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SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Static electricity doomed the Hindenburg, says a team of experts in a new documentary.
The group, including British TV host and aeronautical engineer Jem Stansfield, conducted a series of experiments on three models of the German zeppelin that were just over 80 feet long (the Hindenburg was 803 feet long) at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
They filmed their research in a documentary for the British Channel 4, "Hindenburg."
"Although I have studied the Hindenburg for decades these experiments brought to life for me, in a vivid and dramatic way, various phenomena that had been purely theoretical before," said airship historian Dan Grossman.
Analyzing footage, replicating key experiments from the crash investigation and testing their theories on the models, they determined that static electricity sparked the fire that quickly overtook the Hindenburg, killing 35 passengers on May 6, 1937 in Lakehurst, N.J.
According to the team's research, the balloon's skin had received a new waterproof coating while docked in New Jersey, causing water droplets to pool. Those pools, they say, picked up an electric charge "due to the weather," Stansfield said.
"When the landing ropes attached, the charge within the framework caused sparking," he said.
The team believes there was a pre-existing gas leak that allowed the fire to travel through the airship's ventilation tubes. Mixed with a rush landing, the result was a historical disaster.
"I think you had massive distribution of hydrogen throughout the aft half of the ship; you had an ignition source pull down into the ship, and that whole back portion of the ship went up almost at once," Grossman said.
Their results using the models proved their theory correct.
"From the experiments, I have a reasonable amount of confidence it was a perfect storm," Stansfield said. "They were not supposed to do a high landing under those conditions. They were supposed to land low where there was less of a voltage difference. There was known to be high atmospheric static that day, but they were under a lot of political pressure to land quickly."
