April 4th 1933 / AirShip Crash

[Jetranger]

1933 The Airship Crashed ~ !!!

Link : http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/31/17540387-forgotten-us-airship-crash-recalled-80-years-later?lite

Jet

[Strategic Retreat]

We had a similar problem happening with the airship Italia, though in the harsh conditions of the north pole.

Fact is that those big oblong balloons had the same handling of a beached whale... their sensitivity to weather was just on another DIMENSION if compared to planes... could not land, but had to manned and moored to a pinnacle by hundreds of ground crew (with another accident happening always in the USA where some of said crew lost their life by dropping from deadly height after a failed attempt at mooring... forgot the name of the airship and the date and for this I am sorry)... were always at risk of explosions (the German hydrogen ones) or gas leakage anyway... looked ungainly... were a pain in the you-know to put into storage (humongous hangars were needed even for the smaller ones) and in spite of having more engines than a B36 none of them breached the 130Kmh barrier, making the outrunning of bad weather practically impossible... not to talk about military use, since were as inconspicuous as a fist in the face and as difficult to target as a lame buffalo.

You didn't need the harsh weather conditions of the pole for something bad to happen on one of those things, only statistics. We're better off with them having fallen out of common use.

[Steve M]

I still use the quote, "Oh the humanity of it all" from the Hindenburg incident. My grandfather was in the US Army balloon corp. in WW1. They weren't blimps, so to speak, as they were tethered to the ground, but he told me they made great observation platforms that could be raised just above the range of enemy rifle fire while able to observe the battlefield.

[Strategic Retreat]

I still use the quote, "Oh the humanity of it all" from the Hindenburg incident. My grandfather was in the US Army balloon corp. in WW1. They weren't blimps, so to speak, as they were tethered to the ground, but he told me they made great observation platforms that could be raised just above the range of enemy rifle fire while able to observe the battlefield.

Just above the range of rifle fire... but artillery? Already in the first world war there was artillery that could have, ostensibly, reached the flight levels of today's commercial planes.

And enemy's fighter planes? All right, the first years of the first world war fighter planes could have had problems, but already from 1916 onward... can you spell Turkey Shoot?

They were OK for the first world war, maybe, but already in the first thirties, it was already a given the plane would have the upper hand, it was only to resolve the matter of the range... and that was what the second world war did (among uncountable other things).

Trebuchets, crossbows, swords... they all were great in their times, but there's a reason they are not used today, in war.

[Steve M]

Late reply.. But the artillery of the day, at the begining of WW1 was a crap shoot. Yes.. you could fire those high and get good altitude, but that would severely shorten the 'range'. A calculation could be done, I believe, to keep the observation balloons out of range.

[Strategic Retreat]

Crap shot or not, an oblong flying GIGANTIC ball of gas it's hardly a something you can miss for long. After all, one could say that even during WWII anti-aircraft artillery was crap shot, yet the damage it did...