They could only support a few people and flew wherever the wind carried them. But people needed aircraft with a larger load capacity that they could handle. Continuing to work on improving the balloon, the designers created an airship.

During its first flight, Henri Giffard's airship in 1852 flew 27 km. But the steam engine of the device was not powerful enough to turn and fly against the wind.

The first flight in a hot air balloon was carried out by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783. A few weeks after that, another balloon by the French physicist Jacques Charles took to the air. The balls were named after their designers - hot air balloon and charlier.

Unlike the hot air balloon, the Charlier was filled not with heated air, but with hydrogen, which did not lose lift as it cooled (which cannot be said about air). Hydrogen balloons have become a more common type of aircraft than hot air balloons.

In 1852, the French engineer Henri Giffard improved the design of the ball: instead of a round shell, he made a cigar-shaped one, replaced the basket with a long gondola, added a steering wheel and a 3-liter steam engine. With. Vehicle They called it “airship”, which means “controlled” in French. Average speed the airship was 8 km/h. However, this aircraft could not withstand even a light breeze. A more powerful motor, such as an electric one, was required. It was used by military engineers Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs for their airship “La France” (“France”) in 1884. The France’s flight speed was 20 km/h, and the battery energy was only enough for an hour of operation.

All of these were airships of non-rigid design, that is, those in which the invariability of the shape of the shell is achieved overpressure gas inside it. The rigid airship appeared in 1897. It was built by the Austrian inventor David Schwarz. The shell of the new type of airship held its shape thanks to an internal metal frame made of aluminum. A year later, a semi-rigid airship was designed: metal frames at the bow and stern were connected by a wooden keel.

In 1901, Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont received a prize of 100,000 francs for flying an airship around the Eiffel Tower. Around the same time, the German engineer Ferdinand von Zeppelin began experimenting with the creation of his later famous zeppelins. Only the fourth model (LZ-4) turned out to be successful.

Gradually, airships increased in size and began to be equipped with not one, but two, three and even four engines. Designers began to use internal combustion engines.

This cartoon depicts Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont. He solved the problem of controlling a large airship by designing a large rudder and a huge propeller.

Searchlight beams illuminate a zeppelin bombing London in 1916 during the First World War. German airships were the first bombers capable of carrying a large enough supply of bombs to cause significant destruction.

The first air passenger transportation began in 1910 with the 148-meter Deutschland airship, followed by the 235-meter Graf Zeppelin, which carried passengers across Atlantic Ocean at a speed of 130 km/h.

In the 30s There were two serious disasters, which resulted in the death of many passengers. First there was the crash of the British airship R-101. A few years later, the same fate befell the Hindenburg zeppelin when, upon approaching the landing site, the hydrogen filling the Hindenburg’s shell caught fire and exploded. These events marked the end of the era of hydrogen airships.

After the Second World War on short time Interest in airships filled with non-flammable helium has revived. The US Army used them for patrolling coastal waters. There were plans to create cargo airships, but helicopters took over this role.

Jean Baptiste Marie Charles Meunier is considered the inventor of the airship. The Meunier airship was to be made in the shape of an ellipsoid. Controllability had to be achieved using three propellers, manually rotated by the efforts of 80 people. By changing the volume of gas in the balloon by using a ballonet, it was possible to adjust the flight altitude of the airship, and therefore he proposed two shells - the outer main one and the inner one.

Airship Meunier.
Steam-powered airship designed by Henri Giffard, who borrowed these ideas from Meunier more than half a century later, made its first flight only on September 24, 1852. This difference between the date of invention of the balloon (1783) and the first flight of the airship is explained by the lack of engines for an aerostatic aircraft at that time.

Giffard's airship.

The next technological breakthrough came in 1884, when the first fully controlled free flight was achieved in a French military aircraft. airship with electric motor La France by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs. The length of the airship was 52 m, the volume was 1900 m³, and in 23 minutes a distance of 8 km was covered using an 8.5 hp engine.
However, these devices were short-lived and extremely fragile. Regular controlled flights did not occur until the advent of the engine. internal combustion.
On October 19, 1901, the French aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont, after several attempts, flew around the Eiffel Tower at a speed of just over 20 km/h on his Santos-Dumont apparatus number 6. Then this was considered an eccentricity, but later the airship within several decades became one of the most advanced vehicles.

