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A 'rigid airship' was a type of airship in which the envelope retained its shape by the use of an internal structural framework rather than by being forced into shape by the pressure of the lifting gas within the envelope as used in blimps and semi-rigid airships.
Rigid airships were produced and relatively successfully employed from the beginning of the 1900s to the end of the 1930s, but their heyday ended when the Hindenburg caught fire on May 6, 1937.

Contents

Terminology

Early days

Production

Some famous rigid airships

Modern Rigids

Terminology

Although "rigid airship" is the proper formal term, these aircraft are often referred to in casual use by several other names such as ''dirigibles'', ''zeppelins'' (after the most successful ships of this type built by the Zeppelin Company) or ''the big rigids''.

Early days

The design was first proposed by David Schwartz and was bought by Count Zeppelin who commercialised it with his ''Zeppelin'' company which to this lends its name to the design.

Production

As well as the Zeppelin Company, Schütte-Lanz also manufactured them. Both America and Britain have manufactured rigid airships at some point.

Some famous rigid airships

★ ''R34'', British airship and the first aircraft to traverse the Atlantic Ocean from east to west, in 1919.

★ USS ''Shenandoah'', American naval airship which served the U.S. Navy from 1923 until its crash in Ohio in 1925.

★ ''R38'', British airship intended to join the American naval fleet, but crashed during testing in 1921.

★ USS ''Los Angeles'', German airship sold to the United States in 1924 as part of German reparations from World War I. The ship served with distinction from 1924 to 1931.

★ ''LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin'', German passenger airship designed and piloted by Hugo Eckener. It circumnavigated the globe in 1929 and had a spotless safety record. It was utlimately dismantled by the Nazis at the outset of World War II.

★ ''R-100'', British airship built by the Airship Guarantee Company, a private company created solely for the construction of this airship, as a subsidiary of the armaments firm, Vickers.

★ ''R-101'', British airship designed and built by the British government in a kind of competition with the R-100. The R-101 crashed on its maiden flight in 1930 in France, with considerable loss of life. Its crash effectively ended British participation in rigid airship construction.

★ USS ''Akron'', American naval airship designed and built by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Ohio in 1931. Deployed as an airborne aircraft carrier, it was lost at sea in a storm off New Jersey in 1933 with considerable loss of life.

★ USS ''Macon'', sister ship to the ''Akron'', it was a near carbon-copy of her. Though it suffered only 2 deaths, its crash in 1935 off the coast of California ended American participation in rigid airship development.

★ ''Hindenburg'', German passenger airship also designed and built by Hugo Eckener. The airship was lost in a famous fire in New Jersey in 1937. With its end went the end of the age of the Great Rigid Airships.

Modern Rigids

There are no rigid airships flying today. The ''Zeppelin'' company refers to their NT ship as a "rigid" but this is a misnomer. The envelope shape is retained in part by super-pressure of the lifting gas, and so the NT is more correctly classified as a semi-rigid.