In writing Flight of Dreams I was determined to use the real people who were on that last ill-fated flight. I was determined that I would not change their fate—even when it broke my heart (which it did many times during the month when I wrote of the disaster itself). If they survived in real life, they survived in this novel. If they died in real life, they died in this novel.
But since I was writing about real people, I needed help. We’re talking about men and women who lived and died almost eighty years ago. Most of them were not famous. No biographies were written about them. No articles. By and large, history remembers them with only the occasional anecdote or footnote. Which is why Patrick Russell’s Web site, www.facesofthehindenburg.blogspot.com, was such a godsend. He has spent years compiling extensive biographical information on every passenger and crew member on that last flight. Every article is filled with fascinating minutiae about them. Among many things, I learned from Mr. Russell that Gertrud Adelt’s press card had recently been revoked by the Nazis, that Werner Franz’s grandfather gave him a pocket watch, that Max Zabel had recently taken over as postmaster, that the American worked in the same building as Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda, and that Emilie Imhof was the only woman ever to work aboard a zeppelin. To me, these seemingly insignificant things—when studied and sifted and rearranged—became the spine of this story. Tiny true things made bigger and more relevant when added together.
I confess that prior to writing this novel I knew absolutely nothing about zeppelins. And why would I? The reign of airships ended on May 6, 1937, in that New Jersey field. It was the first disaster of that scale ever to be recorded on film. And while it was not broadcast live, as we’ve often been told, it was played on air later that night. And then played repeatedly on every newsreel in every theater around much of the world afterward. Today zeppelins are the stuff of fantasy and steampunk. But they were highly functional engineering marvels at the time. And to re-create those three and a half days in midair I needed to become a pseudo-expert on airship travel and construction. Dan Grossman’s Web site, www.airships.net, and Rick Archbold’s book Hindenburg: An Illustrated History provided everything I needed to know about the engineering and operation of the Hindenburg. I endeavored to faithfully portray the airship—its strengths and weaknesses, its peculiar quirks—and consulted these resources daily while working on Flight of Dreams. However, my primary focus has been, and always will be, the people on board. So any mistakes with the airship itself—how it was designed and how it functioned—are entirely mine. I offer my advance apologies to any students of airship history who find fault with my fictional rendering of the Hindenburg.
Some of the events, conversations, meals, and rivalries described in this book really happened. But most of them, to the best of my knowledge, did not. Having done my research and committed to writing about the real people on board, there came a point when I had to tell my own story. My version of the events. What I believe could have happened, not necessarily what did happen. Because none of us will ever truly know what occurred on board or why the Hindenburg exploded. And believe me, people have tried to find these answers for almost eighty years. Theories abound—I did my best to give a nod to each of them—but facts are hard to come by. It was this mystery that drew me to the story in the first place. The fact that we do not know what happened. The fact that we will never know. I built this story within those blank, unknown spaces.
My job was to find a plausible explanation for the spark. The Hindenburg burned in thirty-four seconds. Half of one minute. That is mind-boggling if you think about it. And all that we truly know is that it burned so quickly because of a combination of hydrogen and thermite (a huge thanks to Mythbusters and their countless experiments for answering that long-standing question). But no one has ever been able to say for certain what ignited the hydrogen. I know there are a myriad of possible technical, mechanical, and meteorological causes for that spark. But when my turn came to tell this story, I wanted the catalyst to be human.