Airships, Dirigibles, Zeppelins, Blimps, Hot Air Balloons, and other old time aircraft.

[Yvonne Smith]

It is too bad that we had the Hindenburg crash and burn (with all of the pictures of it happening) that scared people from using airships after that. Before the Hindenburg, we actually had a lot of air travel by airships, and not any other major crashes that i remember reading about, anyway.
Probably no worse than now happens with airplanes.

The Hindenburg was using the wrong kind of gas because there was a shortage if helium and they were using the very flammable hydrogen instead. The airship was landing when it caught fire and burned, and there were actually quite a few survivors; but after that the airships fell out of favor.
This picture is over New York, in 1931. You can see 3 airships in the picture, plus the one the photographer was in to take the picture, and this was pretty common in that time period.
At least one of the airships is US Navy.

 

[Don Alaska]

It is too bad that we had the Hindenburg crash and burn (with all of the pictures of it happening) that scared people from using airships after that. Before the Hindenburg, we actually had a lot of air travel by airships, and not any other major crashes that i remember reading about, anyway.
Probably no worse than now happens with airplanes.

The Hindenburg was using the wrong kind of gas because there was a shortage if helium and they were using the very flammable hydrogen instead. The airship was landing when it caught fire and burned, and there were actually quite a few survivors; but after that the airships fell out of favor.
This picture is over New York, in 1931. You can see 3 airships in the picture, plus the one the photographer was in to take the picture, and this was pretty common in that time period.
At least one of the airships is US Navy.


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I was stationed at two of the airship bases--Lakehurst where the Hindenburg died and Moffett Field where U.S. Navy blimps were based on the West Coast. The hangars there are spectacular.

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

I've seen a few "Goodyear" blimps circling over college games here. A long time before that, I can remember a time or two seeing blimps over the (old) local airport, one end of which was just down the road a couple of blocks from the elementary school I attended before we moved (when I was in the 4th grade).

Of course we all know about the Hindenburg, though whether the fire was accidental doesn't seem to be a 100% known fact. Probably true, but there are some dicey circumstances too.

 

[Yvonne Smith]

Apparently, they made a movie about the Hindenburg, back in 1975. I have not seen the movie, but here is the trailer, and it looks like they were questioning what actually happened.
Since it happened shortly before WW2, and it certainly put a fast stop to airship travel (which had been going on for over 30 years), I think that there could have been some kind of sabotage to the airship.

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

My money would be on Churchill and his cabal,

 

[Axel Slingerland]

Apparently, they made a movie about the Hindenburg, back in 1975.

Great movie. But it's one with a triple dose of Hollywood. It they had claimed it was based on history, I would call it speculation at best. I'm not sure if they did. Something I find amusing is the film makers chose Christmas, 1975 for the US release. "Merry Christmas, America! Here's a Nazi sabotage disaster film to help you celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ."

My money would be on Churchill and his cabal,

I would also. He knew what Hitler was capable of and wanted to "enlist" America's help, without it appearing that he asked for said help. That's what a politically savvy person in his position should do. I don't know if I would call his cabinet a cabal, but a politically savvy person like Churchill probably would be secretive...

 

[Jacob Petersheim]

I don't know if I would call his cabinet a cabal

I was thinking of his fleet of domestic and foreign intelligence and covert operations "ministries." Most of those still operate today, some of them still unacknowledged or renamed to other more benign-sounding monikers and buried within the vast civil service and military organizations.

 

[Nancy Hart]

The house I grew up in was 1.7 miles as the crow flies from Goodyear Airdock in Akron. They made dirigibles there up through 1960. Once in a while they would fly right over our house very low. It was a big event as a kid. Very noisy. The older dirigibles were much larger than the ones seen at outdoor sports events now.

We passed by the Airdock almost every day, but you were never allowed to get close. I visited Akron with some friends after moving to Georgia. Took them past the Airdock and the gates were open. I was showing off, so drove in right up to the building. Got stopped and detained by security while they did a background check on us. Not my fault they forgot to close the gates.

 

[Axel Slingerland]

I had an uncle who lived in Cuyahoga Falls. I just remember going there but now I don't remember why. I always liked waterfalls, but my Uncle said the town was more specifically named after the Cuyahoga River and it's series of waterfalls, so perhaps that's why trips there were not all that memorable. We never went up to what is now known as Cuyahoga Falls National Park.

Another of my uncles (my Mom had 12 brothers and sisters) worked for Goodyear and lived a little bit south of Akron. All I remember about our trips there was where my uncle lived, there was a place called Turkeyfoot Lake that was a 3 minute walk from their door to a swimmin' hole. I remember once we had been there for several days and my cousin and I kept hammering our parents to let us go swimming. They said once it gets up to 60°F we could go. But while it was in the high 50°F range, it never quite made it to 60°F. So we took a cigarette lighter and made the thermometer show 60°F. We told them it was 60°F, my dad looked at the thermometer as saw 61°F, and said we could go. We were only in the ice cold lake water a few seconds. When we got back to their house, my aunt was standing on the steps of their house with two big beach towels, and when she handed them to us she whispered to us something like "Next time, don't burn the wood on the thermometer." Busted!

After we stayed there for a week, we would go to Flushing, Michigan for a week. (Some years we went to Michigan first, that was my parents idea of a vacation.) I only remember three things moderately clearly from those trips when I was younger than 14. One of my aunts had a log cabin in her back yard, where her and my uncle lived when they first bought the land in the 1940s, and all of my cousins and I would camp out back there. One of my cousins and I tried to blow up another one of my aunt's outhouse with a string of 100 M-80 firecrackers. We did enough damage to it that got in big trouble for doing it. I think I was 10 at the time, so that would have made it 1966.

