Rigid Airship - Famous Rigid Airships

Famous Rigid Airships

• R34, British airship and the first aircraft to traverse the Atlantic Ocean from east to west, in 1919.
• USS Shenandoah, American naval airship which served the U.S. Navy from 1923 until its crash in Ohio in 1925.
• R38 (ZR-2), British airship intended to join the American naval fleet, but crashed during testing in 1921.
• 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.
• 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 ultimately dismantled by the Nazis at the outset of World War II.
• R80, British airship that first used Barnes Wallis's geodesic construction approach that was later applied to the Wellington bomber.
• 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.
• R-101, British airship designed and built by the British government in a kind of competition with the R-100. 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• LZ 129 Hindenburg, German passenger airship also designed and built by Hugo Eckener. The airship was lost after catching fire and exploding in New Jersey in 1937. With its end came the end of the age of the Great Rigid Airships.