"It's [on] fire and it's crashing!...This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world! Oh, it's crashing...oh, four or five hundred feet into the sky, and it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. There's smoke, and there's flames, now, and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here!

...I can't talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest, it's just laying there, a mass of smoking wreckage, and everybody can hardly breathe and talk... Honest, I can hardly breathe. I'm going to step inside where I cannot see it..."
- Herb Morrison, Hindenburg Disaster, 1937

LZ 129 Hindenburg (Luftschiff Zeppelin #129; Registration: D-LZ 129) was a German commercial passenger-carrying rigid airship, the lead ship of her class, the longest class of flying machine and the largest airship by envelope volume. She was designed and built by the Zeppelin Company (Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH) on the shores of Lake Constance in Friedrichshafen, Germany, and was operated by the German Zeppelin Airline Company (Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei). She was named after Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who was President of Germany from 1925 until his death in 1934.

The airship flew from March 1936 until she was destroyed by fire 14 months later on May 6th, 1937, while attempting to land at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in Manchester Township, New Jersey, at the end of the first North American transatlantic journey of her second season of service. This was the last of the great airship disasters; it was preceded by the crashes of the British R38, the US airship Roma, the French Dixmude, the USS Shenandoah, the British R101, and the USS Akron.

Pictured here is a 1:1000 scale replica of the German Zeppelin, LZ 129 Hindenburg. Note: Although the finished model does not show the German swastika on the model's tail fins, decals are included within the package that the customer can apply to make it more historically accurate. Now in stock!

Dimensions:
Length: 10-inches

Release Date: ?

Historical Account: "A Gaseous Matter" - Helium was initially selected for the lifting gas because it was the safest to use in airships, as it is not flammable. One proposed measure to save helium was to make double-gas cells for 14 of the 16 gas cells; an inner hydrogen cell would be protected by an outer cell filled with helium, with vertical ducting to the dorsal area of the envelope to permit separate filling and venting of the inner hydrogen cells. At the time, however, helium was also relatively rare and extremely expensive as the gas was available in industrial quantities only from distillation plants at certain oil fields in the United States. Hydrogen, by comparison, could be cheaply produced by any industrialized nation and being lighter than helium also provided more lift. Because of its expense and rarity, American rigid airships using helium were forced to conserve the gas at all costs and this hampered their operation.

Despite a U.S. ban on the export of helium under the Helium Control Act of 1927, the Germans designed the airship to use the far safer gas in the belief that they could convince the U.S. government to license its export. When the designers learned that the National Munitions Control Board refused to lift the export ban, they were forced to re-engineer Hindenburg to use flammable hydrogen gas, which was the only alternative lighter-than-air gas that could provide sufficient lift. One of the side benefits of being forced to utilize the flammable yet lighter hydrogen was that more passenger cabins could be added.