70 years later, Hindenburg survivors recall giant airship’s end in flames

LAKEHURST, N.J. – At 87, Robert Buchanan says he sometimes has trouble remembering what he did 10 minutes ago. But he can recall in vivid detail the day 70 years ago when he watched the luxurious airship Hindenburg erupt into a fireball.\nFlames roared across the surface of the mighty German dirigible only 100 or so feet above him, singeing his hair as he ran for his life.\n“It was a piff-puff, just like someone would leave the gas on and not get the flame to it,” said Buchanan, one of the last living members of the ground crew waiting to help the Hindenburg land.\nSeventy years ago Sunday, the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg ignited while easing toward its mooring mast at the U.S. Navy base in Lakehurst. The blaze killed 35 people on board and one person in the ground crew; 62 passengers and crew members survived.\n“I ran quite a distance because the heat; the flame kept shooting out ahead of me,” said Buchanan, of nearby Tuckerton. “And I really didn’t think I was going to make it, frankly.”\nThe huge airship, more than three times longer than a Boeing 747, was engulfed in flames and sank to the ground in less than a minute. Photographers and newsreel crews on hand for the landing captured the scene, and a shocked radio station broadcaster recorded the often replayed phrase, “Oh, the humanity and all the passengers!”\nThe 804-foot-long Hindenburg was cutting-edge technology, with its fabric-covered, metal frame held aloft by more than 7 million cubic feet of lighter-than-air hydrogen. Flammable hydrogen had to be used because of a U.S. embargo on nonflammable helium.\nIt was “the Concorde of its day back in 1936 and ‘37,” said Carl Jablonski, president of the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. But after the fire, he said, it would be called the “Titanic of the sky.”\nThe historical society planned a private 70th anniversary memorial service Sunday at the crash site in Lakehurst, about 40 miles east of Philadelphia.\nThe Hindenburg was a swastika-emblazoned billboard for Nazi Germany, providing travel across the Atlantic in less than half the time of the standard four- to five-day ocean liner trip, said Rick Zitarosa, a vice president of the historical society. It carried more than 1,000 passengers on 10 successful round trips between Germany and Lakehurst in 1936, in addition to trips to Brazil the same year.\n“It was the most luxurious experience in the air, before and since,” Zitarosa said.\nHindenburg passengers ate gourmet meals off fine china and drank French and German wines.\nOn May 6, 1937, more than 1,000 sightseers had gathered at Lakehurst to see the Hindenburg arrive with 61 crew and 36 passengers after its first trans-Atlantic flight of the year.\nBuchanan, 17 at the time, was among more than 200 ground crew members waiting in rainy weather.\n“The blessing is that I wore a sweater and I was soaking wet, absolutely wringing wet. And that’s what I think saved us,” Buchanan said.\nAs the Hindenburg came in and started dropping mooring lines, Associated Press photographer Murray Becker raised his camera.\n“He was just going to make a nice picture of a dirigible coming in. And then it blew, right when he had his finger on the shutter,” recalled Marty Lederhandler, 89, an AP photographer of 66 years who was working in the news service’s New York darkroom when the Hindenburg crashed.