Airships are impractical, but I’d still like to fly in one.

Probably part of the reason they seem so luxurious is that they stopped flying them at the peak of their luxury. Meanwhile, planes started fairly luxurious but they’ve become more and more unpleasant for the passengers as time went on.

Still, even a business jet seems cramped and loud compared to what people had on ships like the Hindenburg. The amount of space inside makes it seem a lot more like a cruise ship than a plane.

If we have to have billionaires, couldn’t we at least get one eccentric one who has a cool personal airship instead of the penis rockets?

This is really interesting to me, thanks for posting this as I haven’t seen it before.

One of my ancestors brothers was at the front of the R101 airship that flew a few years before this and crashed in France.

This picture was not taken in 1936, it was taken in 1929 or 1930.

That’s R101, note her distinctive ring of circular intake vents around the nose. R101 crashed killing most of the passengers and crew in October of 1930, which pretty much killed British interest in airships. Her rival/cousin, R100, was scrapped the following year.

I’m unaware of any other airship that would have been flying in 1936 that moored to a high mast like that; the Germans preferred to moor their airships at ground level and load/unload via ramps directly to the surface like an ocean liner at a pier, the Americans never operated passenger airships. USS Akron and USS Macon were both aircraft carriers that used the vastly inferior yet safer helium as a lifting gas. Where R101 and Hindenberg crashed and burned, Akron and Macon merely crashed.