>>1000165During the 1950s, Pruss energetically but unsuccessfully tried to raise interest in the construction of new zeppelin airships to be inflated with helium. In support of his crusade he often used an argument offered by Charles Rosendahl in the 1930’s, when the airplane was already posing a competitive challenge to the airship: “If you want to get there quickly, take an airplane; if you want to get there comfortably, take an airship.”
In describing Hindenburg in his 1960 interview, Pruss commented:
I can only say that [Hindenburg] was a real ship for passengers, and a new ship, too, and it’s very regrettable that we have no airships. On an airship you have a wonderful trip, not with an airplane about 1,200 meters high and so you can’t see anything. In an airship, we have a height from 100 to 200 meters over the ocean. You have very nice islands, you have big ships. It’s for passengers a very, very comfortable [flight] and a very nice flight. No seasickness.
Pruss’s plan to revive passenger zeppelins centered on a modified version of LZ-131, which had been designed as a successor to LZ-129 Hindenburg and LZ-130 Graf Zeppelin II; it was proposed to equip the redesigned LZ-131 with four 1800 hp engines to carry 100 passengers or 42 tons of freight at speeds up to 100 MPH. Later plans envisioned another design for a 200 passenger, 920-foot long airship inflated with 10.5 million cubic feet of helium. But building such ships required not only a huge investment of funds for the zeppelins themselves — up to 24 million marks per ship — but also similar amounts for the reconstruction of hangar and operating facilities dynamited in 1940 by order of Hermann Goering and futher destroyed during the course of the war, and Pruss was never able to attract sufficient interest to turns these plans into reality.
