Customer Reviews

My Zeppelins (Flight, its first seventy-five years)

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While travelling by air is generally taken for granted today, in the 1930's the fuure of air travel and the shape that it would take was far cloudier. At that time, the technically immature airplane was poised against the giant airships of the German Zeppelin company. 'My Zeppelins' is the story of the attempt to make the Airship a commercially viable vehicle that ended in the Hindenburg disaster of 1937.

The author, Dr. Hugo Eckner, was the driving force behind the Luftshiffbau Zeppelin, the company that produced the huge airships. While he is only known today among a relatively small number of aviation historians, at the time he was a celebrity of worldwide porportions. A vocal critic of the Nazi party, only his enormous fame kept him from being liquidated along with Hitler's lessor opponents.

The book deals mostly with the spectacular success of the Hindenburg's predecessor, the Graf Zeppelin, from financing the craft to the initial ocean-crossing operations. This is most certainly a niche book, of interest to the serious airship enthusiast.

Eckener saw the second flight of the first zeppelin in 1900 and become part of the phenomenon in 1909 until the second world war. He was THE man that kept the concept alive between world wars.

He mostly tells what he did and not his feelings for the most part. He write a lot about mountains and weather. He saw a lot in his years of voyaging. He was made a non-person by Goebbles after insulting him publicly. He met FDR as well as Coolidge and Hoover. He flew the Atlantic in 1924, and around the world in 1928, and had two ticker tape parades thrown for him. He claims that it wasn't the Hindenburg disaster, but the second world war that ended the zeppelin.

I liked the book, but I'm a zeppelin geek.