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Why is it that zeppelins, like the Hindenburg cannot fly in bad weather conditions?

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bad weather conditions such as windy

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5 ANSWERS


  1. They are morbidly obese......too fat!


  2. They are lighter than air craft, meaning bad weather can and will push them around and make it difficult to maintain controlled flight.

  3. A plane flies through the air. A Zeppelin floats through it. And its size is a surface area so large that it is something like a huge sail. There's a lot of material there for wind forces to push against. Think of it this way. You can throw a dart at a board from across the room with no problem. Now imagine trying to throw a balloon that same distance. Can't be done.

  4. No lighter-than-air ship is comfortable flying in stormy or windy weather.  They are not designed to penetrate fast moving air currents or to fight headwinds.  Instead, they float in the air, and are pushed along by slow turning propellers. A big storm can blow an  airship many miles off course, and in some cases, cause the ship to crash.

  5. Unlike a blimp which maintains it's shape by the gas within it, like a balloon, a  zeppelin is a dirigible with an aluminum skeleton covered with fabric and it contains several separate gas bags along it's length that contain the gas that provides lift. The Hindenburg was many times larger than the Goodyear blimp.  The need to keep weight to a minimum so the use of aluminum and the lightness of the construction means they cannot handle bad weather.  Almost every country that messed with large airships incurred major crashes involving loss of life and total loss of the craft.  In almost every case intense weather was the cause.   A relatively lite vehicle of tremendous size is inheritly fragile.

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    Some famous rigid airships

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    R34, British airship and the first aircraft to traverse the Atlantic Ocean from east to west, in 1919.

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    USS Shenandoah, American naval airship which served the U.S. Navy from 1923 until its crash in Ohio in 1925.

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    R38 (ZR-2), British airship intended to join the American naval fleet, but crashed during testing in 1921.

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    USS Los Angeles, German airship sold to the United States in 1924 as part of German reparations from World War I. The ship served with distinction from 1924 to 1931.

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    LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, German passenger airship designed and piloted by Hugo Eckener. It circumnavigated the globe in 1929 and had a spotless safety record. It was utlimately dismantled by the n***s at the outset of World War II.

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    R-100, British airship built by the Airship Guarantee Company, a private company created solely for the construction of this airship, as a subsidiary of the armaments firm, Vickers.

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    R-101, British airship designed and built by the British government in a kind of competition with the R-100.

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    The R-101 crashed on its maiden flight in 1930 in France, with considerable loss of life. Its crash effectively ended British participation in rigid airship construction.

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    USS Akron, American naval airship designed and built by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Ohio in 1931. Deployed as an airborne aircraft carrier, it was lost at sea in a storm off New Jersey in 1933 with considerable loss of life.

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    USS Macon, sister ship to the Akron, it was a near carbon-copy of her. Though it suffered only 2 deaths, its crash in 1935 off the coast of California ended American participation in rigid airship development.

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    LZ 129 Hindenburg, German passenger airship also designed and built by Hugo Eckener. The airship was lost in a famous fire in New Jersey in 1937. With its end went the end of the age of the Great Rigid Airships

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