Chuck Bryant

No, we definitely talked about it because there was a shortage and it was all, everybody was really worried about it going away.

And then all of a sudden we found a huge new vein of it in the United States and now there's no problem with helium anymore.

Stuff like that makes me feel like we're definitely in a simulation sometimes.

You know, it happens a lot.

Like people are like, oh, we're hitting peak oil or, you know, like we're going to run out of helium and all this horrible stuff's going to happen.

And then nothing happens.

Like something comes along and just completely does away with that randomly.

At any rate, that was not the case for the designers of the Hindenburg.

They had to go with hydrogen, like you said.

And because they had made that envelope so much bigger to accommodate the more helium that they were going to need, they were going to now have to fill the whole thing with hydrogen.

So they added a bunch more passenger cabins to basically, well, make more money, but also to make it heavier so that it would do all the same things it would have had it been helium.

Right, right.

And that was 1937 season.

And I think 1936 was the only complete season in the Hindenburg service.

One other thing that I was trying to get to the bottom of that was surprisingly hard to find was its cruising altitude.

Oh, yeah.

Apparently, its usual cruising altitude or normal cruising altitude was like 650 feet or about 200 meters.

It is impressive, but they would usually fly lower to basically fly under clouds rather than through or over them.

So, yeah, I mean, these things I saw somebody say like these are they were flying at the height of like, you know, the tallest trees in the world.

Like it wasn't that high up that they were flying.