msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader) (03/26/85)
> > > I saw a film somewhere (whose name I forget) about using hydrogen as > > > a fuel. It seems that John Q. Public isn't ready for it -- street > > > interviews showed that everybody thought of the Hindenburg. > > > Laura Creighton While I'm not advocating the use of hydrogen airships, it is worth noting that many people survived the Hindenburg disaster, even though most of the hydrogen was consumed in a matter of seconds. The reason is that the hydrogen naturally tended to rise away from the rest of the vehicle, which in turn tended to fall away from the flames, as soon as the fire breached the gasbags. The other great airship disaster was the R101, which simply ran out of lift in a storm (low air pressure == need more lift) because of poor design -- its fabric was fraying rapidly, and one or more gasbags apparently burst under wind stress. The R101 was designed and built by civil servants in a somewhat hostile competition to the private enterprise R100. The R100 was scrapped when the (British) government decided not to support any further development of airships after (though not entirely because) their pet R101 crashed. The story is told by Nevil Shute in his nonfiction book "Slide Rule". Shute was the principal designer of the R100; his full name was Nevil Shute Norway. By the way, it's not "flammible", it's "flammable". (Or "inflammable", as was discussed nearly ad nauseam in net.nlang recently.) Mark Brader