[hindenburg] explosive sausage [continued]

The cost of a ticket from Germany to Lakehurst was quite considerable for the Depression era. Hindenburg passengers were generally of the affluent, including many leaders of industry. To reduce drag, the passenger rooms were contained entirely within the hull, rather than in the gondola as on the Graf Zeppelin.

The Upper A Deck contained small passenger quarters in the middle flanked by large public rooms: a dining room to port and a lounge and writing room to starboard. A stylized world map covered the wall of the lounge. Long slanted windows ran the length of both decks.

The passengers were expected to spend most of their time in the public areas. Harold G. Dick, of Goodyear, remembered; "The only entrance to the lower B Deck smoking room, which was pressurized to prevent the admission of any leaking hydrogen, was via the bar, which had a swivelling air-lock door, and all departing passengers were scrutinized by the bar steward to make sure they were not carrying out a lighted cigarette or pipe."

Many people don't realize that the Hindenburg had almost two years of faultless service before the disaster. On the night of May 3, 1937, the Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, only half full, probably because of concerns of a bomb on board. A letter was sent to the German Ambassador claiming the ship would be destroyed by a bomb after flying over New York City.

There were 36 passengers and 61 crew members but the return flight was fully booked by people attending the coronation of King George VI on May 12.

On May 6, Captain Max Pruss brought the Hindenburg to Lakehurst Naval Air Station, attempting a flying moor onto a tower. At 7:17, the trouble began when the wind shifted direction to southwest, and Pruss was forced to make a second sharp turn, water ballast was dropped, six men were also sent to the bow to trim the ship. None of these worked and Pruss was now permitted to land. At 7:21, altitude 295 feet, the mooring lines were dropped from the bow.

At this point, all cameramen stopped filming. This has never been adequately explained. At 7:25, witnesses on the port side started reporting a small burst of flame near the vent in front of the upper fin. Commander Rosendahl's feeling at once was that the ship was doomed. One witness on the starboard side reported a fire beginning lower and behind the rudder on that side

The Hindenburg quickly became engulfed in flames. Almost instantly, a water tank and a fuel tank burst out of the hull and the same time a crack appeared behind the passenger decks. The ship's back broke and about 34 seconds later it was over. 13 passengers and 22 crew died, one member of the ground crew and two dogs. Pruss was badly burned but survived.

At the time of the disaster, sabotage was commonly put forward as the cause of the fire, in particular by Hugo Eckener, former head of Zeppelin, together with Max Pruss himself. He pointed to the exemplary record to that point.

In 1962, A. Hoehling named the likely saboteur - Eric Spehl, a rigger on the Hindenburg, corroborated in 1972 by Michael MacDonald Mooney, on the grounds:

· His girlfriend's anti-Nazi connections;

· The fire's origin near Gas Cell 4, Spehl's duty station;

· Rumours that in 1938 the Gestapo was investigating Spehl's involvement;

· Spehl's interest in amateur photography, making him familiar with flashbulbs that could have served as an igniter. A dry-cell battery that might have powered a flashbulb was found in the wreckage;

· A flash or a bright reflection that crew members near the lower fin had seen just before the fire.

Since it is very unlikely that Spehl wanted to kill people, proponents of this sabotage theory say that he wanted the ship to explode after the landing [already over 12 hours late] but was too busy to reset the bomb.

During landing, rigger Hans Freund saw a flash like a flashbulb's, and rigger Lau said he saw a brilliant reflection between cells 4 and 5. Others believe Freund was actually looking rearward, away from cells 4 and 5, but that Rudolf Sauter, another crew member in the lower fin had seen the flash.

Another suspect was a passenger, a German acrobat named Joseph Spah, who owned one of the dogs qand was often at the rear. Opponents of sabotage argued that no credible evidence of sabotage was produced at any of the formal hearings.

Another theory posits that the fire was started by a spark caused by a buildup of static electricity on the airship. The skin was separated from the duralumin frame by non-conductive ramie cords and when the Hindenburg passed through a weather front of high humidity and high electrical charge, this made the airship's mooring lines wet and thus conductive.

Some witnesses reported seeing a glow consistent with St. Elmo's fire along the tail portion of the ship just before the flames broke out, but these reports were made after the official inquiries were completed.

The Hindenburg had a cotton skin covered with a finish known as "dope", flammable only when in liquid form. When the mooring line touched the ground, a resulting spark could have ignited the dope in the skin. Zeppelin took the static discharge theory seriously and considered the insulation of the fabric from the frame to be a design flaw in the Hindenburg.

