From Today I Found Out.

The age of the giant rigid airship or Zeppelin was tragically brief, lasting barely forty years from the first Zeppelin flights in 1900 to the scrapping of the last surviving such airship, the Graf Zeppelin II, in 1940. When we think of the end of giant airships, we tend to picture the Hindenburg, which met its end in fiery end outside Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937. But while the Hindenburg was one of the final nails in the coffin for the dream of commercial lighter-than-air flight, the death of the giant airship had begun long before, with a long string of increasingly deadly crashes stretching all the way back to the turn of the century And among the worst was a now largely forgotten 1930 disaster that killed more people than the Hindenburg and ended the dream of airship travel in the British Empire. This is the story of the tragic loss of His Majesty’s Airship R-101.

Author: Gilles Messier
Host: Simon Whistler
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila