For instance, I found last night’s show particularly interesting – because I’ve heard about the Hindenburg disaster my entire life, but I’d never heard how it happened, exactly. Everyone knows it was trying to land, and it was filled with highly-flammable hydrogen gas, and it caught fire, and was pretty much completely destroyed within seconds. And everyone knows that some guy was there reporting on the landing for the news, saw the airship catch fire, exclaimed, “oh the humanity!” and his words were forever preserved for posterity. Preserved so those of us living in the present century can make fun of that particular line… because it sounds so out of place today… Oh the humanity! Yep, still sounds funny…
The show last night explained a lot of things I’d never known. Like the fact that hydrogen itself is not flammable until it comes into contact with air. So in order for the Hindenburg to catch fire the way it did, the hydrogen must’ve already been mixed with air. The hydrogen in the ship was encased in many specially-made bags, covered with tough layers of cotton and linen. These kept the hydrogen separate from the air. But when the ship was beginning to line up for landing, the wind picked up and blew it off course. Instead of slowly circling and lining up again, the captain ordered a sharp turn, and then another sharp turn, to quickly maneuver the ship into place. But the Hindenburg wasn’t designed for sharp turns – the stress of the turns on the rudder caused a supporting line within the ship to snap, springing back toward one of those cotton/linen hydrogen gas bags. It ripped the bag and caused a leak – viola. Hydrogen mixed with air.
But this in itself didn’t cause the ship to go up in flames. The weather on that day was rainy and stormy. And while the lightning had moved out of the area by the time the Hindenburg was landing, the ship behaved much like a giant balloon – picking up static electricity the way a balloon gets charged up when you rub it on your hair. As long as it was in the air, all of this electricity stayed in the ship. But as they neared the ground, the crew threw down mooring ropes, and the electricity from the metal parts of the ship (metal being a good conductor of electricity) traveled into the ground. But the outer skin of the ship – made of some sort of cloth material, and therefore much less conductive – held onto its charge. And then, a spark of electricity from the outer skin of the ship attempted to find the shortest distance to the ground. Unfortunately, it was through all that hydrogen and air that was mixing up near the damaged gas bag. And that’s all it took – one little spark – and the entire ship was engulfed within 34 seconds. Pretty fascinating stuff, right? I hope I’m not the only one who found that fascinating…
So as I was saying, on the one hand, Seconds From Disaster is a very interesting show. However, on the other hand, it graphically illustrates just how LITTLE needs to go wrong for some sort of horrible outcome to result. Like the Concorde crash – remember that? It was caused by a little strip of metal that happened to fall off another plane and landed on the runway. It seemed so benign – it couldn’t have been more than 12 or 14 inches long, barely three or four wide. You’d think a huge plane could run right over it without incident. But that little strip of metal brought the entire Concorde era to a halt. I wonder sometimes if perhaps I shouldn’t watch this show – do I really want to know about things like that? If I keep watching it, will it deter me from boarding a zeppelin some day? Or even a regular old plane?
I’ve never been particularly afraid to fly generally, and there’s only been one instance I would consider a bad experience. It was on a flight home to Newark, after a vacation with family and friends. It was windy and turbulent when we started our descent, and I’ve never liked turbulent landings. (I mean, if the plane is bouncing around like that in the air, who’s to say it won’t bounce a bit too much when it nears the runway?) But the turbulence itself wasn’t as disturbing as our plane’s bizarre approach – as we neared the airport, the pilot made a sudden sharp turn, as if trying to avoid another plane that had unexpectedly swooped out of the sky. The turn was so sharp that the pilot had to rev the engines to prevent a stall. And, as if ONE of these crazy maneuvers wasn’t enough, the pilot made the same kind of turn AGAIN, in the opposite direction (then why did he turn so sharply in the other direction the first time?). At this point, there may have been some slight panic and hyperventilation on my part… And then the grand finale – the plane, still rather high above the runway, steeply descended and dove toward the runway at what seemed a remarkable rate of speed.
We did land safely, of course – but I had never before and have never since experienced a plane landing like that one. In fact, I’ve compared every flight since then to that one – if someone says, “boy, that landing made me nervous,” I say, “are you kidding? That was fine… there was no turning, no engine revving, no swooping towards the runway… that was a great landing.”
I just hope I never see a Seconds From Disaster about a “great landing” plane crash…
Don't overshoot the runway... unless you want to wind up on Seconds From Disaster...
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