Aviation history was written here...

On the second of July 1900 something extraordinary took place in the lakeside town of Friedrichshafen in Southern Germany. The 128-metre long airship called LZ1 rose from its moorings. Dreamed up by by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a German general and inventor, the Zeppelin was an odd looking thing. Like the bumble-bee it looked incapable of flight but these blue-gas powered airships became a huge success story in its day. Zeppelins were first flown commercially in 1910 by The Deutsche Luftschiffahrts AG, the world´s first revenue airline. By mid-1914 it had carried over 10,000 paying passengers on over 1,500 flights. The German military also made extensive use of Zeppelins as bombers or scouts during WWI. Count Zeppelin died in 1917 just before the Golden Era of his aircraft. Then on 4 March 1936 the LZ129 Hindenburg (named after a former President of Germany) made its first flight. The Hindenburg was the largest airship ever built and by this time Zeppelin was used as a propaganda tool by the rising Nazi party. It had been designed to use non-flammable helium, but as the only supplies of the rare gas were controlled by the United States, which refused export it, decision was made to fill the Hindenburg with flammable hydrogen instead. The rest, as they say, is history. On landing at Lakehurst on My 6th 1937 in the US after a successful transatlantic flight, the tail of the ship caught fire, and the Hindenburg burst into flames within seconds, killing 35 of the 97 people on board and one member of the ground crew.