Easy Ride to Sub Orbital Altitudes

On 2020-07-02 3:25 AM, wrote:
The acetate resin doped with alumiunum powder had already destroyed one and maybe two other airships. Zeppelin (the company) was working day and night to find an alternative. The company's lab where the new materials were tested actually survived WWII and the samples were later put in storage. Zeppelin knew there was a problem (a big one) but couldn't afford to shut down its chief source of revenue, or risk losing lucrative potential defense contracts with the Third Reich over a 'petty' safety concern.

Analysis of the very famous Hindenburg plunging to the ground in flames movie revealed a few things to the aforementioned scientist.

(1) The spectacular fireball was in fact the doping catching fire and then setting fire to one of the elements in the aluminium (magnesium I think) that the Hindenburg was made of. Significant but less spectacular fireballs occur when the heat from the burning doping ignites the fuel tanks ( I can't remember if its petrol or diesel).

But in order to get to those temperatures wouldn't you need an
accelerant? Like plentiful and abundant hydrogen? If there is no
accelerant like gas/diesel/hydrogen how aggressive is the fire?


(2) hydrogen + O2 flames are typically all but invisible and would have been completely invisible on the film of the time, given how it was processed. Analysis of the film through modern filters did turn up a signature of H2+O2 flames in the UV Spectrum. But the flames are gone after the first second of the film clip, most of the hydrogen is either consumed or has already escaped.


My bad. I'll grant the fireball was the resins going up, nearly all at
once. Thanks to an accelerant. There would have been momentary enormous
heat from the hydrogen burn in infra-red. It depends how close you were
to the airship to how significant that exposure would have been.
Clothing would have protected you from that to some extent.

(3) the film actually shows a number of people jumping to their deaths while people (at the rear of the Zeppelin) wait until the tail hits the ground before trying to bail.

Granted that.


(4) No source of ignition external to the Hindenburg could be identified. This doesn't rule out all of the exotic weather related possible causes, it just points out that (then) 60 year old film technology can not be trust to capture every detail.


you? Why does everyone on USENET split hairs?

USENET, such as still exists (note I read and post through Google.Groups because I can't get a local ISP to accept NNTP traffic), exists to SPLIT HAIRS. It is the nature of the beast.

lol. true.

Good stuff that followed this snipped because I have no comment other
than to say: Thanks for the response. Your Internet connection is
certainly working well for text.

Dave