Zeppelin Z.12 (LZ-26)

History

First flight on December 14, 1914, the military airship "LZ-26" became one of the most successful airships of the German Empire in the First World War. It was used as a reconnaissance and bombing platform on the Eastern Front against the Russian Empire and Allied forces on the Western Front, especially in northern France.

The airship served under the tactical designation Z XII and belonged to the "Type N" class. As a bombing platform, it claimed to have about 44,100 pounds of ammunition, which flew a total of 11 missions during the war.

Despite these successes, the era of the zeppelin as a useful front-line bombing platform was more or less overit was officially decommissioned on August 8, 1917.

The LZ-26 took the established form of an airship with tapered ends - nose cone at the front and fins at the rear for stability control. These ends are covered with a tubular body consisting of a metal skeleton structure covered with cloth. Lift is achieved through the use of hydrogen-filled batteries on the airship's skin - hydrogen proved useful for the role, despite being highly flammable. This was a very real and deadly problem for German airship crews when the Allies began to use incendiary munitions extensively. The crew was housed in an underbuilt nacelle that contained weapons storage and defensive weapons, while the engines (providing the necessary forward propulsion) were kept away from the hull by struts.

Despite their climbability and valuable "over-the-horizon" qualities from a tactical standpoint, more advanced Allied aircraft and improved ground-based anti-aircraft fire began to greatly marginalize airships as useful battlefield weapons.

The airship concept was developed by German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (hence the popular generic name "Led Zeppelin"). The concept surfaced in useful form as early as 1874, then completed in 1893, and an 1895 German patent revealed a looming effort.

The first commercial use of zeppelins as passenger aircraft began in 1910about four years before the war.

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