The Hindenburg’s Interior | Hacker News Reader

The Hindenburg’s Interior

rarehistoricalphotos.com

147 pointsWarOnPrivacy104 comments

It’s interesting that the furnishings look, well, modern.

They don’t look dated, or quaint, or from another era. The Bauhaus really did win.

I think part of it is the lagging effect of copycat manufacturing that keeps it up even longer. You can get a copycat 1950 eames chair at any big box store today. However it seems like those copycats only really emerged the last 10-20 years. So we are now in this period where you might see a 70 year old fiberglass chair someplace and think it to be a very modern design. It probably won’t last forever I expect, but it makes you wonder what would even qualify today to be the next eames chair. I’m not sure how many contemporary, truly seminal designers there are today akin to an eames. Many more players in the space today from around the world keeps the notoriety distributed.

Literally Modernist. There’s some details that might be Art Deco inspired but overall just clean lines, metal tube furniture, uncluttered. It fits with the need to keep weight down.

The Modern architect Le Corbusier took inspiration from the clean lines and shapes of aircraft and such, you can read about it in Vers Une Architecture.

Eh, the current furniture trend is all about precisely cut woods. The Hindenburg furniture looks like something you would see in a diner or fast food restaurants.

It’s worth noting that everything, including the furniture, was designed to be lightweight and not flammable, so it isn’t necessarily representative of what was in vogue then either.

They didn't say it looks like expensive modern furniture. They said it doesn't look quaint or dated.

The fact that such design been made accessible and democratized isn't a disqualifier. If anything it makes it even more "of our time."

It’s dated, just not its original dates.

Diners have been dying for a long time and fast food chains are busy ripping out their dining rooms for more drive thru lanes in 2024.

Especially post-COVID but even before then, the vast majority of their sales were coming from drive-thru. The people who came inside were retirees who would order from the dollar menu and get a free cup of coffee and sit there for an hour.

I HATE drive-through. And mostly have no interest in going to places like Starbucks unless maybe if I'm traveling.

And then they'll add them back while people wait for their cars to recharge.

On the other hand, the heavy use of aluminum parts resembles modern airplane interiors to some extent. Truly a great material, lightweight and strong.

There was an aluminum piano on board, too.

Airlines take great care to hide the metal in their cabins, particularly the lie flat seats of first and business.

Here in my city in Germany called Friedrichshafen there is the "Zeppelin Museum", as it's is the birthplace of the Zeppelins, and there is a walkable Partial reconstruction of the LZ 129 Hindenburg interior.

You can have a walk around that from home, on Google Arts & Culture:

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/explore-the-zeppelin...

That's awesome, thank you. Perfect replica. Is there a replica of a cabin?

Sergey Brin (and others, I'm sure) hopes to bring airships back with the technological advances since - https://spectrum.ieee.org/lta-airship-faa-clearance

I've heard the bringing back the Zeppelin stories all my life. It never happens.

There’s also the, umm, Flying Bum[1] descended from a discarded project of the US military. (It’s not quite clear what they wanted to do with it—radio relay for ground troops in difficult terrain? mobile command post?) Filling it with helium (expensive and very limited on Earth) feels kind of barbaric, though, knowing what lengths even physics labs go to in order to avoid wasting it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_Airlander_...

> "it can use nonflammable helium instead of explosive hydrogen as a lifting gas."

Frustrating FUD that's held back Hydrogen lift airships for almost a century, because clickbait scaremongering sells newspapers. What about [1] and [2], Spectrum.IEEE reporting on Hydrogen fuel-cell electric aircraft, or [3] them reporting on a hydrogen fuel cell rescue truck, without mentioning explosions or the Hindenburg.

You know how many people died in the Hindenburg disaster?

36.

And how many survivors?

62.

