36 SEPTEMBER 2019 ÇPlane&Pilot
a blimp, at least not technically. Dirigibles can be rigid or
semi-rigid airships, their structure largely maintained by
an internal airframe. The Hindenburg was a dirigible, an
airship with an internal frame. The semi-rigid ones are
part dirigible and part blimp, but they get called dirigibles,
too, we’re guessing because early-last-century blimps were
considered lesser vessels. Regardless of who’s throwing
shade on whom, in the end they’re all airships, so when
in doubt, you can always rely on that term.
Unlike the other terms, “Zeppelin” isn’t a technical
description, but rather a brand name that the public
adopted a century ago as generic, like facial tissues being
referred to as “Kleenex” or cotton-tipped swabs as “Q-tips.”
The British rock group Led Zeppelin, famous for its classic
ballad “Stairway To Heaven,” is indeed named after the
Zeppelin airships, specifically by the one that caught fire
in 1937. The term is a disguised play on words on the term
“lead balloon.” The band came up with the name after a rival
predicted the group would be a bust, like a lead balloon.
Co-opting the idea, the band, which
featured guitarist/songwriter Jimmy
Page and vocalist Robert Plant, bass-
ist John Bonham and drummer John
Paul Jones, adopted the name “Led
Zeppelin,” which sounded a lot more
dangerous and combustible than
“lead balloon,” which proved to be
true. People who were around at the
time say that the idea to change the
word “lead” to “led” was the man-
ager’s idea, done in order to prevent
people from mispronouncing “lead”
as “LEED.”
Providing a physical stairway at least partway to
heaven, Zeppelin airships weren’t blimps; they were
and are dirigibles—there’s a company making airships
by the “Zeppelin” name today, none of which are made
of lead. While the line of succession from the original
Zeppelin company of the early 1900s to today’s firm is
tenuous, the modern-day airship maker did get its seed
money in the early 1990s from the original firm. Both
companies are/were based in Friedrichshafen, Germany,
where today’s annual Aero Expo sport aviation trade
show takes place.
If you think you’ve got the terms figured out, we’ve
got some bad news. Goodyear, famous for its blimps,
had a partnership with Zeppelin in the interwar years
and has been flying airships since 1925. Goodyear is
sure to mess up everyone’s understanding of which kind
of airship is which because it insists on referring to its
eponymous airship as the Goodyear Blimp, even though
its current crafts are not blimps at all but semi-rigid air-
ships, dirigibles. Why not use that term, then? “Goodyear
Semi-Rigid Airship” has a nice ring to it, right? Okay, not
so much. The new Zeppelin company manufactures the
current fleet of three Goodyear “Blimps.”HOW THEY “FLY ”
How airships work is pretty self-evident. They fly because
they float. Because they are lighter than the air sur-
rounding them, they rise up in it, kind of like a helium
balloon. Okay, exactly like a helium balloon. Airships
do create some lift on their own when in motion, due
to their shape. In that regard, they are a kind of lifting
body, though the ratio of lift to float in an airship is very
small, and the same could be said for most fixed-wing
aircraft as well. And some airships have vestigial-looking
wing-like structures that provide some aerodynamic lift
and control, though it’s not much of either commodity.
Airships get around through a combination of gravity
and hefty shoves. They’re notoriously difficult to park.
It takes a crew of a dozen or more experienced ground
handlers working in close coordination with the pilots
to get the big floaty beasts safely moored after a flight.
Unlike hot air balloons, which float on the breeze, air-
ships are powered craft that go where their pilots want
them to, for the most part, anyways.
Engines provide the motive force to
make an airship move faster than or
against the wind, and those engines
are typically attached to the outside
of the envelope or to what’s known
as a gondola, the attached struc-
ture beneath the balloon where the
pilot and passengers typically ride. In
most cases, airships are twin-engine
aircraft, and for a reason. They need
to use differential power in order to
steer. To turn right, they increase the
power in the left engine or decrease it
in the right or some combination of those things. It’s vice
versa to go left. In early airships, mechanics were stationed
at the engines so they could maintain them in flight. Not
a job we’d want. A few modern airships are looking to use
electric power as the propulsion of the future.
For flight control, airships use a combination of tech-
nologies, including venting gas, dropping ballast, trans-
ferring water weight internally to change the center of
gravity and adjusting flight control devices, like elevators
and rudders, for fine control.
That said, there’s limited fine control of an airship. These
vessels really do handle like large ships afloat in a sea of
water instead of air. Nothing happens fast in an airship,
and there’s no time to delay. Airship pilots need to antici-
pate changes far ahead of time while also being ready to
make instantaneous adjustments to the craft’s trajectory
because the need for lead-time is great. Airships, unlike
sea-going craft, have the added dimension of altitude and
must cope with the vicissitudes of the profound effects of
wind speed and wind direction. Granted, these weather
phenomena affect large, engine-driven, oceangoing ves-
sels too, but to a smaller degree in general. Suffice it to say
that airship pilots need to be supremely skilled aviators.Airships worked as
a form of transport
back in the 1930s only
because there weren’t
any decent airliners yet,
so a trans-Atlantic trip
across The Pond in a
Zeppelin made sense.