• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Schutte-Lanz Airships

A	SL I
B	SL II
C-1	SL 3
C-2	SL 4
C-3	SL 5
D-1	SL 6
D-2	SL 7
E-1	SL 8
E-2	SL 9
E-3	SL 10
E-4	SL 11
E-5	SL 12
E-6	SL 13
E-7	SL 14
E-8	SL 15
E-9	SL 16
E-10	SL 17
E-11	SL 18
E-12	SL 19
F-1	SL 20
F-2	SL 21
F-3	SL 22
G	SL 23
H	SL 24

By 1912 the success of the Zeppelin type brought imitators. Chief among them was the Schutte-Lanz, a Mannheim firm, which produced a rigid dirigible with a wooden framework, wire braced. This was not a cylinder like the Zeppelin, but reverted to the cigar shape and contained about the same amount of gas as the Zeppelin type. The Schutte-Lanz was made with two gondolas rigidly attached to the envelope in which the gas bags were placed. The method of construction involved greater weight than was the case with the Zeppelin, but the second of these vessels, built with three gondolas containing engines, and a navigating cabin built into the hull of the airship itself, proved quite successful as a naval scout until wrecked on the islands off the coast of Denmark late in 1914.

The rigid airships were developed by two constructors, the Zeppelin Works and the Schiitte-Lanz Company. Both types were composed of a rigid framework with a variable number of gas cells. In the Zeppelin type the rigid framework consists of longitudinal members running from stem to stern, and transverse members which run from longitudinal to longitudinal, around the ship, thus forming a ring. The material used for the construction is duralumin. In the first Schiitte-Lanz airship the rigid framework was composed of diagonal members which ran spirally around the ship from stem to stern, and transverse rings as in the Zeppelin types. Too many difiiculties in fabrication were encountered, however, and in the remainder of the Schiitte-Lanz airships the girders run longitudinally and transversely as in the Zeppelin airships. The material used, however, in the Schutte-Lanz types was wood and all structural members were made of built-up wooden sections. When these ships were used by the navy it was found that the wood absorbed moisture and the airship became very heavy. In addition to this the glued joints opened up, but later through a new method of fabrication and chemical impregnation of the wood these difiiculties were overcome.

The first to be brought down in flames in England was a Schutte-Lanz, and was a pre-war model; its hull was a true streamline shape, and the main members consisted of fifteen circular wooden hoops" set transversely and at approximately equal distances along the hull; spiral latticed wooden trellis work held the members in position, and the whole was bound with steel wire in great quantity. The Schutte-Lanz had no keel, the weight of its cars being distributed over the whole of the construction. Each car carried a Maybach motor of 240 h.p., which drives, through a clutch and reduction gearing, a " pusher " propeller located at the stern of the car and giving a speed of 53 m.p.h. There were no means of communication between the members of the crew housed in the respective cars other than by telephone. The cubic capacity of the 1913 Schutte-Lanz ships was about 921,000 feet, giving a lifting capacity of 17,600 lbs., and the gas bags were of unusual shape to fit the interior and to allow for the strengthening crosssections and braces. The length of the ships was 470 feet and the diameter 60.5 feet. Two of the bags were uninflated at the beginning of a voyage, and as the ship rises the gas expands and flows, assisted by a circulating pump, into the empty bags until, at a height of between 6,000 and 7,000 feet, all the bags are filled.

The Schutte-Lanz airships were originally built of laminated wood girders trussed with wire stays. In appearance they were dissimilar to the Zeppelin ships in that they had streamline hulls long before the Zeppelins had them, just as they used the quadrilateral propeller drive in advance of their rivals, and originated the internal passage way. As the war progressed, however, there came a visible merging of the two designs, until finally the Schiitte-Lanz Company even gave up the most distinctive feature of its design, the wooden framework. This had first been chosen because in theory it worked out at a lesser weight than the duralumin construction and because it was more easily constructed and repaired. The wooden framework would also have an amount of springiness to take up shocks with little injury such as would gravely damage a Zeppelin.

Practical experience did not fully bear out these assumptions. It is true that after several years of effort the SchiitteLanz ships carried for the same capacity a larger useful load than the Zeppelins and that their ability to stand punishment was also greater. On the other hand the wooden framework had the serious drawback of getting out of alinement under the influence of the weather and its assembling required much more time and painstaking work than that of a Zeppelin. The want of weather-proofness of the S.L. ships explains why the German navy always looked askance at this type of construction and the manufacturers finally admitted this drawback themselves, for the S.L. 20, the last of their war series, had a framework of duralumin tubes instead of being built up of laminated wood. The experience of this firm in metal construction was too recent, however, to enable them to compete on even terms with the Zeppelin Company, which accounts for the superior performance of the latter's ships.