There was a fantastic PBS show to present Addison Bain's hypothesis of the Hindenburg's destruction.
The Hindenburg was an airship built by the Zeppelin Company in Germany. The explosion that killed 36 people at Lakehurst Naval base in NJ on May 6, 1937.
Addison, a retired NASA engineer, investigated the claims of a hydrogen leak that caused the explosion. It seemed to him that the hydrogen venting should have prevented an explosion and that the explosion itself didn't seem to look like a hydrogen fire. As he watched the video footage, it seemed that the skin incinerated very quickly and that the resulting fireball did not look like an anticipated hydrogen plume. Witness accounts all seemed to agree that the fireball was very orange.
Digging deeper he discovered that the fabric skin was coated with a doping compound of powdered aluminum and iron oxide. He points out that these chemicals are found in the solid rocket fuel of the Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters (SRBs) made by ATK in SLC, Utah. The silver, metallic coating was meant to reflect heat from the airship and minimize hydrogen gas expansion.
Addison suspected that this flammable material along with poor bonding (grounding) of the fabric panels to the aluminum frame and each other were the ingredients for the disaster. He believes that electro static discharge (ESD) and static precipitation caused arcing.
Zeppelin engineers later used bronze and better bonding to reduce sparking and increase conductivity and prevent build-up of electrical charge differentials on newer models.
There is not enough expert witness and evidence to discover the exact failure and sequence of events. However, it was interesting to see the media broadcast the initial concerns of sabotage, then lightening, and then the hydrogen fire. Surprisingly, terrorism was a large concern even in the 1930's prior to the "Third Reich" being considered evil.
60 years later Addison Bane proposes the incendiary paint theory. Experts have posed many problems with this theory :
- The thirty second fire burned too quick to be primarily a fabric fire.
- Previous lightening strikes burned holes through the skin in flight and did not incinerate the skin.
So it seems that the orange fireball is just the brilliance of the fabric incineration that masks the nearly invisible, bluish hydrogen flames.
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