Zeppelins Trivia Quiz

Answer: Army officer

Graf Zeppelin was born in 1838 into a noble North German family. From an early age he lived in a family castle near Constance in the south. When he was 17 he entered a military academy and later was commissioned into the army. In 1863 he took leave to act as a volunteer in the Union side in the American Civil War and had his first experience in an observation balloon, which left him with a lifelong interest in lighter-than-air flight.

At the age of 52 he resigned from the army and thereafter devoted his time to dirigible (steerable) balloons and airships.

Although he did pilot his earlier airships himself, he was not a professional pilot, nor did he make a deep study of physics or aeronautics.

Answer: 1900

Zeppelin's first airship, numbered LZ1, was built in a floating hangar on the Bodensee (Lake Constance) and made her first flight in July 1900. The floating platform was adopted so that the effect of changing wind directions would be minimised. She flew for 17 minutes and travelled a distance of just over three and a half miles carrying five people at a maximum height of 1,300 feet, before crash-landing on the lake. After repairs, she made two more flights that year, but Zeppelin failed to convince his financial backers and the craft was subsequently dismantled and scrapped.

The LZ1 was 428 feet long with a diameter of 30 feet, and was powered by two Daimler 15 horsepower internal combustion engines.

Answer: No

Zeppelins were rigid airships, meaning that they had a light alloy framework supporting a number of 'cells' containing the lighter-than-air gas which provided the lift. The frame was covered with a fabric outer skin which gave the airship its shape, irrespective of the state of inflation of the gasbags. A blimp is a non-rigid airship with no internal skeleton or separate gas cells, where the outer skin is the gasbag and the shape is maintained by the pressure of the gas inside.

The word 'Zeppelin' is sometimes used for any rigid airship including those built by other manufacturers, in the same way that any vacuum cleaner is commonly called a 'hoover'. In this quiz it is used to refer only to products of the Zeppelin Company.

Answer: DELAG had a perfect safety record, without injury to a single passenger

The Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft (German Airship Travel Corporation) was formed in 1909. It started with a single airship (LZ7, the 'Deutschland') and by 1913 had a fleet of seven with a network linking eight German cities. In 1912 the first air steward was employed. As stated, its safety record was immaculate.

During the First World War its operations were curtailed by most of its fleet being impounded by the German Army, but a limited service was maintained after the war until its two remaining aircraft were surrendered as part of the post-war reparations. In 1928 the DELAG commenced a transatlantic service with the LZ127 'Graf Zeppelin'.

Although some of the earlier DELAG flights were joyrides amd did give free passage to journalists, the majority of passangers were commercial. It is highly unlikely the Count piloted any DELAG flights, and there was no sexual discrimination!

Answer: There were no exceptions

Every airship built by the Zeppelin Company, starting with the original 1900 prototype, had an LZ serial number. This was a 'works job number' and did not change throughout its lifetime. Craft purchased by the German military, however, were given another number by the customer. This was known as its 'tactical' number. The Navy used the prefix L (for Luftschiff) and the Army, Z (Zeppelin), although it later reverted to using the 'LZ' prefix, adding 30 to confuse the total production numbers. This meant that later naval craft had two 'LZ' numbers, the original one assigned by Zeppelin and the tactical one bestowed by the Army.

LZ126, built after the First World War for the American Navy, was assigned the serial number ZR-3 and the name 'Los Angeles' after her transfer.

Civilian airships were given names in addition to their serial numbers (for example LZ11 'Viktoria Luise' and LZ129 'Hindenburg').

An aircraft that were conceived but never built was nevertheless assigned serial numbers. LZ122 to LZ125 were designed after the war, but construction was forbidden by the Allied Control Commission.

Answer: Friedrichshafen

Friedrichshafen is a city on the north shore of Lake Constance (in German, the Bodensee) in Southern Germany, close to the borders with Switzerland and Austria. Count Zeppelin spent his boyhood at his family castle near Constance on the southern side of the lake. He established the Zeppelin Company in Friedrichshafen and all its airships were built there. Various other companies were established as 'spin-offs' from Zeppelin. These include Maybach, which originally built engines for Zeppelin airships and later branched into luxury car production, and Dornier, founded by ex-Zeppelin employee Claude Dornier to build fixed-wing aircraft. Zeppelin brought a great deal of work and prosperity to Friedrichshafen and various streets and public buildings in the town are named after senior employees of the Company.

The other three cities mentioned all had connections with the German aircraft industry. Augsburg was home to the Messerschmitt Company, Focke-Wulf had its headquarters in Bremen, and Heinkel was based in Warnemunde.

