A professor reads about a disaster

When Count Zeppelin’s LZ 4 was destroyed at Echterdingen in 1908, Professor Johann Schütte began working out, with his students, how an airship ought to be designed scientifically. He found a partner in Karl Lanz, an industrialist and wood products manufacturer, and on 22 April 1909 they founded Luftschiffbau Schütte-Lanz at Rheinau near Mannheim. The great difference from Zeppelin lay in the skeleton: Schütte-Lanz frames were made of plywood glued together, not aluminium. The first ship, SL 1, flew on 1 October 1911 with a diamond-lattice frame and a streamlined hull.

The shape every airship copied

SL 2 of 1914 mattered far more than its own war record. It combined Zeppelin-style ring girders with a properly streamlined hull, a simple cruciform tail with one pair of rudders and elevators, and engines in separate streamlined cars. Those last two features were copied in almost all later rigid airships. SL 2 went to the army and flew missions over Poland and France before it was stranded and written off in January 1916.

Wood, damp and the navy

Wood had a weakness. Glued joints suffered when water got into the hull, in rain and in leaky hangars, and the navy, flying from damp coastal bases, came to distrust the ships. Peter Strasser, the commander of naval airships, complained that most Schütte-Lanz ships were unusable in combat because their wooden construction could not cope with maritime conditions. The army became the main customer. In all the firm built 20 airships; SL 6 exploded on take-off with all hands in 1915, hangar roofs collapsed under snow onto others, and the last, SL 22, was refused by the navy in 1918.

Cuffley, 3 September 1916

In the early hours of 3 September 1916 the army ship SL 11, commanded by Hauptmann Wilhelm Schramm, bombed Hertfordshire and was caught by Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson in a BE 2c firing incendiary ammunition. It fell blazing at Cuffley, the first German airship shot down over Britain. Robinson received the Victoria Cross two days later, and the Red Cross sold souvenirs made from the wreck’s wire. Since all rigid airships tended to be called Zeppelins, newspapers rarely gave Schütte-Lanz the credit, or the blame.

Bombers, trainers, furniture and cars

From 1916 a branch works at Zeesen near Berlin turned to aeroplanes, building AGO C.IV reconnaissance aircraft, seven giant Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI bombers and hundreds of LVG trainers, about 600 machines in all, alongside its own prototype fighters. Versailles ended aviation work in 1919. The company tried furniture, doors and windows, then small cars, including the Velox for Sweden, before it was liquidated in 1925. Its plywood know-how lived on: until 2007 a Finnforest Schütte-Lanz company made formwork panels at Brühl.

Fabrikalar

• Rheinau works · Mannheim-Rheinau — Main plant and airship hangar; protected halls of 1911 survive
• Zeesen works · Zeesen, Brandenburg — Airship yard and aircraft works, 1916–1925; three airships and about 600 aeroplanes
• Leipzig · Leipzig — Additional airship works; hangar collapse destroyed SL 13 and SL 18 in 1917

İnsanlar

• Johann Schütte · co-founder, designer — 1873–1940; professor who set out to design airships scientifically
• Karl Lanz · co-founder, industrialist
• Wilhelm Schramm · commander of SL 11 — Killed with his crew at Cuffley, 1916
• William Leefe Robinson · RFC pilot — Shot down SL 11; awarded the Victoria Cross

Rekorlar ve ilkler

• SL 1: record speed of 38.3 km/h for an airship of its type, 1911
• SL 11: first German airship shot down over Britain, 3 September 1916