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It was good enough to get the Graf Zeppelin to be the first vehicle to fly around the world, first vehicle to fly a million miles[1] and so on, but it comes fro
by jodrellblank 3y ago
It was good enough to get the Graf Zeppelin to be the first vehicle to fly around the world, first vehicle to fly a million miles[1] and so on, but it comes from a time where the captain steered it with a ship's wheel, shouted down a pipe to men in the engine nacelles to adjust the engine speeds by hand, dangled a wire out below the ship to make radio contact, used audible pings to the ground below and listening for the echo delay to determine altitude, and a rope attached to a valve to let the Hydrogen out of the bags to descend, and water ballast to release to ascend. It's primitive compared to the vast improvements in air vehicle design, sensors, computers and safety technology between 1930 and today.
The reference to the Hindenburg is always calling to mind the big fire. The Hindenburg was 245m long, the Graf Zeppelin was 236m long. Would it be so bad to say "Sergey Brin's airship is the biggest since the days of the Graf Zeppelin"? or "One of the biggest since the days of the giant German Zeppelins of the 1930s"? Just comparing it straight out to one of the most famous disaster photos of the last century is ... an unfair and unnecessary kick. In what other fields would we get an instant comparison to a tragedy from a hundred years ago, every single time?
[1] Most of the airships of the time - British, French, American - were rubbish and broke apart or failed in various ways killing everyone onboard. How come the Graf Zeppelin was so incredibly succesful? This is like the stories of ye olde greybeards who built one incredible system in LISP in the 1970s and it has never been replicated before or since. What actually caused the Graf Zeppelin to be so anomalously good - was it Dr Hugo Eckener, was it procedures, was it something in the regulation or lack of, or government support or lack of, or some especially clever or suitable designer, or something in the manufacturing, or what?