Yes that's too many. FOURTY TWO THOUSAND people killed by cars EVERY YEAR in the USA[7] held back car development or sales? When was the last time an aeroplane crash killed that many people? It was August 9th - only a month ago - a crash in Brazil killed 66 people[4]. Before that? January 2023 a crash in Nepal killed 72 people. In fact, look how many plane crashes there are[5] - that doesn't leave newspapers scaremongering about airplane travel and regulators banning it. OK, it does, "Horrific Oregon plane crash shows moment aircraft flies into home and EXPLODES as residents evacuate area" a week ago in the Daily Mail[8].

Jet fuel is explosive, explosions are how engines work! A Boeing 737 carries ~20,000 litres or ~5300 gallons of jet fuel, and nobody writes articles about how planes are bad because jet fuel burns.

With today's technology, and all the improvements in airline safety generally - checklists, regulations, mandatory inspections and maintenance, why wouldn't Hydrogen lift airships be similarly safe to airplanes? Look at "List of airship accidents"[6] and ask yourself how many could be made unlikely with today's technology, weather forecasting, and careful design and maintenance procedures? The first 30 years are mostly:

    - crashed
    - fell apart
    - burnt
    - strong winds broke moorings / crashed it / tore it apart
    - exploded

And if you think the fire risk is not safely manageable, have a think about Hydrogen refuelling pumps at every gas station on every town and city street, used by ordinary people not paying much attention, refuelled and maintained by the lowest bidder, into old, maybe poorly maintained, cars and trucks.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/hydrogen-powered-planes-fuel-cells

[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/stealthy-startup-promises-cheap-ca...

[3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/hydrogen-truck-emergency-rescue

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voepass_Linhas_A%C3%A9reas_Fli...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

[8] I'm not linking to the Daily Mail. If you're desperate to read it, you'll have to find it.

Helium is a much less effective lifting gas than hydrogen, meaning there goes your payload. Helium is a non-renewable resource, too.

The hydrogen gas could also fuel the engines.

I concur that the risk of hydrogen in a Zeppelin is overstated. We know why the Hindenburg burned, and that is easily fixed. (Static electricity discharge, and the skin coated with rocket fuel.)

Now do deaths per mile traveled for those modes of transport.

Deaths per mile travelled for planes and cars designed and built before 1930, for a fair comparison. The Graf Zeppelin launched in 1928 did 1,000,000 miles with no crashes, deaths or injuries. How many other vehicles from the 1920s were that capable and safe?

I'm not sure deaths per mile is a good way to compare different modes of transport.

Suppose a company discovered warp drive and started offering trips to the Andromeda galaxy. Their warp starships can carry 100 passengers. Establishing the warp field is dangerous, and 99% of the time the result is an explosion that destroys the ship (and everyone aboard). If the warp field is successfully established actually traversing the warp field is safe enough that the chances of anything going wrong in transit are negligible.

Those warp starships that kill 99% of their passengers would have a fatality rate per passenger mile 5 orders of magnitude lower than that of commercial airlines, and 8 orders of magnitude lower than that of automobiles but I doubt many people think is is safer.

More relevant is that if someone straps wings on their back, jumps off a building and dies, that’s 1 death/0miles or infinity deaths per mile.

To get deaths per mile down needs a long tail of safe mass use, and that comes after the rough early days of little use and lots of accidents. Cars got a lot less deathy after banning drunk driving, adding white lines on the roads, banning jaywalking - things outside Car technology - as well as seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones, better headlights, power assisted brakes, antilock brakes.

Zeppelins used Hydrogen and several deadly accidents were while emptying or refilling. Now there are better materials, equipment, OSHA rules, industries which deal with natural gas and gasoline and other dangerous gases and chemicals routinely which is outside Zeppelin technology but would help make them safer.

One Zeppelin crash was the gas release valves sealed shut to save money. We have better regulation around airline safety to catch that kind of “safety device isn’t functioning” and expect failovers at the design stage, also outside them being Zeppelins and just general bad practice.

One Zeppelin crash was a last minute extension to the design launched before it could be tested properly for political reasons, that’s an avoidable problem with regulatory bodies overseeing designs and builds - also general bass practice.

