From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
a modern airship
AnAirship is kind of lighter-than-airaircraft. It floats in the sky and need not move to stay up. That is because it is filled with a liftinggas that is more lightweight than air. This is different fromaeroplanes that stay up in the sky by moving. An airship floats like aballoon. But an airship is different from a balloon. An airship has anengine for power and a way to control its direction of movement. A balloon does not have an engine or a way to control its direction of movement.
There are three kinds of airships. The difference is the amount of structure in the airship.
Rigid airships - Rigid airships have frames within the envelope to maintain their form. The biggest airships were rigid airships, made in the 1920s and 1930s. Big rigid airships were also calleddirigibles.
Semi-rigid airships - Semi-rigid airships have small structures in them. There are only a few semi-rigid airships.
Non-rigid airships - Non-rigid airships have no structures in them. Non-rigid airships are also calledblimps. Most airships are non-rigid airships.
Blimps were used by theUnited States inWWII to fight against submarines. Blimps are now used mostly for advertising and sometimes for looking down, for example at sport stadiums and tourist attractions.
The most famous airship was theHindenburg. TheHindenburg was a rigid airship made by theZeppelin airship company. It burned when it was landing on May 6, 1937. There were 97 people on the airship when the fire started. The fire killed 35 of these people and one person on the ground.
