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La France (airship)
Two French army officers, Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs, took La France up from Chalais-Meudon near Paris on August 9, 1884, and brought it back to where it started. That return is the whole point: balloons went where the wind sent them, and this was the first powered aircraft to fly a circuit and come home. The flight lasted less than half an hour.
It ran on a 9-horsepower Gramme electric motor, which makes it a surprising ancestor of today's electric airship projects.
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Zeppelin LZ 1
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first rigid airship rose from Lake Constance on July 2, 1900, and stayed up for less than 20 minutes. It flew only three times, but it proved the idea behind every Zeppelin that followed: a rigid frame holding separate gas cells inside a fabric skin, so the ship kept its shape whatever the pressure of the gas.
Start here to see how far the design came in the 36 years before the Hindenburg.
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Santos-Dumont number 6
On October 19, 1901, Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his No. 6 from Saint-Cloud around the Eiffel Tower and back to win the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize, which demanded the round trip in under 30 minutes. His flight lasted 29 minutes and 30 seconds, although the timing was disputed at first, and he gave the 100,000-franc prize to his crew and the poor of Paris.
Small, nimble and flown by its own designer, No. 6 showed a whole city that an airship could be steered to a chosen point and brought back.
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Zeppelin LZ 38
On the night of May 31, 1915, LZ 38, commanded by Erich Linnarz, made the first Zeppelin raid on London, dropping its first bomb on Stoke Newington. Seven people were killed and 35 injured.
It earns its place because it changed what an airship meant. The graceful machine that drew crowds before the war had become a weapon able to reach a capital at night, and the bombing campaign that followed shaped how Britain saw airships for years. LZ 38 itself did not last: on June 7, 1915, two British naval airmen bombed its shed at Evere, near Brussels, and destroyed the ship inside.
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R33-class airship
R34, the R33 class's transatlantic record-setter
In July 1919 R34 made the first east-to-west crossing of the Atlantic by air, flying from East Fortune in Scotland to Mineola on Long Island in 108 hours and 12 minutes. It then flew home to Pulham in Norfolk, completing the first return flight between Britain and the United States.
Alcock and Brown had flown the Atlantic eastbound in an airplane only weeks earlier; the first westbound crossing went to an airship. The trip even carried a stowaway, a crew member who hid aboard rather than miss it.
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USS Shenandoah (ZR-1)
The US Navy's first rigid airship was also the first to fly on nonflammable helium, from its maiden flight in September 1923. That made it a turning point for airship safety, since a helium ship could not burn the way hydrogen ships did.
Helium could not protect it from the weather. On September 3, 1925, Shenandoah broke apart in a storm over Noble County, Ohio, and came down in three sections. Fourteen of the 45 men aboard died, including its commander, Zachary Lansdowne, while the crew in the stern section survived.
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Goodyear Blimp
Goodyear's first blimp, Pilgrim, took off on June 3, 1925, and the company has flown airships for the century since. That makes its fleet the longest-running story on this list.
The blimps gave television its aerial view of big events, with a live broadcast of the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl Game in 1955 and Super Bowl I for CBS in 1967. Today's Wingfoot ships are technically semi-rigid Zeppelin NTs rather than true blimps, but they still float on helium and the old name has stuck.
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Norge (airship)
On May 12, 1926, Norge carried Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth and its Italian designer and pilot Umberto Nobile over the North Pole, with 16 men aboard in all, on a flight from Svalbard to Teller, Alaska. It was the first crossing of the Arctic Ocean by air.
Many accounts also call it the first verified journey of any kind to the Pole, because earlier claims by sledge and by airplane are still disputed. And because Norge was built in Italy, it is a useful reminder that the airship story was never only about Zeppelins.
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Italia (airship)
Built to almost the same design as Norge, Italia carried Umberto Nobile back to the Arctic on an expedition of his own, and its story is the dark other half of the polar airship era. Italia reached the North Pole on May 24, 1928, then crashed onto the ice on the way back the next day. The gondola tore away, leaving survivors on the floe, while six men were carried off with the drifting envelope and never found.
The rescue became an international drama: Roald Amundsen disappeared in a flying boat while joining the search, and the Soviet icebreaker Krasin picked up the last five survivors on July 12. Read it alongside Norge to see how quickly triumph turned to tragedy.
