The speed of progress that marks aviation history astounds me.

In
1903, the Wright Brothers controlled a heavier than air, powered
flight for a matter of moments. By the First World War, the
technology was capable of not only sustained air flight, but of
enough maneuverability to make the airplane into an adaptable
weapon of war. We have often discussed in class how technologies
change our view of the world (railroads bringing us closer,
assembly line making us part of the manufacturing machine). With
aviation, the speed of the development, the speed of the vehicle,
and the conquering of the third dimension of space inspired artists,
scientists, children, and adults in every nation the technology
touched. Some nations viewed aviation as a source of national
pride and considered the technology to be owned by the state. Peter
Fritzsche explores this dynamic in A Nation of Fliers: German
Aviation and the popular Imagination. In essence, he tells a
biography of the German People from 1908 to 1939 through the
nation’s relationship to aviation. Tom Crouch is more focused on
the personal relationship with aviation and his biography The
Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright is about the
man and the machine. Therefore, Crouch chooses to tell his
narrative primarily through personal correspondences while
Fritzsche draws on popular press and media. I will focus on
Fritzsche’s work by discussing the three primary types of German
aviation (Zeppelin, Fighter Plane, Glider), how the nation related
to each technology, and how he uses a variety of sources to explore
these relationships.
Zeppelin
German aviation, and Fritzsche’s book, begins in 1908 with the flight of the first
zeppelin, and consequently the first German motorized aircraft. Initially, the zeppelin was
seen as the people’s craft and a demonstration of national superiority. When an accident
at Echterdingen challenged the future of the zeppelin program, individuals, businesses,
and civic organizations donated to a fund for Graf Zeppelin to build the next generation
craft (15-17). In
addition to monetary support, Fritzsche argues that poems and songs from Germans and a
proliferation in zeppelin souvenirs reflected the enthusiasm of the populace. Not only did
the zeppelin become a symbol for most social movements and classes in pre-WWI and
Weimar Germany, Graf Zeppelin was also elevated to a level of national representation.
“Graf Zeppelin represented what many Germans took to be their national virtues: skill,
purposefulness, and idealism” (35).
In World War I, the zeppelin took on new imagery as a weapon of the state. This role was
foreshadowed in children’s songs leading up to the first aerial bombings of the War. The
military hesitated using zeppelins offensively, but “growing pressure from the public,
which for six years had carried on a romance with the sleek, powerful zeppelins, was
critical in forcing the hand of the high command, which authorized the first zeppelin raids
in early 1915” (44). The zeppelin influenced the populace and in turn the populace
influenced the state. The illusion of an invincible, superior zeppelin reflected the illusion
of an invincible, superior Germany. While the zeppelin faced physical limitations,
Germany faced European defeat. Therefore, as Germany strove to repair its image post-
WWI, it once again drew on the image of the zeppelin to inspire national confidence.
Germany pioneered transatlantic voyages to once again prove technical proficiency and
superiority to the world. However, the tragedy of the Hindenburg exemplified the frailty
of the craft, and analogously the German state.
The sinusoidal journey of the Zeppelin and of Graf Zeppelin in German popular culture is
effectively portrayed in this German schoolgirl adaptation of London Bridges:
Zeppelin to, Zeppelin fro,
Zeppelin has no airship more.
Zeppelin up, Zeppelin down,
Zeppelin has his airship now.
Zepp-Zapp-Zeppelin
The airship’s down again (35)
Fighter Plane
Fritzsche states that as the War progressed, the airshipman on the zeppelin became more
a symbol of the German spirit than the craft itself (58). The evolving image of the pilot
captures the German romance with flight. Initially the pilot was little more than a
chauffer, transferring officers from one location to another or flying a gunman around to
shoot at enemy targets or planes. However, when Anthony Fokker, a Dutch engineer,
built a monoplane with a synchronized rapid-fire gun the image and reality of the war ace
came into being. Fritzshe includes advertisement, portraits from newspapers, and
graphics of ace funerals to demonstrate the individual importance of each ace. “Much of
the power of the image of the ace comes from its contrast to that of the infantryman in the
trenches. Fliers fought an individual rather than a collective and anonymous war. Their
victories were immediately recognizable” (82). The zeppelin relied on the technology and
its inventor for imagery while the user was the focus of the fighter plane mystique.
