downward, and ultimately
62 survived.
The main reason the Hindenburg crash is so infamous is because it was caught on film
and viewed by millions.
Despite the recorded evidence, there are questions about what exactly happened.
The Hindenburg left Germany on May 3, 1937 and cruised into New Jersey three days later.
The crew maneuvered into a mooring position and dropped the lines, and that's when the
ship's fabric hull started to flutter and the fire started near the tail.
It spread so fast that it lasted just 34 seconds, leading to reporter Herbert Morrison's famous
outburst:
"Oh, the humanity!"
It's generally accepted that the fire started due to a mix of oxygen and escaping hydrogen,
but the fire's cause is still debated.
Long-running theories of sabotage have fallen out of favor.
Other possibilities are that it was sparked by an unfortunate build-up of static electricity,
or that it was due to St. Elmo's fire, which happens when static jumps between the air
and an object.
Whatever happened, it was truly the end of the airship era.
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