For a few decades in the first half of the twentieth century, it seemed possible that the airship would be the long-distance passenger vehicle of the future. Vast hydrogen-filled Zeppelins carried passengers across the Atlantic in comfort that ocean liners could scarcely match, and several nations invested heavily in their development. By the late 1930s, the airship had effectively disappeared from commercial service, replaced by the aeroplane. The rise and fall of this technology is a case study in how promising inventions can fail to survive contact with safer alternatives.

The principle of the airship is simple: a cigar-shaped envelope filled with a lighter-than-air gas lifts a structure carrying engines, controls and passenger compartments. Two types emerged early. The non-rigid 'blimp' consists of a gas envelope whose shape is maintained purely by the pressure of its contents. The rigid airship has an internal framework, usually of aluminium alloy, that holds the envelope in shape regardless of gas pressure. The largest rigid airships were the German Zeppelins of the early twentieth century, named after Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, whose company built them from 1900 onwards.

Passenger service grew rapidly after the First World War. By the 1930s, the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin had circumnavigated the globe, carried paying passengers across the Atlantic dozens of times, and established a routine between Germany and South America. Its successor, the LZ 129 Hindenburg, was larger still, with promenade decks, a dining room and private cabins for about seventy passengers. A voyage from Frankfurt to New Jersey took about two and a half days, compared with four or five for the fastest ocean liners, and passengers praised the smoothness of the ride.

The gas used was hydrogen, chosen for its superior lifting capacity. Helium, a safer alternative because it does not burn, was held as a near-monopoly by the United States, which in the 1930s refused to export it to Germany. The Zeppelin company therefore continued to use hydrogen despite its fire risk. On 6 May 1937, the Hindenburg caught fire while manoeuvring at its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The fire consumed the airship within seconds, killing thirty-five of the ninety-seven people on board along with one member of the ground crew. Though the loss of life was smaller than many maritime accidents of the same era, the Hindenburg fire was filmed and broadcast, becoming one of the most famous disasters of the early media age.

The immediate effect of the disaster was public loss of confidence. Zeppelin's last passenger airship, the LZ 130, flew only military and reconnaissance missions and was scrapped shortly before the Second World War. Historian Dr. Marianne Holst has argued that the Hindenburg accident did not so much cause the end of commercial airship service as accelerate a decline that was already visible. Long-distance aeroplanes, including the Douglas DC-3 and the first Boeing flying boats, were rapidly demonstrating that heavier-than-air flight could carry passengers across oceans in a fraction of the airship's time, and at declining cost. Airships were comfortable but slow; aircraft were faster and, once the early risks were reduced, acceptably safe.

The aeroplane's advantage has held. Modern airships exist, but they are used almost entirely for advertising, aerial filming and specialised survey work. Several recent projects have proposed using airships for heavy freight into areas without suitable airstrips, particularly in Arctic regions with poor road infrastructure. The case rests on low fuel consumption per tonne-kilometre and on the ability of an airship to hover while cargo is unloaded. Whether any of these projects will reach commercial operation remains to be seen; earlier announcements in the 2000s did not produce operational fleets.

Dr. Holst has suggested that the airship's legacy is mostly visible in design ideas that aviation adopted. The emphasis on passenger comfort, for example, was exported from the Zeppelins to later long-distance aircraft, where the idea of an on-board dining room and promenade survived for decades before declining productivity pushed it out. The aluminium alloys developed for airship frames found their way into aircraft construction. And the Zeppelin ground crews, which had pioneered coordinated handling of very large craft at mooring masts, provided procedures that informed early carrier aviation. The airship's direct failure was comprehensive, but the skills and materials it had accumulated dispersed into the technology that replaced it.