A crash that raised six million marks

In 1908 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s airship LZ 4 was destroyed during a high-profile test flight. It should have ruined him. Instead the German public, gripped by his flights since the first in 1900, poured money in: the Zeppelin donation raised more than six million marks, enough to found both Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH and the Zeppelin Foundation, which has owned the company ever since. Alfred Colsman ran the business, and from 1913 Ludwig Dürr was technical director. Around it grew a cluster of firms: an engine maker set up with Karl Maybach in 1909, a gear factory in 1915 that became ZF Friedrichshafen, and a department under Claude Dornier building all-metal flying boats.

The world’s first airline

The army was slow to order airships, so Colsman suggested selling rides to an enthusiastic public. On 16 November 1909 the company founded DELAG, the world’s first airline to use aircraft in revenue service. By July 1914 its Zeppelins had carried 34,028 passengers on 1,588 commercial flights covering 172,535 kilometres. Before the war Luftschiffbau Zeppelin built 21 airships, LZ 5 to LZ 25, some for DELAG and some for the military, and the name Zeppelin became the generic word for a rigid airship.

Raiders over England

War turned the passenger ships into the first long-range strategic bombers. Zeppelins raided Belgium, France and Britain; the direct damage was limited, but the alarm was great, and a parliamentary inquiry under Jan Smuts led to the creation of the Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918. The company built military airships from LZ 24 to LZ 114 and employed about 4,000 people by 1918. The count also foresaw the giant aeroplane replacing the airship, and his Staaken works built the R.VI, a four-engined biplane bomber that could carry a 1,000 kg bomb; 18 were built. Count von Zeppelin died in 1917 and Hugo Eckener took over.

Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg

Versailles banned large airships, and for a time the works made aluminium cooking pots. Salvation came from America: LZ 126, built for the US Navy and flown on 27 August 1924, became the USS Los Angeles. Then came LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, first flown on 18 September 1928, which made the first round-the-world flight by airship and 590 flights in all. The Nazis funded the giant LZ 129 Hindenburg, which first flew on 4 March 1936. On 6 May 1937 it burst into flames landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36. Production ended in 1938, and in 1940 the remaining airships were scrapped for Luftwaffe aluminium.

Cooking pots, construction machinery and the NT

In the Second World War Zeppelin made radar antennas and V-2 rocket parts, ran sub-camps of Dachau for forced labourers, and was bombed in 1943 and 1944. Airship building was banned, but the foundation lived on: a metalworks founded in 1950 became today’s Zeppelin GmbH, a large dealer in Caterpillar construction machinery. In 1993 Zeppelin and ZF founded Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik to build a new semi-rigid airship, the Zeppelin NT, which first flew in September 1997 with US pilot Scott Danneker. Seven had been built; in 2011 Goodyear renewed a partnership first struck in 1924 and ordered three NTs for its famous advertising fleet.

工場

• Friedrichshafen works · Friedrichshafen, Lake Constance — Home of Zeppelin airship construction since 1908
• Staaken works · Berlin-Staaken — Giant aircraft department in WWI

人々

• Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin · founder — Flew his first airship in 1900; died 1917
• Alfred Colsman · business manager — Proposed DELAG, the first airline
• Hugo Eckener · chairman from 1917 — Champion of civil airships; censored by Goebbels from 1936
• Ludwig Dürr · technical director from 1913 — Retired when airship building ended after 1945
• Claude Dornier · engineer — Ran the metal flying-boat department that became Dornier

記録と初記録

• DELAG: world’s first airline using aircraft in revenue service, 1909
• LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin: first circumnavigation of the world by airship and first nonstop crossing of the Pacific by air
• LZ 129 and LZ 130: the largest airships ever built, 200,000 cubic metres each