A. J. Dessler, of NASA favors the Hindenburg being struck by lightning and cites an airship rule from the time: "Never blow off gas during a thunderstorm." The Hindenburg was doing just this. However, Dr. Eckener believed that the way the fire appeared was not consistent with lightning.

Ground crew member Robert Buchanan, on the mooring lines at the time, noted that one of the engines, thrown into reverse for a hard turn, backfired, and a shower of sparks was emitted. He and others think that this was the trigger that ignited the craft, not static electricity, as the official version goes. However, Dr. Eckener pointed out that the ignition temperature for hydrogen is 700° C, but the sparks from the exhaust only reached 250° C.

Addison Bain received permission from the German government to search its archives and discovered that during the Nazi regime, German scientists concluded that the dope on the Hindenburg's fabric skin was the cause of the conflagration. Bain interviewed the wife of the investigation's lead scientist, and she confirmed that her husband had told her about the conclusion and instructed her to tell no one.

Critics point out that port side witnesses, as well as crew members saw a glow inside Cell 4 before any fire broke out of the skin, indicating that the fire began inside the ship. Newsreel footage supports this. Photographs of the early stages of the fire show the gas cells of the Hindenburg's entire aft section fully aflame. Harold Dick wrote that the doping methods were changed for the LZ-130, with special attention to the cords with which the fabric was attached to the frame so that there would be a good grounding of the fabric on the Hindenburg's sister ship.

Those who believe hydrogen was the initial fuel discount arguments for the incendiary paint theory as not credible. They point out that cellulose acetate butyrate (CAB) varnish is rated within the plastics industry as combustible but nonflammable. That is, it will burn when placed in a fire but is not readily ignited by itself. In fact, it is considered to be self-extinguishing.[21] That many pieces of the Hindenburg's skin survived despite such a fierce fire is cited as proof. In his experiment, Addison Bain used a high-energy ignition source (a spark) to make it burn.

Although the hydrogen was reportedly odorised with garlic, nobody reported smelling the odor. Odorised hydrogen would have been detected only in the area of a leak. The fire started near the top of the airship far from any crew or passengers. Once the fire was underway, more powerful smells would have masked any garlic odor. There is however, no official document that the hydrogen was even odorised.

Gauges found in the wreckage showed the tension of the wires was much too high. Some of the wires may have been substandard. One bracing wire tested after the crash broke at only 70% of its rated load. A punctured cell would have freed hydrogen into the air and could have been ignited by a static discharge.

The photos clearly show that after the cells in the aft section of the airship exploded and the combustion products were vented out the top of the ship, the fabric on the rear section was still largely intact, and air pressure from the outside was acting upon it, caving the sides of the ship inward due to the reduction of pressure caused by the venting of combustion gases out the top.

Captain Pruss believed that the Hindenburg could withstand tight turns without significant damage. Others believe that the ship would have been weakened by being repeatedly stressed. Even a 10-meter, full-scale replica of the Hindenburg's passenger quarters, displayed in the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, has developed some metal fatigue.

16-year-old Bobby Rutan said he had smelled "gasoline" when he was standing below the Hindenburg's aft port engine, had detected a diesel fuel leak. The day before the disaster a fuel pump had broken during the flight. A crew member said this was fixed but it may not have been.

A Luger pistol with one shell fired was found among the wreckage.

So what to make of it?

It's the old dilemma of the rationalist who favours a "natural expanation" versus the cynic who favours a conspiratorial theory. Who is the more rational person? The rationalist automatically rejects collusion, then searches for backup and in the end always says that there is not enough "officially documented" evidence.

The cynic says there's hardly likely to be documentary evidence of any kind if there had been collusion. It would have been quite effectively spirited away and anyone supporting the sabotage theory would have been persuaded to change his mind, as Eckener clearly did.

The cynic asks why, in all normal walks of life, there are phone calls and deals of every kind but the moment there's a disaster, suddenly, no one is allowed by the rationalist to have cut any deal or to have carried out any industrial sabotage whatsoever. Suddenly evryone must be pristine clean in all their dealings.

I can't see why Zeppelin Company couldn't have put a man on the Hindenburg crew, for commerical purposes, to destroy the machine plausibly. Clearly the man would not have been aware that he himself was in any danger - in other words, an Oswald stool pigeon. Hell it happens all the time. if it never happened in any field, there wouldn't be the words "stool pigeon" in the English jargon.

So why couldn't there be this explanation? I'm not asking, "What evidence was there that there was sabotage but what evidence was there that there definitely wasn't?"

Remember, that theory was the prevalent one at the time. Also, it was wartime - the Brits would have been interested, the war money was changing hands [two years away from the opening sallies] - there were any number of quite cogent reasons for someone wanting to see it stopped.