Aircraft got safer once the copilot started flying and the pilot advised. Because of social power imbalances, it’s much easier for the pilot to correct the assistant, than for yer assistant to correct the pilot. Maybe that could benefit Zeppelins?

Ocean travel got safer as ships learned to avoid the worst routes and weather, and with the Panama and Suez canals; by the time of the Titanic when lifeboat regulations were being discussed it was an argument that ships don’t crash enough anymore to benefit from lifeboats. Lots of Zeppelin problems with storms should be improved with todays weather prediction/reporting as well as storm-proof materials.

Zeppelins stopped before all those kinds of changes/developments. Left in the era of men standing in a field holding onto them by ropes, altitude by sonar echo and stopwatch, radio by dangling a wire to use as an antenna, controlling speed by telling a man sitting by each engine to turn them up or down, then saying “high deaths per mile they must be inherently unsafe” is more scaremongering dismissal than genuine interested carefully reasoned position.

Well, maybe it's still better than the alternative of trying to get there by chemically propelled rocket, and having a 100% chance of dying of old age on the way.

I get your point technically, but I think the mildly fallacious part of your argument is that the warp example opens up the possibility of orders of magnitude farther travel in the first place, whereas most Earthbound modes of transport are not too far off from one another in their potential. Nobody’s driving a Corolla to the Andromeda Galaxy, or flying on a 737. Therefore no one ought to be comparing them on any distance-related metric, probably. Perhaps a pure “chances that a given person boarding the craft disembarks alive” metric would be better.

I'll make sure to remember these pictures next time I'll be crammed into my economy class seat for 9 hours flying over the Atlantic.

Will you also remember the price difference, the choice of flights and how common it is now vs then?

No. I won't remember that I could fly first class for a lot more money, either, because that's equally not what I was getting at.

My favorites though not Zeppelin. Dining rooms, sleeping berths while faster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dornier_Do_X

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_377_Stratocruiser

Why did we stop building crazy stuff like this?

Everything seems to now be an exercise in somehow optimizing profits

Even our billionaires are boring now

Where are the wild eyed people dreaming up impossible megastructures and geoengineering projects? I can’t imagine anyone even attempting to build the Panama canal today

>Everything seems to now be an exercise in somehow optimizing profits

It has always been, but now the idea is to maximize it as fast as possible and “tomorrow is not my problem”, same as school grades discussed in another post, the goal is to pass the metrics, the final result doesn’t really matter.

You may be right. And it’s odd. Everyone is talking about AI and the future and all of that. But really, we live as if there is no tomorrow. Nobody would start a construction project anymore that would pay off a generation later. Compare that to medieval building projects. I imagine we lack a stable foundation to stand on. If you have no idea what the world will look like 50 years from now (and what people will value them), it’s useless to make any long term investments. Your customers are the people of today, along with their ideas about the future - but not the people of the future themselves.

Same problem in education. We have no idea what kids will need 20 years from now. So we just let them do what they like. Not because we cared more than the teachers of the past. But because they had a plan and a mission and a reason why to pull kids through training that sometimes was tough for them, whereas we don’t.

Yep, optimization. I did at some point napkin on cargo Zeppelin 3-4 days vs 747 in half a day Shanghai to SFO. Zeppelin would burn almost the same fuel, and ultimately 747 would provide higher ROI due to more flight over the same time period.

The Hindenburg, and apparently those linked planes ended after catastrophic accidents. Not saying they couldn't have been revived but safety has a way of constraining what you might do.

Reading the main article reminded me of the Concorde. Similar luxury vibes and similar end.

The interior of the Concorde was cramped. It's luxury was speed.

My dad once was once upgraded from his usual first class to a Concorde. His reaction was basically "meh." As I recall, he landed at a less convenient time and really preferred his usual seating which wasn't as comfortable as today.

> Even our billionaires are boring now

Not Elon Musk. He's anything but boring.

There's plenty of comfortable travel available if you're not in a hurry. You just need to pay for it.

