New Niche for an Old Travel Mode

Those building a new generation of dirigibles in this birthplace of the zeppelin have just one thing to say to the millions worldwide whose enduring image of airship travel is singed by the fiery crash of the Hindenburg: Get over it.

That was in 1937--in the infancy of aviation--and a tragic consequence of the German airship’s owners’ having inflated it with flammable hydrogen instead of harmless helium. The United States then had monopoly control of the gas and refused to supply Germany, for fear that the dirigibles would be conscripted into the Nazis’ aggressive plans.

“People don’t refuse to board commercial airliners because there have been a few crashes, and the cruise ship industry didn’t die when the Titanic sank, so why do people insist on associating modern airships with the Hindenburg?” demands Scott Danneker, chief pilot of the newest zeppelin, launched this week to mark the centennial of airship travel. “We’re doing stuff completely different from the old days.”

Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik, which has focused for the last six decades on making gears and auto parts amid the post-Hindenburg dearth in demand for airships, is seeking to re-create and serve a market for luxury flights aboard its new Zeppelin NT.

“The old airship was like the Queen Mary of its day,” Danneker says of the 1930s, when zeppelins transported thousands of passengers from Germany to Rio de Janeiro and New York in style, with staterooms and lounges that were aviation’s equivalent of first-class ocean liner travel.

Test flights have just been completed and certification data presented to the German aviation authorities, and licensing of the new 248-foot-long dirigible is expected by October, says Fritz Gunther, the pilot in charge of testing.

The Zeppelin NT prototype, christened the Friedrichshafen and launched at the start of this week of fanfare marking the July 2, 1900, flight of the first zeppelin, so far is the company’s only completed airship and thus serves as a test craft, marketing device and trainer for pilots from the firms that have ordered five of them. A second 12-passenger NT is due for completion in a few months and serial production will begin next year, company spokeswoman Jeannine Meighoerner says.

No one expects, in the Jet Age, to recapture the dirigible’s illustrious role in mass transport, but niche markets are opening for adventure tourism combined with old-fashioned pampering, and that has convinced dirigible builders that there is a market for today’s smaller, more maneuverable airships, Meighoerner says.

At a cost of about $7 million each, they are relatively affordable for purveyors of luxury travel and can offer quiet, close-up, even stock-still contemplation of scenery that no other form of aviation can claim.

The marketeers envision airship rides against dramatic backdrops such as Alpine valleys or the Rhine River becoming part of high-end European travel offerings, with guests departing from five-star hotel rooftops for day trips during which they can soak up champagne and canapes along with the view.

While the zeppelins are aimed at the tourism market, with some advertising revenue expected on the side, modern airships also have serious roles to play.

Britain’s Lightship Group, led by entrepreneur and adventurer Richard Branson, has developed its own line of dirigibles and offered one for testing ultra-wide-band radar’s use in detecting buried antipersonnel mines, the Journal of the Airship Assn. reports.

Another airship maker wannabe, CargoLifter in the eastern German city of Brand, last year sold shares in an enterprise that expects to develop and market a heavy-transport craft by 2004 for moving objects such as deep-sea oil platforms to locales that lack road, rail or air infrastructure.

“It’s a whole new world in airships, and we all have our niches to fill,” says Danneker, a North Carolinian who spent several years working on a dirigible project for Westinghouse that eventually was abandoned.

“We’re sick and tired of the Hindenburg,” he said. “It was a tragedy that sparked a lot of emotion because of the dramatic film footage, but after 63 years it needs to be laid to rest.”