It is specifically a La Aurora 107 Zeppelin perfecto.

Thanks, Joe! You are too kind. 🙂

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To bring attention to the movement for women’s suffrage, Australian-born Muriel Lilah Matters hired an airship to drop pamphlets over London in 1909 as King Edward VII made his procession through Westminster for the State Opening of Parliament.

Emblazoned with “Votes For Women” on the envelope, and with aeronaut Henry Spencer at the controls and Matters bravely in the basket, the 80-foot airship departed Hendon for Westminster on February 16, 1909.

The underpowered airship was blown off course by adverse winds and never reached Westminster — landing in the branches of a tree in Surrey instead — but Matters achieved her goal of publicity for the cause of women’s suffrage.

On this International Women’s Day, take a moment to listen to this wonderful 1939 BBC interview with the intrepid Muriel Matters.

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I wish they had not sanitized history by censoring the flag on LZ-129’s fins, and there are problems with a few very small details, but nice animations — including a great visualization of how the passenger space was located within the hull — and a generally enjoyable video.

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The Rocketeer is 108 minutes of avgeek/Dieselpunk heaven featuring a fictional German airship called the LZ-130 Luxembourg, a Gee Bee, Howard Hughes, and tons of other 1930s aircraft.

Here is a short clip of the Rocketeer using his jetpack to fly to the zeppelin to rescue his sweetheart from Errol Flynn some Nazi movie star who bears no resemblance to Errol Flynn:

The Rocketeer Minute is hosted by #avgeeks Hal Bryan of the Experimental Aircraft Association and Jim O’Kane, who also does The Airport Minute, a podcast featuring a minute-by-minute analysis of one of my all-time favorite films, Airport.

(And let me just say that any pilot who does not get choked up when Joe Patroni says, “That’s one nice thing about the 707. It can do everything but read the manual” needs to have his ticket lifted.)

It was an honor and a pleasure to chat with Hal and Jim about zeppelins.

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Based on the size of the human figures (assuming the people are 6 feet tall), and assuming the pool is 6 feet deep, a very rough estimate of the water in that pool would be 30,240 cubic feet, or 226,210 gallons, or 1,886,591 pounds.

Just to lift the water in the pool alone would require 31.4 million cubic feet of helium at 60 lb lift per 1000 cu. ft.

 That’s 4-1/2 Hindenburgs.

Of course, the airship would need to lift more than just the pool: Engines, anyone? Fuel? How about that hard carapace of a shell?

This “airship” has as much chance of floating in the air as Hugo Eckener after a meal of sauerbraten and kaiserschmarrn.

Which is good, because placing two million pounds of water above the lifting gas would cause this thing to capsize and dump all those people onto the pretty mountains.

And at that altitude, high above those mountains peaks, the helium would expand so much the airship would have to be vastly larger than in that illustration.

And the water in the pool would likely freeze into a block of ice without some rather effective — and heavy! — heating system.

But when some people think about airships, they forget about physics.

Bless their hearts. 🙂

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I asked Kirk McGinnis, who created the shirt, to explain what inspired him. Kirk told me, “What I particularly wanted to convey was that Zeppelins actually had major successes for their time and weren’t all disasters like the Hindenburg. There’s no other airship that conveys that message better than the Graf Zeppelin and there’s no better feat to focus on than Hugo Eckener’s 1929 circumnavigation of the globe.”

Kirk told me his interest in zeppelins began when he watched the movie “Wayne’s World” as 12-year old and saw Garth wearing the classic Led Zeppelin shirt depicting the Hindenburg disaster!

“T-shirts are like miniature walking billboards,” Kirk said. “Any idea or message you can think of can easily be spread on a shirt. And it hit me that not only would it be cool to have a REAL Zeppelin shirt, rather than the Led Zeppelin shirts I’ve had to buy over the years instead, but that if the shirt shared some details about the history of airships it could lead to conversation and potentially educate people who knew nothing about them.”

Please support Kirk and his passion for teaching the world about zeppelins by buying one of his shirts.

And when people ask what it means, you can tell them all about LZ-127. 🙂

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Lot 3284 – Postcard written by Hindenburg mechanic Albert Thasler

The Thasler Postcard

The postcard was written by Hindenburg engine mechanic Albert Thasler, who often sent mail to himself and family members. Thasler was ill and not able to join Hindenburg’s last flight so he gave several pieces of mail — at least nine cards and three letters –  to friend and fellow Hindenburg mechanic Robert Moser.