I've done Atlantic crossings by ship. You just need the time and schedule around availability. (And pay the premium of course.)

There's plenty of comfortable travel even if you are in a hurry... If you can pay for it. Modern first class is pretty good and beyond that you could always fly private (I have only ever flown economy, though).

True. I usually don't but have flown business trans-Pacific. Taking an ocean liner when schedule permits is very comfortable but really is a different beast.

two days on either side of a two to three week vacation is viable

ten days on either side is not

It depends on your situation. And, given Starlink, there's a lot of flexibility these days for people who can work remote.

ADDED: And if they can't work remote adding a few days on the sides probably isn't a great option either. Certainly it wasn't a good option when I was maximizing vacation days.

Stopping in the Azores wouldn't be a bad way to break things up

> A one-way fare between Germany and the United States was US$400 (equivalent to $7,811 in 2021); Hindenburg passengers were affluent

I feel like seeing such an affliction happen to so many of the richest people at once is what killed interest in the zeppelin

I always felt that was too reductive, one crash killed public interest? No more like it killed that tiny market’s interest

I think it could be done better, safer, and cheaper now

I think it's more a case of things moving on. The Hindenburg crashed only shortly before cross atlantic passenger flight by much faster planes took off (around 1939). The Hindenburg was already a bit obsolete by the time the accident happened. And of course WW II then happened which made passenger travel by plane a bit impractical. Even so there was plenty of it happening.

Post WW II we had transatlantic flights taking over and creating the modern aviation industry. With iconic planes like the Lockheed Constellation (which first flew in 1943). Initially those would have been similarly luxurious. And this is also not that different from what a Concorde ticket would have cost later on. And of course Concorde flights were also discontinued after a crash. Not unlike the Hindenburg.

These days, there's a business and first class section servicing the rich with similar pricing. This never really went away.

Concorde just became a poor value for everyone involved. It was noisy, it sucked fuel, it required three crew on the flight deck to operate it, demand was dropping because for their money, people were preferring the more oppulent, spacious, and comfortable first class of a modern wide-body than the cigar-tube regional jet experience of sitting in the Concorde, even if it was faster.

The crash just sealed its fate.

Another factor is that Germany was the expert in airships. The Zeppelin company scrapped their airships, made fixed-wing aircraft during the war, and was nearly destroyed at end of war.

After the war, planes were better and faster.

Similarly, the Concorde crash also featured horrifying film of it flying trailing a gigantic fireball, shown over and over on TV.

It would give anyone pause thinking of flying in it.

> one crash killed public interest

It was not really one crash, but a series of crashes.

R38 broke up in the air over the UK. Roma crashed and burned in Virginia. Dixmude exploded mid-air over Sicily. R101 crashed and burnt in France. R100 was declared a failure and broken up. USS Akron crashed, and so did the USS Shenandoah.

Yes. That generation of airships was terrible at maneuvering. An airship has huge sail area, isn't very strong, and is not high powered. Crosswinds are a big problem.

The modern Zeppelin NT handles better. Remember Airship Ventures, which used to have an airship touring over Silicon Valley? They had one. Unfortunately, they launched the service in 2008, during the recession. Then the price of helium doubled. So that operation shut down. The NT was fly by wire with steerable fans, which gave it enough maneuverability that it could be landed without a big ground crew. Here's the Airship Ventures craft landing at Moffett Field.[1]

DARPA funded Lockheed-Martin's Skunk Works to build a more maneuverable airship. The result was the P-791.[2] This could be taxied out of a hangar, flown, landed, and taxied back in, all under its own power. All the propellers are on two-axis gimbals, and the flight control systems is constantly adjusting them to keep it level. It has hovercraft-type air bags as landing gear, so it can suck itself onto the ground when needed under windy conditions. All the propellers are on two-axis gimbals. Worked fine, but no military need at the time.

I'm surprised that no billionaire has an airship yacht yet. You need an airship-sized hangar anywhere you want to go, though, so there are not many destinations possible.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b5zO1ZzTws

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_P-791

> I'm surprised that no billionaire has an airship yacht yet.