Fokker’s integrated monoplane altered the relationship between the plane and the pilot.
The technology became an enhancement of the human. Rabinbach’s The Human Motor
showed how the modern era viewed humans as analogous to machines and possibly
governed by similar principles. Humans eventually become integrated into the machine
through the assembly line. However Fritzsche further extends this metaphor of
integration by portraying the plane as an extension of the pilot. Crouch echoes this
relationship when discussing the intimacy between the pilot and control system in even
the early Wright Fliers.
The image of the ace hardened, became superhuman and sterile as WWI raged on. “Over
the course of the war, airmen emerged as representatives of a more tough-minded,
popular patriotism that was technologically able and ruthlessly chauvinistic” (100).
Germany’s defeat, and the resulting Treaty of Versailles, banished German pilots from
the skies, freezing the image of the ace.
Gliders
In spite of Versailles, Germans were not going to abandon aviation and its resultant
national pride. Constructing and flying gliders quickly became a national hobby post-
WWI. As technological progress was made, gliding was recast as a patriotic, nationalistic
act. Fritzsche uses gliding to represent the German people’s transition from civilian
idealism and self-reliance to military fraternity. This shift in mentality between the world
wars is most starkly portrayed when contrasting two pictures of gliding included by
Fritzsche. The first (129) shows a relaxed outdoor environment with informally dressed
Germans sprawled around glider wings, casually working together. The second picture
shows uniformed Nazis rigidly lined up along the wings of a glider (194). Of course, “the
point is not that gliding camps in the 1920s nurtured Nazis but that the unpretentious and
cooperative spirit and self-reliant nationalism that gliding cherished eventually fostered
an unmistakable empathy for the National Socialist message” (130).
The accessibility of gliding and the later violation of Versailles increased the notion that
German was an “airminded” people. At the start of World War II, air warfare was
discussed with nonchalance in the German home and schoolroom, reflecting the complete
ubiquity of aviation in all facets of society. Again, Fritzsche demonstrates this
airmindedness by drawing on popular press, government propaganda, poems, and
folksongs. In drawing on a wide range of sources, the reader draws the conclusion that
aviation really was ubiquitous. Even if signs of aviation were every where, one wonders
if there were any dissenting German sentiments. Certainly in the United States there was
at least a noise complaint concerning low flying planes. Did Frizsche not come across
similar statements or did he choose not to include them. If the evidence doesn’t exist is it
because Germans were truly universally enthusiastic about aviation or is it a function of
information flow in a tyrannical state?
The Bishop’s Boys and A Nation of Fliers both tell a story by listening to what the people
are saying about themselves. Crouch had an obvious place to start, with personal
correspondence,
when writing the Wrights’ journey. However, he brought in newspaper articles and court
testimonies to add multiple perspectives to the tale. Fritzsche did not necessarily have an
obvious fundamental source or an obvious point of view. Thus, his decision to draw
heavily on popular press puts the narrative focus on the people, not on the rulers or the
scientists/engineers. Germany’s early aviation history pivoted around three crafts: the
zeppelin, the fighter plane, and the glider. They coexisted and improved alongside each
other, but each related to the German people and state in different ways. The zeppelin
symbolically served as the people’s craft. The fighter plane emphasized the (German)
man behind the machine. And the glider physically allowed the populace to interact with
aviation technology before becoming a vehicle for the rising socialist state. Germany’s
interaction with each technological artifact was documented in popular culture and
captured and retold by Fritzsche as a history of the time and a biography of its people
Could Zeppelin's airships soon be gracing our skies again?
A new generation of environmentally friendly 'hybrid airships' could be just about
to take off
Germany is producing zeppelins again. More than 70 years after the infamous
Hindenburg disaster, its latest airship was gently guided out of the hangar doors
last month to make its maiden test flight.