At the same time that soft airships began to gain recognition, the development of rigid airships also did not stand still: they were subsequently able to carry more cargo than airplanes, and this situation remained for many decades. The design of such airships and its development are associated with the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

Construction of the first Zeppelin airships began in 1899 on a floating assembly shop at Lake Constance in Munzell Bay, Friedrichshafen. It was organized on the lake because Count von Zeppelin, the founder of the plant, spent all his fortune on this project and did not have sufficient funds to rent land for the plant. The experimental airship "LZ 1" (LZ stood for "Luftschiff Zeppelin") had a length of 128 m and was balanced by moving the weight between two gondolas; it was equipped with two Daimler engines with a power of 14.2 hp. (10.6 kW).
Zeppelin's first flight took place on July 2, 1900. It lasted only 18 minutes as LZ 1 was forced to land on a lake after the weight balancing mechanism broke down. After the apparatus was repaired, the rigid airship technology was successfully tested in subsequent flights, breaking the speed record of the French airship La France (6 m/s) by 3 m/s, but this was still not enough to attract significant investment in airship construction. The count received the necessary funding a few years later. The very first flights of his airships convincingly showed the prospects of their use in military affairs.
Zeppelin over the Summer Garden.

By 1906, Zeppelin managed to build an improved airship, which interested the military. For military purposes, first semi-rigid and then soft Parseval airships, as well as rigid Zeppelin airships, were used; in 1913 the rigid airship "Schütte-Lanz" was put into service. Comparative tests of these aeronautics in 1914 showed the superiority of rigid airships. The latter, with a length of 150 m and a shell volume of 22,000 m³, lifted up to 8,000 kg of payload, having maximum height lift 2200 m (for German military airships during the First World War, the ceiling was up to 8000 m). With three engines producing 210 hp. each of them reached a speed of 21 m/s. IN payload included 10-kilogram bombs and 15-centimeter and 21-centimeter grenades (total weight 500 kg), as well as radiotelegraph equipment. In 1910, Europe's first air passenger line Friedrichshafen-Dusseldorf was opened, along which the airship "Germany" plied. In January 1914, Germany, in terms of total volume (244,000 m³) and the combat qualities of its airships, had the most powerful aeronautical fleet in the world.

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Airships - huge gas-filled structures - appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. For several decades they were enthusiastically accepted and considered practical and effective solution for transportation with comfort large quantity people or transporting military cargo. But in the 1930s, a tragedy occurred that radically changed the attitude towards airships. Today, after almost a century, airships are returning to the arena again, but in a new guise.

The death of the Hindenburg on May 6, 1937 marked the end of the era of airships. The sight of a giant German zeppelin falling in flames near Lakehurst, New Jersey, scared people. The airship burned in a matter of seconds, killing 35 of the 97 passengers, and photographs and newsreels of the terrible event shocked people around the world.

Not surprisingly, the popularity of flying in massive gas-filled structures dropped to zero, and the industry never recovered. But the dream of traveling in lighter-than-air craft has not yet died. That's why government agencies and private companies continue to experiment with huge airships to this day.

1. Aeroscraft ML866

Aeroscraft Corporation engineers took on the colossal task of building an airship with an interior space of 465 square meters.

Touted as a "flying yacht", the Aeroscraft ML866 is currently under construction and will be completed in 2020. General manager And chief engineer company, Igor Pasternak stated that the dimensions of the airship will be 169 meters in length and 29 meters in width. By comparison, the Hindenburg's dimensions were 245 meters long and 41 meters wide, with an internal usable area of ​​about 557 square meters.

The Aeroscraft ML866 cylinders will be filled with helium, rather than the highly flammable hydrogen that caused the Hindenburg fire.

When operational, the new airship will be able to reach a cruising altitude of 3,658 meters and will be able to fly up to 5,000 kilometers. The declared carrying capacity is 66 tons.

2. Airlander 10

Currently the world's largest helium powered aircraft is the Airlander 10 - designed and manufactured British company Hybrid Air Vehicles is a device that combines the technologies of helicopters and airplanes. It reaches 92 meters in length (for comparison, the largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380, is only 71 meters long).

The airship's cruising altitude is 6,100 m, and it can fly for up to two weeks without any people on board and about five days with a crew. Airlander 10 can take off and land from “almost any surface.” The declared carrying capacity is 9,980 kilograms.