When people ask me what would I do if i won the lottery i tell them that I would build a liveaboard airship. Would need to win multiple lotteries probably, and also the liveaboardness would need to be very minimalistic but still it would be awesome just even the journey to get there.

I feel like something similar was in a movie I watched recently. Mission Impossible or James Bond (Argyle maybe)?

What killed public interest was not necessarily the crash, but the happenstance that it was filmed and shown over and over and over, along with the famous live radio broadcast of it. Heck, my dad even saved 1937 newspaper clippings of the fireball.

Yes. I mean one just has to look at the last picture of the article with the Hindenburg burning. Not even the best propagandist could save this disaster.

> better, safer, and cheaper now

I'm not so sure. What killed most Zeppelins was bad weather.

Germany's war preparations starting to divert resources away from civilian enterprises during the time probably didn't help either. Those zeppelins were massive investments in terms of material and industry after all

I was thinking that too

A lot of trends were cut short by the world wars

A lot of things I like from the 1890s and 1900 early aughts just stopped being made or were never explored fully, and then I remembered “oh yeah, everybody died” and its like the first time in hundreds of years that something so broadly affected so many socioeconomic classes in so many places at once

happened again in the late 1930s

That's also why they were using hydrogen gas in the first place. Helium was too expensive.

The Zeppelins were funded by the government for their massive propaganda value.

This isn't too far off from the cost of a first-class trans-continental flight.

Yeah, it would probably have been economically viable if zeppelins had a pleb and business class too

The cabins were already tiny. Can you imagine sitting in the economy seats with 20" of legroom and airline quality food for a week?

Yeah. It's hard to justify premium and much more time-consuming transatlantic travel even when I can afford it. I've done it for various reasons. But generally I'd prefer to spend my money and and time on other things.

They'd look different than airlines, Zepplins were primarily weight constrained instead of volume. Dumping the cabins can save a lot of weight.

> US$400, .... $7,811

Ah, peanuts! Chump change!

Somewhere recently saw a review of the Titanic, lots of pictures (taken BEFORE leaving England!) with the mention that the 1st class fare was $100,000. And that the ship cost $1.5 million to build.

So 15 first-class passengers on one trip would pay for the whole ship? I assume a 16th would pay all the costs of making a trip.

That's a ridiculous cost structure. What was going on?

One number is being adjusted for inflation, the other number is not. Per Wikipedia, the highest first class fare was £1000 in currency at the time, and the ship itself cost about £1.5 million in currency at the time.

They didn't have to do multi-hundred-million dollars certification (and i think their safety record wasn't good). The lower speed also lowers the costs of making it. They are really less a plane and more like a ship, only floating in the air, and the ships are significantly cheaper.

Assuming those numbers are accurate, that $100k surely bought a lot of amenities (not just food and beverage, but also dedicated staff people) that weren't free.

You think the running cost of a trip was over $100,000? I mentioned this specifically in my first comment.

A quick check suggests the passenger manifest has, OK, 8 first-class passengers.

It sounds like the ship is expected to turn a profit by the time it makes its second voyage. Really?

Of course not. That high ticket cost certainly had a healthy profit margin.

Oops: Looks like the $100,000 would be okay, accurate enough, if change the ',' to a '.' and get $100.000.

There is no way today to have the experience of looking down at the earth, silently, from a few thousand feet.

I think an LA to Las Vegas route could be viable. You aren’t limited by volume— only weight. You could have huge vaulted ceilings and massive windows. Hell, bungee jumping while we’re at it.

Here’s a vision deck for an aerostatic future: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r6CPFJ1AX1ZULacguTf6...

Hot air balloons get you close and because they’re unpowered you are flowing in and with the wind, so there is absolutely no apparent movement.

It's funny when I see hollywood films of people in balloons with the wind ruffling their hair.

I can picture the rigid airship Excelsior from Archer.