The Zeppelin NT, built from endowment money left behind by German airship
pioneer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, will make further test flights around
Friedrichshafen over the coming months, before flying to London - where a
former contestant from The Apprentice, Rory Laing, plans to offer tourist joyrides
over the capital for £150 a throw.
What is it about airships that continues to capture the imagination? By rights, the
lumbering airborne relics of a century past should be no more than museum
curiosities, consigned like gas lamps to the sentimental roll-call of redundant
technology. But like sacked television contestants, it's hard to keep an idea as
audacious as the airship down. With the cost of oil at record highs, and airline
chiefs warning of the end of cheap flights, the idea of the airship is being
seriously floated once more.
The appeal is of the airship is easy to grasp. Environmentalists like George
Monbiot cite their frugal use of fuel when compared to other forms of flight. They
are also quiet and fly at low altitude, at around 4,000ft compared with 35,000ft,
further lessening their environmental impact. Although they are relatively slow,
typically travelling at 125 mph - as quick as a high-speed train, but still needing
about 43 hours to cross the Atlantic - most need no runway and could be
deployed without need for further airport expansion.
One British company, SkyCat, is even floating the idea that airships could take
off from the reservoirs bordering Heathrow airport. Airships appeal, moreover, to
romantic travellers who see something glamorous in their more stately form of
travel.
Once it's flown around London for a while, the new Zeppelin will cross the
Atlantic itself en route to San Francisco where it will conduct more tourist flights
(a sister ship is already operating in Japan). In engineering terms, the Zeppelin
NT represents a remarkable revival in the fortunes of the airship.
On the right vector
It's more nimble than the old airships. The NT uses "vectored thrust", which is in
principle the same ability to direct its thrust in much the same way as a Harrier
jump jet. This is important, because one thing holding the airship back is it
vulnerability to wind, especially gusts. Most traditional airships need a dozen
people to tie it to a mast; the NT, just three.
The renaissance has been a long time coming. The development of the airship in
the latter part of the 20th century saw the once stately transport reduced to the
role of tethered balloon: a static camera platform and floating advertising hording
like America's Goodyear blimp. But since the millennium, ideas for a new
generation of airships have abounded.
Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defence manufacturer, has been secretly
testing the crewed hybrid P-791 that marries the buoyancy of an airship with the
aerodynamics of an aeroplane. Deep in development in California is the
Aeroscraft, another hybrid that touts itself as a sky yacht and looks a lot like
Thunderbird 2 from the old TV show.
Then there is the Stratocruiser, a beautiful re-imagining of the zeppelin by Tino
Schaedler, a London-based German set designer and thinker. It's a wonderful
flight of fancy designed to incorporate a gourmet restaurant, swimming pool and
nightclub with resident DJs.
"Over the last year or so we've seen a real renaissance in the airship ventures,
both in manned tourism-based airships and in surveillance," explains Andreas
Grünewald, a zeppelin enthusiast who blogs atAirshipworld . "It's something very
present and growing, especially over the last year or so. There's a lot going on".
The trouble though with the buzz of a zeppelin revival is a simple one: carrying
capacity. The Zeppelin NT has a passenger capacity of just 12, plus two crew.
The Aeroscraft, more ambitious offering, could be adapted to manage anything
up to 180. (A 747 carries about 460 people.)
Airships may be enjoying their most exciting phase since the 1930s. But don't sell
your shares in the airlines just yet. Though people think the 1937 Hindenburg
disaster killed off airships, they never took off for mass transit. The Hindenburg
was from a fleet of just two, and fixed-wing passenger aircraft had already
overtaken the zeppelin for passenger carriage.
"They were for a very limited number of wealthy passengers and mainly as an
alternative to luxury passenger shipping services to a very few destinations,"
says Douglas Botting, author of Dr Eckener's Dream Machine, a biography of the
zeppelin. "If the Hindenburg disaster had not stopped the zeppelin service dead
in its tracks, world war two would have done." The airship's passenger days
seemed behind it. But around a decade ago, a British designer, Roger Monk,
working inside the shed in Cardington where Britain's own airship programme
was conducted in the 1930s, began to revive the idea with his SkyCat. The
SkyCat was the first serious "hybrid airship" combining the aerodynamics of a
fixed-wing aircraft with the lighter-than-air properties of a balloon.