Airlander 10 took off on its maiden flight on August 17, 2016, flying 10 kilometers in 19 minutes in Bedfordshire, UK. At the same time, it reached a height of 152 m.

3.Fireball finder

After a spacecraft crashed into the Californian coast on April 22, 2012, “ fireball the size of a minibus," a team of scientists boarded the Zeppelin Eureka to cruise the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains and search for meteorite fragments on the ground.

On May 3 of the same year, researchers from NASA and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) rose to a height of 300 m in an airship that was 75 m long (slightly larger than a Boeing 747 aircraft). During the 5-hour flight, they looked for craters that could mark places where pieces of the meteorite crashed into the ground.

4.Walrus

As part of the Walrus program in the Office of Advanced research projects The US Department of Defense (DARPA) is developing a hybrid airship that will be heavier than air and generate lift through a combination of aerodynamics, thrust vectoring and volatile gas generation.

DARPA representatives stated that these modern airships designed to use advanced technology to overcome the design problems faced by airships in earlier eras.

5. The Falcon Project

Could the airship finally solve the mystery of the supposed existence of the elusive humanoid known as "Bigfoot" or " Bigfoot" Falcon project operators think it's possible.

To this end, Project Falcon announced in 2012 that they would begin searching for the bipedal beast by deploying a remote-controlled, helium-filled aircraft to observe from the sky the forests where the creature was allegedly seen. The custom-built 14-metre Aurora Mk II will hunt Bigfoot by scanning the landscape with antennas and cameras. high resolution, which shoot in different ranges and spectra.

6. Fish-like airship

Unlike zeppelins, airships do not have internal basis, supporting their "skin", and they maintain their shape solely due to the pressure of the gas that inflates them from the inside. This flexibility prompted researchers to begin developing a type power plant, which uses artificial muscles to propel the airship through the air, much like a fish swims through water. The so-called muscles are elastic polymer films(EAP), which expand and contract when exposed to electricity.

7. Zeppelin NT

In 2008, California-based design company Airship Ventures purchased a $12 million, 12-passenger Zeppelin, the Zeppelin NT, built by the German company Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH for use in sightseeing purposes.

Zeppelins returned to German skies in 1997 with the launch of the first Zeppelin NT prototype, the first Zeppelin to appear in California since the 1930s, when the US Navy Macon and USS Akron roamed the skies.

At 75m long, the Zeppelin NT airships are significantly shorter than the massive Hindenburg (245m). Also, unlike the Hindenburg, modern Zeppelins are pumped with helium, which is somewhat less volatile than hydrogen but also much less flammable.

However, modern designers do not stop at developing airships alone. One of the latest developments has become when it is really necessary.

An airship is a lighter-than-air aircraft, a balloon with an engine, thanks to which the airship can move regardless of the direction of air currents.
The very first airships were driven by a steam engine or human muscle power, and since 1900 internal combustion engines began to be widely used.

Airship Meunier, 1784

Jean Baptiste Marie Charles Meunier is considered the inventor of the airship. The Meunier airship was to be made in the shape of an ellipsoid. Controllability had to be achieved using three propellers, manually rotated by the efforts of 80 people.

Giffard's airship, 1852

The designer Giffard borrowed ideas from Meunier back in 1780, but his airship made its first flight after Giffard’s death - 70 years later! It took this long for humanity to invent the first steam engine.

The next first fully controlled free flight in a French military airship with an electric engine was made in 1884. The length of the airship was 52 m, in 23 minutes it flew a distance of 8 km.

These devices were short-lived and extremely fragile. Airships became public transport only twenty years later, when an internal combustion engine, like the ones in modern cars, was invented.

On October 19, 1901, the French aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont flew around the Eiffel Tower at a speed of just over 20 km/h on his Santos-Dumont No. 6 apparatus. Then it was considered an eccentricity, but this particular model of airship became one of the most advanced vehicles for several decades .

The heyday of airships occurred in the 20-30s of the 20th century. Airships were equipped with aviation and, less commonly, diesel engines.

By design, airships are divided into three main types: soft, semi-rigid and rigid.

AND rigid airships. A metal frame was assembled (like a bird cage) and covered with fabric on the outside.

soft airships, essentially similar to balloons.

Semi-rigid airships have a metal shell at the bottom.

