Hindenburg Blows Up

On the evening of May 6, 1937, the German dirigible Hindenburg approached its mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey, completing a transatlantic crossing from Frankfurt. The massive airship — 804 feet in length and filled with approximately seven million cubic feet of hydrogen gas — had made the journey in routine fashion, yet something went catastrophically wrong in the final moments of landing. At 7:25 p.m., a fire ignited near the tail of the craft, and within thirty-four seconds the entire vessel was consumed in a fireball visible for miles.

Of the 97 persons aboard, 36 perished — passengers and crew members alike — along with one member of the ground handling team below. The disaster was captured on newsreel film and broadcast live over radio, including the anguished commentary of reporter Herbert Morrison, whose cry of "Oh, the humanity!" became one of the most recognizable phrases in the history of American broadcasting. The cause of the Hindenburg explosion has never been definitively established, and the question has generated debate among engineers and historians ever since.

Theories have ranged from a hydrogen leak ignited by an electrostatic discharge, to sabotage by an anti-Nazi crew member, to a failure of the outer fabric skin. What is beyond dispute is the disaster's consequence for the future of air travel. The Hindenburg was the pride of Nazi Germany's aviation program and the flagship of what had seemed a promising era of commercial airship travel across the Atlantic. Its destruction in full view of the press and public brought that era to an abrupt close, effectively ending the age of the passenger dirigible and accelerating the shift toward fixed-wing aircraft as the dominant form of long-distance air transport.