The SkyCat also employs a "hover-skirt" which allows it to land not just without a
runway, but without a mast to tie it to, giving it a drawing-board advantage over
the zeppelin. "In our case we don't need any ground crew whatsoever," says
Michael Stewart of SkyCat. "We can land our ship anywhere: on water or snow or
marsh and even rubble."
The latter point you keep hearing about airships; that they could be used for
disaster rescue. An airship can fly over broken bridges and land without a
runway, taking aid to precisely the point it is needed.
What's new, SkyCat?
The SkyCat is a beautifully conceived vehicle, but one that has so far failed to
receive proper funding. The team have built a 25m-long model, dubbed the "Sky
Kitten", but that's it. The problem is money. Airships are expensive and don't
carry many people. SkyCat has been floating around for a decade and yet it has
failed to raise the hundreds of millions needed to get it off the ground. But even if
hybrid airships can find commercial backers, they still face a steep climb.
The next thing holding airships back is the cost of the gas. To fill the SkyCat with
helium, for example,would cost between £1m to £3m. However, the helium
doesn't need to be refilled each time the airship lands, and "you only lose about
1% a year", says Stewart.
But a further disadvantage is speed. SkyCat will fly with a top speed of 100mph,
far less when flying into a prevailing wind. London to Manchester would be far
slower than the train.
Another problem is their vulnerability to wind. Although, "as they increase in size
they become less so", says Grünewald. "With increasing technology that problem
will be reduced to the same level of vulnerability faced by aeroplane."
The sight of zeppelins over London is sure to rekindle interest in the airship. The
rising price of oil may one day make them affordable. For a short-haul journeys,
they could easily compete with the likes of ferries and trains, but the return to
long-haul remains something of a dream. And yet who would have thought, a
decade ago, that passenger airships would ever fly at all?
In the history of civil aviation, Germany may hold a unique distinction—that of
having an airship service as its first airline, considered also by many as the
world's first passenger airline. On November 16, 1909, German entrepreneurs
created a company named DELAG (Deutsche Luftschiffahrt Aktien
Gesellschaft). The company used one of the large airships built by Ferdinand
Graf von Zeppelin, a retired military officer in his sixties. The early DELAG
flights, between 1910 and 1914, and then after World War I, between 1919 and
1921, cost passengers between 100 and 200 reichsmarks, much more than the
income of an average German worker. For the most part, DELAG airships
carried wealthy foreigners across Germany to cities such as Berlin, Potsdam,
and Dusseldorf.
Even though airships offered the first air transport services in Germany, their
importance was slowly eclipsed by airplane service. In the late 1930s, after a
series of spectacular accidents involving a number of airships—including the
catastrophic explosion of the Hindenburg airship in May 1937—the Germans
permanently discontinued airship transport in favor of airplanes.
As with most other European countries, civil air transport in Germany was a
logical outcome of the military use of aircraft during World War I. As the war
neared its end, German aircraft manufacturers were keen to convert their
production to civilian use. They did not, however, anticipate the terms of the
Treaty of Versailles, signed by all the major powers in June 1919, which
severely restricted German weapons development. As a consequence, civil
aviation also suffered from the lack of available aircraft.
Many important German airplane manufacturers simply collapsed, but some
survived. The most important survivor was the Junkers firm, founded by Hugo
Junkers, the son of a mill-owner who already had established a name as an
inventor of engines and boilers. During the war, he had pioneered the
construction of all-metal aircraft for the German air force. One of Junker's
most famous contributions to civil aviation was the all-metal low-wing Junkers
F13 monoplane, which some historians consider the world's first true transport
airplane, in other words, one that was not converted from military to civilian
use, but rather was built specifically to carry passengers. Other companies that
continued to build civilian aircraft in the 1920s included Heinkel and Dornier.
