Sources and Credits

This website is a non-commercial, non-profit, educational resource for the public.

Acknowledgments

This website has been prepared with the assistance of the following airship historians who have kindly acted as an informal advisory board to review the site, offering thoughts and suggestions, and most importantly correcting errors when necessary.  The author expresses his deep gratitude and appreciation for their assistance:

• Cheryl Ganz – Smithsonian Institution, Chief Curator, National Postal Museum
• Andreas Horn – Airship Modeler and Historian
• Dennis Kromm – Airship Historian and Consultant
• Dieter Leder – Zeppelin Mail Authority and Expertiser and Airship Historian
• Patrick Russell – Hindenburg Historian; Editor, Faces of the Hindenburg
• Rick Zitarosa – Historian, Navy Lakehurst Historical Society

Images

Many of the images on this site are items from my personal collection of unpublished aviation postcards, photographs, and memorabilia, since one goal of this website is to share images that might not otherwise be widely available to the public.

Text

The text on this site was written entirely by the author (and is protected by copyright), and is based on personal research using the primary and secondary sources which I believe to be the most accurate and reliable.

Primary and Secondary Sources

The primary sources on which I have relied are too numerous to detail on this page, and are not easily available to the general public.  But to allow readers to follow in my footsteps with generally available materials, these are the principal secondary sources on which I have relied and which I believe to be the most definitive:

Recent Secondary Sources

• William F. Althoff: Sky Ships: A History of the Airship in the United States Navy
• William F. Althoff: USS Los Angeles: The Navy’s Venerable Airship and Aviation Technology
• Harold G. Dick with Douglas H. Robinson: Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships : Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg
• John Duggan: LZ129 Hindenburg – The Complete Story
• John Duggan: Zeppelinpost LZ129 Hindenburg
• Henry Cord Meyer: Airshipmen, Businessmen, and Politics – 1890-1940
• Douglas H. Robinson: Giants in the Sky
• Douglas H. Robinson: LZ-129 Hindenburg
• Sieger-Verlag: Zeppelin Post Katalog
• Guillaume de Syon:  Zeppelin!: Germany and the Airship, 1900–1939
• Dale Topping: When Giants Roamed the Sky: Karl Arnstein and the Rise of Airships from Zeppelin to Goodyear
• Gordon Vaeth: Graf Zeppelin, The Adventures of an Aerial Globetrotter

Contemporary Sources:

• Hugh Allen: The Story of the Airship (7th ed., 1931)
• Hugo Eckener: Die Amerikafahrt des “Graf Zeppelin”
• Hugo Eckener: Count Zeppelin, The Man and his Work
• Rupert S. Holland: Historic Airships (1928)
• Ernst Lehmann: Auf Luftpatrouille und Weltfahrt
• P.W. Litchfield:  Why Has America No Rigid Airships? (1945)
• C.E. Rosendahl: What About the Airship?  (1938)
• R101 – The Airship Disaster, 1930 (1931)

There are, of course, many other fascinating books about airships; some of these are highly reliable, while others were written with much less rigorous research.

• Douglas Botting: Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine
• Douglas Botting/Time-Life: The Giant Airships
• Christopher Chant: The Zeppelin
• Wilbur Cross: Zeppelins of World War I
• Mike Flynn: The Great Airships
• Thom Hook: Flying Hookers, The Last Great Rigid Airship Adventure
• Thom Hook: Shenandoah Saga
• Hans Knausel: Zeppelin and the United States of America
• Ces Mowthorpe: Sky Sailors, The Story of the World’s Airshipmen
• J.E. Morpurgo: Barnes Wallis
• Norman Richards: Giants in the Sky
• John Toland: Ships in the Sky/The Great Dirigibles

For the beautiful illustrations by Ken Marschall, as well as the text, I need to make special mention of Rick Archbold’s Hindenburg, An Illustrated History.

I have, of course, also read Michael M. Mooney’s The Hindenburg and Adolph A. Hoehling’s Who Destroyed the Hindenburg, but each time I read Hoehling’s book I am amazed at how casually, carelessly, and misleadingly it was written.

For the material on Clara Adams, I have relied on her own writings, supplemented and verified by secondary sources, including Jon E. Krupnick’s Pacific Pioneers and his revised Pacific Pioneers – The Rest of the Story.