And least but not last, when I was 13 we went there and my cousin and I were walking along this creek looking for a good fishin' hole, and we heard some loud music. We knew there were no stereos that loud. Looking for where it was coming from, we found this old barn with with the door open, and inside were three guys jamming. I had never hears anything so loud. They saw us and invited in for a few songs. We talked for a few minutes, and they said they had just formed their band a few weeks before and were rehearsing for a tour. (We thought they were making that up.) After we talked a bit they said they to get back into rehearsing, so we continued our search for a good fishin' hole on the creek. My cousin asked me if I believed what they said, and as a guitarist, albeit at that time I was not a Bluser, I said they were pretty good, so maybe. But then again, they could be lying about it.

Down the road a year or so, I heard one of their songs playing on the radio. I remembered it because they played it several times while we were there. (Which is common in rehearsals. You play the same things over and over.) I still think that this song from their first album was their best track.

Edit: The Posting Gods made me fix my Typos.

 

[Joe Riley]

 

[Joe Riley]

"*Starred Review* Not to be confused—really, really not—with John Sayles’ classic 1988 baseball movie Eight Men Out, this is a thrilling debut novel, set during the American Civil War and featuring airships, flying bicycle-like contraptions, massive vehicles that walk on stilt-like legs, a flamboyant circus impresario, a fiendishly clever (and distinctly megalomaniacal) villain, some plucky heroes, and a supersecret scientific outpost with some very unusual inhabitants. Oh, and zombies. Did we mention this is not your ordinary Civil War story? Here’s the premise: due to a recent zombie outbreak, the Union and the Confederacy have put the war on hold and joined forces to deal with the living dead. The book features characters from both sides, and we follow them as they converge on the mysterious Outpost Two Thirteen, where they hope to find the key to disposing of the chewers—as they call the zombies—once and for all. But what they find will shock and terrify them, while absolutely delighting the book’s readers. This is a wonderfully written and gutsy novel, the kind of story that could easily have fallen flat on its face, if not for its author’s storytelling skills: he makes us believe a whole lot of completely unbelievable things all at once (especially one really unbelievable thing, even more unbelievable than the zombies). It’s impossible to say this too strongly: this steampunk-horror-historical-thriller crossbreed is an amazing book. Word of mouth could turn this from an under-the-radar debut novel into a genre-busting cult classic. Get on board now. --David Pitt"

 

[Joe Riley]

Forget the yellow brick road.......!

...other old time aircraft!

 

[Nancy Hart]

I had an uncle who lived in Cuyahoga Falls. I just remember going there but now I don't remember why. I always liked waterfalls but my Uncle said more specifically named after the Cuyahoga River and it's series of waterfalls, so perhaps that's why trips there were not all that memorable. We never went up to what is now known as Cuyahoga Falls National Park.

Another of my uncles (my Mom had 12 brothers and sisters) worked for Goodyear and lived a little bit south of Akron. All I remember about was where my uncle lived, there was a place called Turkeyfoot Lake that was a 3 minute walk from their door to a swimmin' hole. I remember once we had been there for several days and my cousin and I kept hammering our parents to let us go swimming. They said once it gets up to 60°F we could go. But while it was in the high 50°F range, it never quite made it to 60°F. So we took a cigarette lighter and made the thermometer show 60°F. We told them it was 60°F, my dad looked at the thermometer as saw 61°F, and said we could go. We were only in the ice cold lake water a few seconds. When we got back to their house, my aunt was standing on the steps of their house with two big beach towels, and when she handed them to us she whispered to us something like "Next time don't burn the wood on the thermometer." Busted!

I had 3 pairs of aunts & uncles who both worked for Goodyear. One lived on Turkeyfoot Lake Road. That lake is part of Portage Lakes State Park. My girlfriend and I took Red Cross swimming lessons there one summer (1962 ?) as teenagers at one of the lakes.

 

[Joe Riley]

My Airship​

By Ryan Teitman
"It cuts through the night like a sharp whistle through silence. I have no crew, no destination, no port of call. I’m the only character in a Russian sci-fi film from the seventies. Instead of a mattress, moss grows atop my bunk. When I lie on it, its green whispers the names of ships that have vanished on this same course: Hotspur, Red Star, Windhover, Kintsugi. When the director says cut, an assistant brings the man in the moss suit a ginger ale. At craft services, the Russian dressing is just called dressing. I ask the script supervisor how long it takes to learn Russian, but she turns out to be a cloud. Sorry, she says, I only speak cloud. Each word languidly becomes the next, the way a cloud changes from a fish to a tree to a bird to a door. The sentence takes her over an hour to speak. I don’t remember anything from my semester of cloud, so I just smile and nod. When the shoot finally wraps, the ship is empty again. I anchor above a drive-in to watch myself on screen, but the film is punishingly dull, and I fall asleep fifteen minutes in. I wake up as the credits are rolling. The drive-in is empty. I brush the crumbs from my shirt and double-check my charts. When we lift off, I remember how to say airship in cloud. I say it softly, to myself. By the time I finish, I’m miles away."

 

[Nancy Hart]

Union Army surveillance balloon being filled by hydrogen-generating wagons during The Civil War

(photo by Matthew Brady)