What if the hindenburg didnt blow up

Headwinds had extended its Atlantic crossing by about half a day and thunderstorms delayed its final approach. Ground handlers grabbed hold of the landing lines dropped from the bow of the ship. Four minutes later, at 7. Though there seems little doubt the hydrogen lifting gas caught fire, what actually started the fire has been debated ever since.

Various witness testimonies suggest that hydrogen was escaping from one of the rear gas bags, causing the stern of the Hindenburg to sink. Captain Albert Sammt tried to correct the trim of the airship adjust its balance by venting hydrogen from cells 11—16 in the bow for 30 seconds, dropping kg of water ballast from ring 77 in the tail and, when this failed, he ordered six crewmen forward to the bow.

Both the released and escaping hydrogen passed into the gas exit shafts between the gas bags before leaving the top of the airship. The Board of Inquiry into the disaster concluded this hydrogen was ignited by static electricity. Hydrogen is flammable in air over a much wider range of concentrations than petrol and diesel.

Hydrogen can even explode when mixed with air in the right proportions. In order to control buoyancy, hydrogen was released from the gas bags into the ventilation or exit shafts between them. In the process, the hydrogen would have passed through the full range of concentrations, before escaping out of the top of the airship. This was an accident waiting for an ignition source and the energy required is equivalent to dropping a 5 g pencil from less than the thickness of a coin.

The Hindenburg was making a high landing, known as a flying moor, and would have dropped its landing ropes and winching cable so it could be winched down the mooring mast. However, the Hindenburg did not burst into flames for another four minutes. Besides, ground handlers would have known to wait for the landing ropes to touch the ground to allow any charge to flow to earth or risk electrocution.

However, there might well have been a build-up of static electricity on the airship caused by friction as it moved through the air, the so-called triboelectric effect. The skin was separated from the duralumin frame by ramie lacing cords.

Ramie Boehmeria nivea is a flowering plant from the nettle family and among the strongest natural fibres. But ramie is an electrical insulator so a potential difference could have been created between the skin and the frame and a spark between the two could have ignited the hydrogen. Following the demise of the Hindenburg, design modifications were made to her sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin II LZ , which was still under construction. Today we could build a fairly safe airship using advanced polymers as gas bags.

Methane provides less lift than hydrogen but is far less prone to leaking and in low concentrations exploding. It might work but nobody has any interest in trying. On a world where polymer technology was fifty years advanced but where the Wright brothers crashed and died The issue of using highly flammable hydrogen would have most likely come up and even if the US somehow managed to manufacture enough Helium, seems it would have burned the same a similar crash happened on the US Navy's USS Akron.

Turns out lighter than air has the issue of being subject to the weather. As for the effects, the most likely ones would be the actions of those people who would have survived.

This is explored in the time travelling show featuring some nice alternate history paradoxes Timeless. So I'd say if you want to look at the effects, pull the list of the victims and look into their lives and what they could have done, especially in the years leading up to WWII.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Asked 5 years, 8 months ago. Active 1 year, 6 months ago. Viewed 2k times. Thank you for the answers. Improve this question. Star Mr. Star 67 1 1 silver badge 8 8 bronze badges. Nobody knows".

On these paradoxes you can then play "patches" to repair the timeline with new history. This one isn't closed as too broad mostly because it has very little affect. But if you were to go to other questions where history diverged from ours they are normally closed for being too broad, because there would be too many possible answers. This no Hindenburg disaster is one of the aspects of the series' alternate history. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. WI the Hindenburg hadn't blown up.

The Hindenburg doesn't explode in Improved airship design and greater demand favors lighter-than-air travel over the commercial airplane, though airplanes are still built for military use. This gives the German a greater air advantage over British and World War II ends by , setting the scene for a Nazi-Soviet conflict by the early 50's. PatrickThePoet said:. Click to expand Non sequitur The Hindenburg was a blind alley in aeronautical terms. The USA had tried to make rigid helium airships work and like Britain was to have its greatest success with the non-rigid blimp for anti-submarine work and radar picket duty.

Show Caption. Hide Caption. The mighty Hindenburg bursts into flames and crashes to the ground in a horrific sight as survivors run from the wreckage while many others are encased in a fiery tomb.