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LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin
If one airship proves the rigid idea worked, it is this one. The Graf Zeppelin flew more than a million miles on 590 flights and carried over 34,000 passengers without a single injury.
Between August 7 and September 4, 1929, it flew around the world, and it went on to make the first regularly scheduled transatlantic passenger crossings by air, years before airliners could do the same. It is the best answer to anyone who thinks the Hindenburg tells the whole story of the passenger Zeppelin.
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R101
Britain's great imperial airship was meant to link the country with India, and its loss ended that plan. On its maiden overseas voyage, bound for Karachi, R101 came down just south of Beauvais in northern France shortly after 2 a.m. on October 5, 1930, and burned. Forty-eight of the 54 people aboard died, among them the Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thomson, who had launched the program.
The inquiry blamed a probable tear in the forward cover that let gas cells fail, and said the ship would not have set out that evening but for the pressure of public policy, a hard lesson in letting politics set the schedule. Its rival, R100, was broken up for scrap in 1931.
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USS Akron
Built in the giant Goodyear-Zeppelin Airdock in Akron, Ohio, and first flown in 1931, USS Akron was a flying aircraft carrier. It launched and recovered small F9C-2 Sparrowhawk biplanes in midair on a trapeze, a bold answer to the problem of scouting far over the ocean.
It is also a sobering entry. Akron went down in a storm off the New Jersey coast in the early hours of April 4, 1933, and of the 76 men aboard only three survived, making it the deadliest airship crash in history.
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USS Macon (ZRS-5)
Akron's sister ship first flew on April 21, 1933, just 17 days after Akron was lost, and it refined the flying-carrier idea with its own Sparrowhawk scouts.
The difference in its ending is the lesson. When Macon came down off the California coast on February 12, 1935, it carried life jackets and rafts, and all but two of the 83 men aboard were rescued. Losing Macon so soon after Akron helped end the US Navy's rigid airship program, and every airship the Navy flew after it was a nonrigid blimp.
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LZ 129 Hindenburg
At 803.8 feet long, LZ 129 Hindenburg belonged to the longest class of aircraft ever flown and marked the peak of transatlantic airship luxury. Its fire at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937, consumed the ship in little more than half a minute and killed 35 people aboard and one member of the ground crew; 62 of the 97 people aboard survived.
The leading explanation is still a spark that ignited leaking hydrogen. Caught by newsreel cameras and in Herbert Morrison's famous radio report, the disaster ended the age of the rigid passenger airship, and no entry on this list explains better why the revival took so long.
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Zeppelin NT
The Zeppelin name came back with this 246-foot semi-rigid airship, which first flew on September 18, 1997. Its carbon-fiber and aluminum frame sits inside a helium envelope, a modern take on the old rigid idea without the giant metal skeleton.
It matters because it is the revival that actually entered service: Goodyear's current fleet is built on it, and in sightseeing form it seats 12 to 14 passengers. It is also the realistic way to ride in a Zeppelin today, since the company offers public flights in Germany.
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Hybrid Air Vehicles Airlander 10
Britain's Hybrid Air Vehicles wants this hybrid airship, whose flattened hull adds aerodynamic lift in forward flight, to carry over 100 passengers or a ten-ton payload. Spain's Air Nostrum has reservations for 20 of them.
Treat it as a revival still in progress. Air Nostrum's first reservation, in 2022, expected deliveries in 2026; the production aircraft is now due to begin testing in 2027 and to enter service only after type certification. So far in 2026 the work has included several hundred take-offs and landings in a simulator. It is here for the ambition and the design, but judge it when it carries its first paying passengers.
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Pathfinder 1 (airship)
LTA Research's 406-foot proof-of-concept is an electric rigid airship, and the company calls it the only rigid airship flying in 2026. It received an exhibition airworthiness certificate in December 2025, and in October 2026 it flew down the California coast to Salinas, its first landing away from its home base at Moffett Field.
That puts it in a different class from most revival projects: this one is real and flying, not a rendering. A larger sister ship, Pathfinder 3, is planned, so it is worth following, but the achievement to judge so far is simply that a big rigid airship is in the air again.
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