Hindenburg Documentary 17th September 2007

[DeepC]

I fell asleep roughly half an hour before the end of last night's documentary. Please can someone enlighten me as to how the programme concluded the airship was brought down.

My wife watched it up to the point when the designer chap reckoned that a combination of sharp turn causing cable to snap and puncture gas bag and delayed earthing of a highly statically charged airship conspired to bring it down. Was this the final conclusion?

Good docu-drama I thought. The shots featuring the airship shed looked like they were shot at Cardington.

DeepC

[Footless Halls]

Very good prog, actually. Not sure who made it. Even though there wasn't any proof, it left little doubt in my mind that the cause of the accident was fire triggered by structural failure towards the tail of the ship.
The ship had experienced strong headwinds all the way across the Atlantic and was 12 hours late. The officers were under strong pressure to get it down quickly. The weather at their landing ground was stormy and the air turbulent.
As they arrived they presumably experienced turbulent air and also made at least one turn a lot tighter than was prudent (shades of the R37?). A tight turn could easily snap an internal rigging wire, which equally easily could puncture a gas bag. After that on their final approach they dropped a lot of ballast from the tail, indicating that the ship had become tail heavy. One can postulate that this was as a result of a hydrogen leak from one of the bags in the tail. This much seems pretty plausible - likely indeed. The only thing left a mystery is what the actual source of ignition for the hydrogen was.
Contributing to the disaster was a possible conflict between the Captain (Preuss?) and a superior officer in the comapny who was accompanying him (Lehmann?) - (shades of the Tenerife disaster?).
All very sad.

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

I also became "distracted" before the end. A problem when fact and informed conjecture are diluted with yards of drama. I missed any mention of aluminium nitro dope and static electric discharge across it.

[Akrotiri bad boy]

You're right GBZ; there was no mention of the metal based dope used on the fabric.

I understand that the airship became massively static charged during the transit through the storm. The metallic dope had the effect of bonding the entire airframe but without the means of dissipating the electrical charge to atmosphere. The mooring ropes would earth the airframe, unfortunately they hit the deck sometime after the rigging cable gave way and punctured the gas bag. Therefore hydrogen was filling the aft compartment as the static electrical charge flowed to earth.....boomshanka.

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

All aircraft in flight acquire a potential difference between Earth and themselves. That's why use of the earthing pole is very important during VERTREPs (Naval term for receiving stores as underslung loads on helicopters). Even dumping water ballast can generate a static electric charge; rather like a Van der Graaf generator where the water is the belt. Physics is boring and not very good television, though.

[spekesoftly]

For those that fell asleep, became distracted, or just missed it altogether (like me!) the programme is repeated on Saturday at 21:00 BST on More4. (Freeview14*, Sky138, VirginTV142)

*Freeview13 if you haven't done a rescan since 20th August