Airship

An airship is a powered, steerable aircraft that flies by buoyancy, using a gas lighter than the surrounding air, held either within an envelope or within separate internal gas cells, to lift an attached structure carrying engines, crew and cargo. The Jesuit priest Francesco Lana de Terzi proposed an unbuildable design he called an Aerial Ship in 1670, and the French engineer Henri Giffard achieved the first true powered, controlled flight in an airship in 1852, covering 27 kilometers in a steam-powered craft of his own design. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin then pioneered the rigid airship, built around an internal framework of triangular lattice girders housing separate gas cells with engines carried in external gondolas, launching his first craft, the LZ1, in July 1900; Zeppelins dominated passenger airship service through the 1930s until the Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed on 6 May 1937, a disaster that ended the type's era as a passenger transport.