Moser gave the items to navigation officer Max Zabel — who also functioned as Hindenburg’s postmaster — during the flight to America. Zabel planned to cancel the items during the return flight to Germany and he stored them in Hindenburg’s post office, where they were later found amid the wreckage. Moser was in one of Hindenburg’s engineering rooms deep inside the airship at the time of the accident and died in the crash.

More than 17,000 letters and postcards were carried on Hindenburg’s last flight but only 372 were recovered from the wreckage, and they are documented in Dieter Leder‘s definitive book, LZ-129 Hindenburg Zeppelin Crash Mail (Meersburg, Germany: Topo|Verlag, 2012).

The Felzmann Auction

The Thasler postcard is among hundreds of items of zeppelin mail being offered in Auktionshaus Ulrich Felzmann’s Auction No. 158. The items are too numerous to describe here but can be viewed online.

The auction also includes a “drop bag” used to drop mail from LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin; several pieces of mail from early DELAG passenger zeppelins; postcards from Graf Zeppelin’s Polar Flight; and items sent or signed by well known zeppelin crew members including Max Pruss, Albert Sammt, and Willy Speck.

Lot 3064 – Mail Drop Bag from LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin

Lot 3134 – A913 postcard from LZ 17 “Sachsen”

Lot 3224 – Graf Zeppelin postcard signed by Max Pruss

Lot 3242 – Graf Zeppelin postcard mailed by Albert Sammt

Lot 3215- Graf Zeppelin postcard signed by radio officer Willy Speck

Lot 3223 – Cover from Graf Zeppelin Polar Flight that was passed to the Soviet icebreaker Malygin

Lot 3281 – Hindenburg cover from multiple 1936 North and South American flights

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It didn’t.

Which is not to say Birmingham does not have a connection to the zeppelin craze of the 1920’s.

It certainly does.

The tower was built in 1929 as a publicity stunt to gain attention for the new hotel by capitalizing on the worldwide fascination with airships inspired by the success of Graf Zeppelin, which crossed the Atlantic in 1928 and made a round-the-world flight in 1929.

And if Birmingham wants to celebrate civic pride by promoting this connection to a fascinating time in aviation history, good for Birmingham!

Postcard of Hotel Thomas Jefferson. (Tichnor Brothers Collection Location, Boston Public Library)

Birmingham was not alone in trying to capture the public’s love of airships in the 1920s and 1930s. Several buildings around the United States installed “dirigible mooring masts” as publicity stunts during that era. The most famous, of course, is the one atop New York’s Empire State Building, but there is also one in Chicago (which I discussed in a piece for Chicago’s NPR affiliate WBEZ: “Zeppelin Poseurs: Why Chicago’s Airship Dreams Never Took Off“) and even in Buffalo, New York.

But while these were great marketing tools, they would have been disastrous mooring masts.

The spindly little structure on Birmingham’s building was never actually intended as a mooring mast for dirigibles, which place tremendous structural loads on their mooring masts; a 776-foot airship like Graf Zeppelin acts like a giant sail, and the slightest wind against such a tremendous surface puts a huge load on anything to which it is attached. The mooring mast used to secure Britain’s R.101, for example — which is shown in the Alabama video — could withstand a force of thirty tons and was secured to eight pieces of concrete that were each 12 feet square and embedded six feet deep in the ground, and the mast itself was a massive structure. It also had an elevator (lift) to carry passengers up and down the mast.

The airship mast at Cardington, England with R.101

Diagram of Cardington mast

The skinny tower in Birmingham could never have withstood the loads exerted by an airship.

I found the following photo of the structure posted by an urban explorer; it is easy to see that an airship would have ripped this “mast” off the building in the slightest wind, assuming the thin middle section of the tower didn’t fail first, which seems likely.

Nor does this “mooring mast” have any way for passengers to embark or disembark; there isn’t so much as a ladder connecting the top of the mast to the roof of the building.

But Birmingham, Buffalo, and other cities can take pride in their desire to be seen on the cutting edge of technology and to associate themselves with the future — even if only for the purpose of public relations.

Meanwhile, enjoy this great video from the folks at This is Alabama, and congratulations to Birmingham on the renovation of this beautiful old building.

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