The design of all airships is simple: a huge cigar-shaped tank filled with hydrogen or helium, a cabin and two rotary engines. To lift the balloon into the sky, hydrogen was used, stored inside a rigid frame in numerous compartments or cylinders. Ascent and descent are carried out by tilting the airship with the elevators - the engines then pull it up or down.
Inside the airship or under it there was a cabin with a crew, and passengers were also located here.

Soft airship (Parseval PL25), 1910

Semi-rigid airship "Norway", 1920

Rigid airship (USS Macon), 1930

Control room. (USS Macon)

Rigid airships could carry more cargo than early airplanes, a position that continued for many decades.
The design of such airships and their development are associated with the name of the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

The German officer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, having visited America during Civil War in the USA, became interested in balloons that opponents used to conduct aerial reconnaissance. Having risen into the air, conquered by flying over the Mississippi River, he forever connected his life with aeronautics. Since then, the words “airship” and “zeppelin” have become synonymous.

Zeppelin LZ 1902

Count von Zeppelin dreamed of making airships the transport of the future - comfortable airliners, powerful cargo carriers. He believed that huge airships could help achieve military power Germany.
Zeppelin spent twenty years to make a decent model of the airship. And in 1906, he built an improved airship, which interested the military.

Zeppelin on Lake Constance

From that moment on, Count Zeppelin retired and began developing and constructing airships. Having created a company for the construction of airships, the count gained fame, he was called “The Greatest German of the 20th Century.”

The Zeppelins were enormous in size and shaped like a cigar.

During the flights of airships, mail was transported. Envelopes were usually stamped with special postage stamps, and a number of states even issued postage stamps designed specifically to pay for mail transported by airships.

View from the gondola of a French airship in 1918

The first air passenger line in Europe, Friedrichshafen - Düsseldorf, along which the airship "Germany" plied, was opened in 1910.

During World War I, the German military used Zeppelins for reconnaissance and bombing missions. Unlike airplanes (the role of bombers was performed by light reconnaissance aircraft, whose pilots took several small bombs with them), airships were already a formidable force at the beginning of the World War.

Airship raid on Calais

The most powerful aeronautical powers were Russia, which had more than two dozen devices in St. Petersburg, and Germany, which had 18 airships.

In 1926, a joint Norwegian-Italian-American expedition led by R. Amundsen on the airship “Norway” designed by Umberto Nobile carried out the first trans-Arctic flight along the route: the island of Spitsbergen - North Pole- Alaska.

By 1929, airship technology had advanced to a very high level; The airship "Graf Zeppelin" began the first transatlantic flights - flights to America.

LZ 127 "Count Zeppelin"

In 1929, the airship LZ 127 "Graf Zeppelin" made its legendary flight around the world with three intermediate landings. In 20 days, he covered more than 34 thousand kilometers with an average flight speed of about 115 km/h!

Traveling in an airship was different from flying in a modern airplane.
Imagine yourself on board the Hindenburg airship, which was three times longer than a modern Airbus and equal in height to a 13-story building.
You are given not a chair, but a whole cabin with a bed and a toilet. There is no need to fasten your seat belts during takeoff. You can stand in the cabin, walk around the salon or deck, and look out the windows. The restaurant has tables set with silverware and porcelain dishes. There was even a small grand piano in the salon.

Restaurant on the Hindenburg

Salon on the Hindenburg

All these rooms were located in the huge “belly” of the airship, designed for 50 passengers.

Moving at a speed of 130 kilometers per hour at an altitude of 200 meters above sea level, the Hindenburg made its fastest flight across the North Atlantic in 43 hours in 1936.

Engine of the airship "Hindenburg"

One of the most big enemies The Zeppelins were in bad weather.
Of the twenty-four airships built, eight failed due to bad weather. Nevertheless, Germany still believed in the reliability of the Zeppelins and continued their production.

German naval zeppelin L 20 after a forced landing off the coast of Norway, 1916.

It is often thought that the airships of the 1930s could land vertically, like a helicopter. But this could only be feasible if complete absence wind.

IN real conditions To land an airship, it is necessary for people on the ground to pick up the ropes dropped from different points of the airship and tie them to suitable ground objects, then the airship can be pulled to the ground.

