More Than Hot Air

By Steve Zwick/Friedrichshafen

Just once, Scott Danneker would like to see a TV documentary or magazine story about his employer that doesn't feature the airship Hindenburg's bursting like a lava-filled egg over Lakehurst, N.J., on May 6, 1937. "What would happen if people felt compelled to mention Pan Am Flight 103 every time they talked about airplanes?" he asks. Danneker would rather talk about sleek, soaring dirigibles like the Norge, which in 1926 pinpointed the exact position of the North Pole for the first time, or about the millions of kilometers of uneventful flight the Hindenburg racked up before its dramatic exit.

A self-proclaimed "helium head," Danneker is a true believer in the future of lighter-than-air flight. He believes both that it has a future and that he's part of it. In fact, Danneker is helping set the course for a new generation of lighter-than-air flying machines that are about to appear in the skies of Europe and the U.S. "I was flying blimps in North Carolina, and I heard these guys had a prototype," the Boston-born Danneker recalls. "I ran to my wife and said, 'We gotta pack.'" The guys were Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH, the maker of giant airships based in Friedrichshafen, Germany, which hired Danneker to polish up and test-pilot its 120th creation.

After more than 60 years on the dustheap of aviation history, the Zeppelin is making a comeback--sort of. The fiery death of the Hindenburg put an end to the hydrogen-filled balloon for passenger travel, and even when the lifting gas was replaced by helium, passengers never again trusted the big airships. The last Zeppelin made, the LZ 130, rolled out of the hangar in Friedrichshafen, near the Swiss-German border, in 1938, and it was eventually turned into scrap. At 246-ft. long, the ship that Danneker will pilot, the new Zeppelin NT--for new technology--will disappoint those expecting to see hotels embedded in the bellies of stadium-size behemoths. German regulations limit the number of people aboard a commuter aircraft to 19, and the Zeppelin NT will carry just 12 passengers and two crew members. Testing is complete, and it's only a matter of waiting for the aviation rule book to be updated to accommodate the "new" type of ship. So far, ships have been sold to tourism and computer companies, and oil companies are interested in using the ships to monitor pipelines.

The German airship is the first of many that will soon be soaring over Europe. In the Netherlands a company called Rigid Airship Design is building a 591-ft.-long dirigible, which it hopes to begin testing at the end of next year. The company aims to carry as much as 30 tons of cargo or 240 passengers. In Berlin a company called CargoLifter launched a high-profile public stock offering on May 30 to fund the building of an 853-ft. colossus--49 ft. longer than the ill-fated Hindenburg. "I've been watching the airship industry for 15 years, and now it's getting very exciting," says Christian Schulthess, who for 20 years was a pilot with Balair-CTA, the charter subsidiary of Swissair. He is now president of Skyship Cruises in Switzerland, which ordered the first Zeppelin. "CargoLifter and Rigid Airship Design get your imagination going," he says, "and here the Zeppelins are really flying."

What has given an old technology a new boost is lightweight materials like foamed carbon fibers, similar to those used in the Brietling Orbiter 3, the balloon that Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones used in last year's record-setting flight around the world. Piccard is the grandson of Auguste Piccard, the famed physicist and part-time aviator who in 1932 became the first man to reach the stratosphere in a balloon. In 1988 an engineer named Klaus Hagenlocher began poring through the Zeppelin archives and persuaded the company's CEO, Friedrichshafen Mayor Bernd Wiedmann, to resurrect the airship. In 1993 a new company was formed to create a prototype, the LZ No. 7, which Danneker piloted on its maiden flight in 1997. Its construction was funded by a foundation set up by companies that came into existence as parts suppliers in Zeppelin's heyday, and their motives sometimes seem more sentimental than business driven. Thus far, only one airship has been built, and another is under construction, with contracts to sell a total of five. Sponsors have invested $35 million to develop the ships, and to break even the company will need to sell about 20 of them at $7 million each to firms such as Switzerland's Skyship Cruise and Germany's Transatlantic Luftfahrt Gesellschaft.

The Zeppelin NT is more maneuverable than a blimp, and it doesn't vibrate as much as a helicopter--making it ideal for scientific and business projects such as monitoring pipelines and detecting mines. "This ship has the kind of precision and maneuverability that you'll never find in a blimp," says Schulthess. "We can land the Zeppelin with a ground crew of just two people, while the best blimps need 17 or 18 people."

The CargoLifter project, by contrast, started when logistics expert Carl von Gablenz had an epiphany a few years back in North Carolina, where he was a visiting professor of logistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was waiting for a lumbering freight train to cross the road in front of him when the tedium caused him to start thinking about ways to float heavy machinery over land. He began hitting up German logistics companies for capital to build something to do just that. "Using conventional means, it takes about 60 days and costs about $250,000 to haul 140 tons of freight from Germany to Kazakhstan," Von Gablenz says. "With the CargoLifter, the same freight would arrive in three days, and the costs would be about 20% lower"--assuming, of course, that the prototype gets off the ground in 2002. Von Gablenz needs $250 million to build a construction hangar and put a ship in the air. To date he has raised $160 million from shareholders--two-thirds of it from 16,000 private investors and the rest from institutional investors and potential users such as Siemens and Thyssen Krupp. Von Gablenz's company has successfully tested a one-eighth-scale version called Joey. The first freight could be shipped by CargoLifter in 2003.

So will the skies soon be filled with airships? Don't bet on it. Even if everything goes well, Zeppelin plans to build fewer than three ships a year if a market for its long-lost brainchild develops.