Hindenburg: An Illustrated History chronicles the complete story of the great dirigibles - from the pioneering efforts of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin to the brief career of the Hindenburg's little-known sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin II. At the turn of the century zeppelins established the world's first passenger-carrying airline. But World War I bombing raids over London earned them the label "baby-killers". In the postwar years Great Britain and the United States competed with Germany for the prestige of building the world's most advanced airship. The British envisioned an empire linked by a fleet of silver giants. For the United States Navy, the zeppelin would be a flying aircraft carrier, transporting fighter planes in its belly. By the late 1920s it seemed that the airship was poised to conquer the skies. In 1926 explorer Roald Amundsen flew across the Arctic Ocean in the dirigible Norge. An ecstatic New York ticker-tape parade greeted the Graf Zeppelin at the end of her pioneering 1929 round-the-world flight. The Graf soon went on to establish the first ever non-stop transatlantic air service. But not all airship enterprises ended in triumph. Two years after the Norge's Arctic exploit, the Italia crashed on a polar ice floe, stranding her surviving crew for forty-nine days. And the first intercontinental flight of the British airship R 101 ended in flames in a French field. The U. S. Navy airships Akron and Macon were wrecked by storms at sea within two years of each other. A haunting photo mosaic shows the site where underwater cameras recently located the skeleton of the huge dirigible Macon on the ocean floor, lying with the Sparrowhawk fighters that were once housed in herinternal hangar. Hindenburg: An Illustrated History vividly re-creates a time when many believed that lighter-than-air craft held the promise of the future. Highlighted by a highly readable, informative text and illustrated with hundreds of breathtaking images, this magnificent book brings to life a remarkable chapter in the history of flight.