The most convenient and safe way landing (especially for large airships) - mooring to special masts. A rope was dropped from the top of the mooring mast and laid along the ground in the direction of the wind. The airship approached the mast from the leeward side, and a rope was also dropped from its bow. People on the ground tied these two ropes, and then the airship was winched to the mast - its nose was fixed in the docking socket.

Rigid airship ZR 1 "Shenandoah" on the mooring mast

Rigid airship ZR 3 " Los Angeles"(German airship LZ 126) on a cable pier on an aircraft carrier, 1928.

A moored airship can rotate freely around the mast, like a weather vane. The docking unit could move up and down along the mast - this made it possible to lower the airship closer to the ground for loading and unloading and boarding and disembarking passengers.

Mooring masts are the only suitable place to moor airships. After all, airships are huge, and a special hangar-garage for them will not only be colossal in size, but also very expensive! By the way, to bring a relatively small airship into the hangar in a strong wind required the efforts of up to 200 people.

Attempts to create aircraft carriers began with the appearance of the first zeppelins, whose size suggested the idea that they could well be used for aircraft that at that time were small in size and had an insignificant flight range, limiting their use.

In 1930, experiments began on their creation, and even several flying aircraft carriers were put into operation.

Flying aircraft carrier USS Akron (ZRS-4)

When taking off from an aircraft carrier, the biplane was lowered down on a special crane from the open hatch of the airship, going in full swing, after which it unhooked and flew on its own.

A fighter at the moment of landing on the aircraft-carrying airship USS Akron (ZRS-4)

When landing, the same actions occurred in reverse order: the biplane, having equalized its speed with the speed of the airship, clung to the hook of a special crane, after which it was pulled inside the hatch.

The creators of airships, neglecting basic safety measures, filled them with unsafe, but cheap hydrogen instead of inert, but expensive and inaccessible helium. In May 1937, a catastrophe occurred that shocked the whole world.
The Hindenburg had already moored to the mast in Lakehurst, when suddenly small flames appeared in the tail section. They exploded the hydrogen in the compartments, and the airship was engulfed in fire. 25 people died.

On September 24, 1852, in the suburbs of Paris, Versailles, he took to the skies first airship- managed balloon Girard I. Length first airship was 44 m, it had a spindle shape and was equipped with a steam engine. Its designer is Henri-Jacques Girard, a former railway worker who is passionate about construction balloons, flew on his giant creation more than 31 km, reaching a speed of 10 km/h in the sky over Paris. Thus began the era of airships! Airships were distinguished from balloons by the elongated, spindle-shaped shape of the balloon. The cylinder was filled with hydrogen - a gas that was much lighter than air, moved thanks to a steam engine that rotated the propeller, and was controlled using a steering wheel. In the second half of the 19th century. The steam engine was replaced by an internal combustion engine, which was designed by Alberto Santos-Dumont. At the beginning of the 20th century. Thanks to the support of the German official Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the era of the heyday of giant airships began.

They were used to transport goods, as well as for military purposes: during the First World War, London was bombed from airships. Zeppelin introduced many innovations: his first balloon had a rigid aluminum structure over which fabric was stretched and then covered with paint. All this increased the strength of the structure. In addition, there were gondolas for passengers and crew, and the length of the airship reached 126 m. On July 2, 1900, Zeppelin I (L21), with five people on board, took off over Lake Costanza and gained a height of 400 m and covered 6 km in 17 minutes. In 1920, very expensive flights across the Atlantic on airships became fashionable among the rich and aristocrats, and airships were even nicknamed flying hotels. Unfortunately, due to frequent plane crashes involving the use of flammable hydrogen in the 1930s. The fashion for airships came to an end.

Around the world in 21 days

In 1929, the airship Graf Zeppelin (1.2127) flew around the world in 21 days, landing only in Tokyo, Los Angeles and Lakehurst (New Jersey). In nine years of flight, he crossed the Atlantic 139 times!

The largest airship

The biggest ever built airships became the “Hindenburg” (1.2129), its length reached 245 m, it was built in Germany, at the Zeppelin plant. But fate the largest airship ended in disaster.

Hindenburg disaster

Hindenburg disaster one of the most unpleasant events in the history of the world. On May 6, 1937, having completed its 63rd ocean flight, the Hindenburg suddenly burst into flames as it landed (photo left). 35 people died in the flames, another 62 were injured severe injuries. Since then passenger airships no more were built.