Welcome to Gaia! ::

At this moment- I will declare a life goal: To ride in an Airship.
:3 Nice links. I found some interesting books at my library that I'm going to check out on Monday (The bell rang and too many people were at checkout)

Actually, with the technology of today, airships would probably be no more unsafe than a plane or something. (Goodyear blimp anyone??)

And the only reason the Hindenburg crashed and burned was because it was fueled by hydrogen instead of helium. The US was the only country at the time that had helium in that large of a supply, and they refused to sell it to Germany. So the germans went with hydrogen. bad idea!

and! there was this show on the history channel a few days ago that i watched.... all about airships.... and the US navy had Goodyear build two really huge ones for long range surveillance over oceans sometime in the 1930's. they could store 4 small biplanes that could be released and brought back onto the ship (which was really cool to see!)
Unfortunately there were some weak points in the framework that were discovered, and Goodyear wanted to fix it, but the navy stalled on having it fixed and they both crashed D:
and that pretty much ended the US government funding the building of airships.