For the last time, the Excelsior is filled with non-flamable helium!

For the longest time I had frisky dingo and Archer mixed up. I never understood how Archer was so mainstream when it was SO weird.

Like Indiana Jones and the last crusade then

Both the movie and the adventure game. They were perfect for their time. It reminds me that I should play it again.

“No ticket”

That's some serious drillium on the photos.

I'd love to see airships (and flying boats) come back. Would open up new routes and different destinations.

They're just too slow for most people. Like trains. There's a certain charm to spending three days to get to LA on a train, eating in the dining car and watching the scenery go by, but for most people they'd rather get on an airliner and be there in 4 hours.

Like cruise ships? An airplane can also get you places way faster, but cruise ships are a some $50 billion industry, with some 30 million passengers each year. How much of that industry would an airship need to slice off to be profitable?

Cruise ships are about the cruise though. They're not really to get anywhere. I think most of them start and end at the same port?

While they were both still in service, there was a famous long-serving cruise package of QE2 from Southampton to NYC, then Concorde back (and another package of the opposite directions)

But yes, mostly these days cruises are a circular trip.

Some info: https://www.heritageconcorde.com/concorde--the-qe2

Queen Mary 2 today.

Yes. It's nice. There's a lot of entertainment. Good food. But you need to be in a circumstance where you don't really care about the time (or the money although it's in the ballpark of business class air for two people).

So an airship that runs over a picturesque coastline route would do the trick. Don’t have to fly over the Atlantic. Just fly around the caribbean islands

Just avoid the ads and go to the source https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/

Fantastic pictures! I've seen books on the Hindenburg, and haven't seen these pix before.

Love all the weight-saving construction of everything.

I wish the billionaires would drop a few dollars into making enormous airships come back, just because they are amazing and not for profit.

Even for profit, they can lift more than anything else - build houses or appartments in a factory and float them accross the country to their destination. Then they can be bigger than road/bridge/tunnel limits. Because they are buoyant they don't need much energy for the effort of lifting (improves on airplane, helicopter, hovercraft, mag-lev).

If not that, then just for tourism / novelty / showing off. Along the lines of the beautiful (but not very economical) buildings of old - train stations, libraries, opera houses - to show off doing something grand and impressive.

> just because they are amazing and not for profit

Why all this angst about somebody making a profit? Why does it have to lose money in order to be acceptable? If it's amazing, who cares if a profit is made?

> "If it's amazing, who cares if a profit is made?"

That's what I said. Restated: billionaires already do things which are expected to be profitable; apparently Zeppelins are not in that case and I can't argue that I think they would be profitable and should be in that case, so that case doesn't need commenting on. The case where they do things as money losers, I would like it if that case included Zeppelins.

(angst about somebody making a profit) and (it has to lose money in order to be acceptable) are not things I said.

Profit ≠ revenue

> The latest gas cells were made by a new method pioneered by Goodyear using multiple layers of gelatinized latex rather than the previous goldbeater’s skins.

How much did Goodyear help Nazi causes (even inadvertently)? A company is like a machine automata in many ways.

p.s. The amount of metal on the Hindenburg was truly insane. With today's technologies 3x, probably even more, paying passengers could be accommodated aboard such a contraption. Plastic is the worst, laziest scourge ever (97%+ of supermarket packaging) and occasionally incredible.

p.p.s. the SuperGuppy (still flying, since 1965) is pretty remarkable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Spacelines_Super_Guppy

Isn't it true that at the time there wasn't anything like weather radar? What would have happened if a zeppelin got caught up in a strong storm?

Search [1] for 'storm' and 'blown' and 'wind'...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents

"Smoking Room"?

People smoked constantly in those days. Asking them to stop for a three day voyage would be untenable. It was probaby considered quite an imposition just to ask them to go to a special room.

But at negative pressure as I recall?

Higher pressure, to prevent hydrogen leaks from elsewhere coming in

That sounds correct.

I wish they'd bring back Led Zeppelin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com