Timeline
The final flight of the Hindenburg began on the evening of May 3, 1937, when it departed from Frankfurt, Germany, for its first scheduled transatlantic trip of the season to the United States. The journey was routine for the seasoned crew and the 36 passengers on board. The airship, a symbol of luxury and modern engineering, cruised smoothly across the Atlantic Ocean.
The flight was largely uneventful until it reached the American coast on the morning of May 6. Headwinds had slowed its progress, delaying its arrival over New York City. By the afternoon, as it approached its destination at the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey, the weather deteriorated. A line of thunderstorms sat directly over the landing site, making a mooring operation too dangerous. Captain Max Pruss, the commanding officer of the Hindenburg, decided to alter course to allow the storm to pass.
For several hours, the airship flew a holding pattern over the New Jersey coast. Passengers could see the beaches and small towns below as they waited for clearance to land. At approximately 6:22 PM Eastern Daylight Time, the air station at Lakehurst signaled that the weather had improved sufficiently to attempt a landing. The Hindenburg turned back toward the field.
At around 7:00 PM, the airship arrived over the landing field. The ground was wet from the recent rain, and the air remained humid and electrically charged. The Hindenburg performed a high landing, also known as a “flying moor,” a procedure intended to be faster than a conventional landing. It involved dropping mooring lines from a higher altitude and winching the ship down to the mast.
At 7:21 PM, the forward handling ropes were dropped from the bow of the airship to the ground crew waiting below. The crew connected them to the ground winches. It was at this critical moment, as the ship was being physically connected to the ground, that the electrical potential between the airship and the earth would have equalized, creating the conditions for a static spark.
At approximately 7:25 PM, the first signs of trouble appeared. Eyewitnesses on the ground reported seeing a small, mushroom-shaped bloom of fire on the top of the airship, just forward of the upper vertical fin. Some heard a muffled pop. Within seconds, the flame erupted into an inferno. The fire spread with astonishing speed, fueled by the venting hydrogen. The entire tail section was engulfed in a massive column of fire.
As the hydrogen in the aft gas cells burned away, the tail lost its lift and began to drop. The ship tilted sharply backward, causing a cascade of failures. The fire raced forward through the ship’s central corridor, igniting the remaining gas cells in a chain reaction. The immense heat and structural collapse consumed the airship from stern to bow. From the first visible flame to the moment the burning skeleton of the Hindenburg crashed to the ground, only 32 to 37 seconds elapsed.
The bow of the airship, still containing some unburned hydrogen, pointed skyward for a final, brief moment before it too collapsed onto the ground. The entire catastrophic sequence was over in less than a minute, leaving a scene of twisted, smoldering metal and a stunned silence broken only by the cries of the injured and the shouts of the rescuers.
