Historic Airship Pictures (the Shenandoah, the Los Angeles, the Akron and the Macon as well as the Zeppelins and many more

© U.S. Naval Historical Center

The web is a big place and there are many hidden gems, websites that have been put together that contain a wealth of information but see only a few visitors. This post today was inspired by two pictures that I found online. Jim Ford had linked to them on his Delicious account One of the pictures was the homepage of George Starcher called Georges World he has a small section on Airships and some really nice pictures of the USS Los Angeles.
The second picture that Jim had linked to brought me through the Wikipedia to the Naval Historical Center I had bookmarked the website before but got lost in it's vastness. The best thing to navigate that website is the Search function. With this and a bit of knowledge about the Navy Airships you can get to the pages of the:

• USS Shenandoah (ZR-1), Airship 1923-1925
• USS Los Angeles (ZR-3), Airship 1924-1939
• USS Akron (ZRS-4), Airship 1931-1933
• USS Macon (ZRS-5), Airship 1933-1935

But you can also find pictures of the mast ship USS Patoka even with airships nearby or moored to the mast the resolution of all those pictures is not huge but good enough it makes a very interesting browse.

If the big Navy rigids aren't you favorites, how about some German Zeppelins? While continuing my search for great historic airship sites I stumbled accross this page called "Luftschiff Zeppelin" I had never seen this page before but was so much more surprised what a wealth of information and content the site had to offer. It contains information about all historic Zeppelins from LZ1 all the way to LZ131 either by serial number or name. So have a look at the Luftschiff Database you have to select either serial number (Baunummer) or name (Bezeichnung). But the page does not stop at the information it contains lot of pictures of airships (Luftschiffe) hangars and people from the industry (Luftschiffer). It contains a database of people and hangars with additional information. Eventhough the page is in german it's a real hidden gem. And if your German is rusty the auto-translated English page is also available here

But those aren't the only good historic resources with pictures. The Homepage of Ford U.Ross featuring pictures of Navy Blimps is a great page. Also a wealth of information can be found at Pilot und Luftschiff unfortunately also a German page but you can find information about Airships check out a lot of galleries find out about different airship types and much more. For the English translation follow this link. There are many more interesting historical websites for example DJ's Zeppelin Page or the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society that contain more historical images and information.

We have shown you only a few of those great websites that you should bookmark because they are gems and not easy to be found. We save everything we find and write about in our delicious account currently 520 bookmarks to pages, pictures, videos and other airship related resources on the web. You can take a look at all our bookmarks by going to delicious. Do you know some hidden gems? A site that you think is a fantastic airship related website that we should mention but maybe haven't yet? Is there a link that we have not in our bookmarks? Let us and everyone else know by posting your favorite airship website in the comments section.

Hindenburg picture and other military aviation art

I just found this picture of the Hindenburg and wanted to share it with you.

Hindenburg - Ship of Dreams

The picture is part of The Military Art Gallery featuring a vast selection of military art prints. There are more airship pictures in the gallery for example here pictures by the Artist Marii Chernev featuring a German Zeppelin over the English Coast 1916 and a German observation balloon in spring 1915. Maybe there are even more great pictures, have a look around in The Military Art Gallery and let us know. If you find a good one post a link in the comments.

The Snow Bird a record breaking Airship

Today we want to look at a very special airship that made history. The Navy Blimp ZPG-2, No 141561 called the Snow Bird. That went out to challenge the long distance record that was once set by the Graf Zeppelin on it's non-stop flight from Friedrichshafen, Germany to Tokyo, Japan. The two places where the Zeppelin is flying again today. Silver Donald Cameron brought the famous blimp back into our awareness with his column "Another way to fly: blimps" in the Chronicle Herald. The Snow Bird flew from South Weymouth, Mass to Europe, Africa and back across the Atlantic to Key West, Florida marking it the the longest unrefuelled flight ever made by an airship both in distance and time covering 9448 miles (15205 km) in 11 days. So when did that happen one might ask, it happened over 50 years ago and ever since no airship has ever come even remotely close to this record.

To learn more about the flight of the Snow Bird you might want to check out a few more great resources. The Naval Historical Center released a publication called Kite Balloons to Airships...the Navy's Lighter-than-Air Experience outlining the 75 years of history in LTA (Lighter-Than-Air) at the Navy. Chapter "XVI. LTA Records Set in the 1950s"(PDF) outlines the story on the Snowbird in great detail with many pictures. But the whole publication is worth a read. It's a free PDF download.

The Naval Airship Association also had a great article with pictures in their official newsletter The Noon Balloon(PDF) around page 18. Click here to get the Noon Balloon Number 73.

These where the Specifications of the ZPG-2 also called N Class Blimp :
General characteristics

• Crew: 21
• Length: 343 ft 0 in (104.57 m)
• Diameter: 76 ft 0 in (23.17 m)
• Height: 107 ft 0 in (32.62 m)
• Volume: 1,011,000 ft³ (23,648 m³)
• Powerplant: 2 × Wright R-1300-2 radials,, 800 hp (600 kW) each

Performance

• Maximum speed: 80 mph (128 km/h)
• Endurance: over 200 hours

How much would it cost to build and operate such a ship today? Would it not be a lot cheaper than 50years ago, wouldn't an airship build with new composite materials perform much better than this 50 years old ship? There is a future for airships, if it was possible to build something like that 50 years ago it's an easy task to build it today. Just take the old design, replace the envelope material with a better one and the engines, too and start from there. A proven airworthy design which could be optimized in future iterations.

So I can only agree to Silver Donald Cameron that airships have a great future ahead. They can provide alternative ways of travel with less fuel consumption than any modern air plane. Sure they are slower but there are lot's of applications where time is not so much an issue. Check out Mr Camerons Blogs Sailing Away from Winter and Silver Donald on Sunday for more columns and bits by him.

If you like this article and our Blog and are not already subscribed, why don't you subscribe, it's FREE. You can subscribe via email, this way articles get send to you directly into your email inbox. Or you subscribe to the RSS feed and use a feedreader to read the blog. But don't forget to take a look at the website, too. Often there are videos or slideshows that do not get delivered in the feed. Also you can find additional links and other stuff on the website which makes it worth a visit.

Airship and Dirigibles history pages - Part 2

We are continuing our roundup for airship, blimp and dirigible history websites with pictures and historical informations from the great ages of the airships. The first Website I would like to Point out is Æ Aeragon Website, the website is dedicated to military technology transfer, and has different section one of them is Air Transportation, in there you will find a special section about airships how their development went from military to public commercial use. It's a great and insightfull read.
The next Site is the Airship Heritage Trust an active site with lot's of pictures, videos and information about airships. It's a great resource and the Website is actively promoting Airships and the fascination surrounding them.
The last historical Site is The Zeppelin Library Archive a resource listing the history and specs of the great Zeppelins also mentioning the new Zeppelin NT, which was really brand new the lst time the Website was updated. It seems pretty dead, but history doesn't go away and in this way it's a great resource.

Airship and Dirigibles history pages - Part 1

Today we take a look at a russian Website, since my Russian skills are not existant since I have never learnt that language I can only say, nice pictures of historc Airships in the early 1900s the first Page is in english but there are about 19 Pages of pictures none of them are in english. Whoever speaks russian and would be so nice, should get us those texts under the pictures translated. And while we are at it, and already pointed to some russian website, let's bring in the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society which also has some nice picture of the historic navy airships. Continuing our travels in the US there is also another Site dedicated to Historic Aiships and that is The Naval Air Station Tillamook Website, also containing many images and stories about Airhsips of the US Military.