Answer: Reconnaissance missions over the sea

67 Zeppelins were built during the war, the majority for the German Navy, although some went to the Army. The Navy used them primarily for reconnaissance patrols, but both the Army and Navy conducted bombing raids over England (mainly London) and France. Little damage resulted and the effect was mainly psychological.

At the Armistice 16 airships survived and these were surrendered to the Allied powers as war reparations. They were never used for target towing or covert operations.

Answer: The use of hydrogen to provide lift

The Zeppelins' Achilles heel was the fact that they used hydrogen gas, which is lighter than air, to provide buoyancy. Hydrogen is highly inflammable, and explosive in a concentration of between 4% and 74% in air. The gas cells in a Zeppelin always leaked a little, and this meant that rigorous anti-fire precautions had to be taken. lin. Any possibility of accidentally striking a spark was guarded against and passengers were not allowed to smoke, The surprising exception to this was the smoking-lounge aboard the 'Hindenburg', the last Zeppelin to enter commercial service. The room was kept at a higher air pressure than the rest of the accommodation and had a double-doored airlock, but nevertheless it must have taken some nerve to light up with seven million cubic feet of hydrogen above you!

A safe alternative to hydrogen was helium. This has only about half the buoyancy in air as helium but is inert. Unfortunately virtually the only source of supply was the United States, which would not supply it to Germany for diplomatic reasons. The destruction of the 'Hindenburg' in 1937 underlined the risks of using hydrogen and spelt the end of the Zeppelin era.

Speed was not a major factor at the time. The airship 'Graf Zeppelin' (1927) cruised at about 70 mph whereas the Ford Trimotor, a contemporary airliner, cruised 20 mph faster, had a typical capacity of ten passengers and range of just over 500 miles, whereas the Zeppelin could carry at least twice as many passengers almost 6,000 miles without refuelling.

Since there were very few aircraft around during the Zeppelin era, the danger of collision was minimal and altitude was not an important consideration. Cruising height was normally between six hundred and a thousand feet, although much greater altitudes could be reached if necessary.

Lack of passenger accommodation was definitely not a problem. The 'Graf Zeppelin' accommodated twenty passengers in ten sleeping cabins and a lounge/dining room in the ninety-eight foot long gondola slung below the hull, while the 'Hindenburg' had twenty-five double cabins, as well as a dining room, lounges and promenade decks contained within the hull.

Answer: The head of the Zeppelin Company after Zeppelin's death

Hugo Eckener was born in 1868 in Flensburg, a German town on the Danish border. He was considered a dull student at school, preferring to spend his time sailing in summer and skating in winter. However, in the early 1890s he gained a doctoral degree in psychology, and began working as a correspondent for a Frankfurt newspaper. He was asked to cover the flights of the early Zeppelins LZ1 and LZ2, and visited Lake Constance for the purpose. He was not impressed by the airships' performance but admired the Count's dedication, and joined the Zeppelin Company as a publicity writer. By 1911 he had become so interested in the airships that he had gained his pilot's licence. During the 1914-1918 war he trained most of Germany's airship pilots. After the Count's death in 1917 he became head of the company and struggled to keep it viable despite the restrictions placed on German aircraft building by the Treaty of Versailles. He managed to obtain permission to build the LZ126, later the 'USS Los Angeles', for the American Navy as part of Germany's war reparations, and skippered her transatlantic delivery flight. He then raised the money to build the LZ127, 'Graf Zeppelin'. Between 1928 and 1932 she achieved a number of long-distance flights, including one around the world, under Eckener's command. She was the most successful airship ever built.

He never tried to hide his dislike for the Nazi regime and during the late 1930s and the Second World War he was increasingly pushed into the sidelines. He died in Friedrichshafen in 1954.

The Zeppelin Company's chief designer from the earl 1900s until 1945 was Dr Ludwig Durr. He was in charge of design for every Zeppelin except LZ1, a total of 130.

Answer: No-one knows - Zeppelins are still being built.

The last airship built by the original Zeppelin Company in the twentieth century was completed in 1938 (LZ130, 'Graf Zeppelin II'). However, in the 1990s the Zeppelin Company resurfaced with the Zeppelin NT ("New Technology") design, which is a semi-rigid airship, much smaller than the giants of the 1920s and 1930s, using helium rather than hydrogen, and technologically advanced.

The new Zeppelin Company was formed with money left in trust by the original and regards itself as the successor.