All these companies built a variety of models that were regularly exported to
countries such as the Soviet Union, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Iran, and Turkey for
their own use. The Germans had much incentive to build a variety of different
transport aircraft. Since the Treaty of Versailles prohibited Germans from
building military aircraft, the government built "dual-use" aircraft that could be
secretly and quickly converted for military use.
After World War I, the new Weimar government in Germany was very
supportive of early efforts at commercial aviation. With as much as 70 percent
of their costs paid by the government, companies such as A.E.G. (Allgemeine
Elektrizitats Gesellschaft) offered basic airlines services, often for only a single
passenger. By the mid-1920s, there were a number of small civilian passenger
services in Germany, although only a few survived the massive inflation and
poor economic conditions of the time. In January 1926, the German
government combined two of these, Deutsche Aero Lloyd (DAL) and Junkers,
into a new company named Deutsche Luft Hansa (DLH). The government gave
the company, which effectively had a monopoly on German air transport, an
annual subsidy of the modest sum of 18 million marks to ensure that it had a
stable future.
DLH was quite large for the time. On the day of its first regularly scheduled
service, April 6, 1926, it owned as many as 162 aircraft consisting of 18
different models. Most of these aircraft were the single-engine Merkur built by
the Dornier company, owned by Claudius Dornier, a veteran of the Zeppelin
airship design teams. DLH's services began to expand through the late 1920s,
when it acquired shares in a joint German-Soviet airline known as Deruluft that
operated popular international services between the two countries. In 1933,
DLH was renamed simply Lufthansa, a name that the modern German airline
inherited.
Unlike many other European airlines of the period, Lufthansa was hugely
profitable. Lufthansa's expansion was helped by two factors: a powerful
government eager to expand and spread its influence all over the world, and
the lifting of restrictions on German commercial aviation in 1928. The motto
for Lufthansa perfectly illustrated how German commercial aviation combined
business with nationalism: "commerce follows the flag." By 1928, Lufthansa
flew more miles and carried more passengers than all the other European
companies combined. The company had a staff of 300 superbly trained pilots as
well as some of the best civil aircraft in the world, manufactured by Junkers
and Dornier. The Junkers Ju-52 became the mainstay of Lufthansa routes in
Europe and elsewhere, although larger planes such as the Junkers G-38 (only
two were ever built) saw service as well.
One of Lufthansa's most well publicized achievements was a service to remote
China. In February 1930, Lufthansa and the Chinese Transport Ministry signed a
ten-year agreement for the operation of an airline called Eurasia, which would
be operated by Lufthansa. Establishing service to China proved to be a big
challenge for the Germans. There were no aerial maps of China, no radio
stations, no repair shops, and no airports, only rudimentary landing strips.
Although there were problems with the route—such as pilots getting lost
because of navigational errors or pilots getting stranded for weeks without
spare parts—the service proved to be commercially lucrative. By 1939, the
Europe-China service extended over nearly 5,000 miles; Junkers aircraft had
carried 52,000 passengers and over 2,000 tons of cargo. When the new Nazi
government allied itself with the Japanese imperial government, the Chinese
cut ties with Germany in 1941. It would be nearly 40 years before a German
plane, a Lufthansa, would land again in a Chinese city.
The Nazi seizure of power had a profound effect on German aviation. The Nazis
used air power as one of the main ways to extend their influence over Europe
and Asia, and indeed, much of the world. The distinctions between civil and
military aviation were blurred, as the Nazi swastika, painted on both combat
and passenger aircraft, became a powerful symbol of Nazi aspirations. It was a
common sight to see Lufthansa aircraft with the swastika emblazoned on their
tail fins. During the war, Lufthansa's well-equipped air service served the Nazis
well, but it also called into question the company's role in the immoral policies
of the Nazi government. At the end of the war, in 1945, Lufthansa discontinued
all services and was liquidated as a company. German commercial aviation, and
Lufthansa in particular, would have to start from the beginning.