AUTHOR’S NOTE

They said it was an uneventful flight. This phrase is repeated countless times in the hundreds of pages of eyewitness testimony compiled by the Commerce Department Board of Inquiry. Leonhard Adelt, a German journalist, later wrote, “Our trip on the Hindenburg in May was the most uneventful journey I ever undertook in an airship.” In November 1937 the American heiress Margaret Mather wrote an article for Harper’s in which she described the trip with such banality that one has to wonder why the passengers didn’t sleep the entire time.

An uneventful flight.

But here’s the problem: I don’t believe them. Ninety-seven people traveled on a floating luxury hotel for three days over the Atlantic Ocean. The events that took place on board might not have been explosive—at least not until the end—but I doubt they were uneventful. I’ve taken enough transatlantic flights to know you can’t place that many people in such a small space for any length of time and not have tension brewing beneath the surface. But if you’re going to call bullshit on historical events, you’d best have a good theory to offer as an alternative. This novel is my attempt at a theory. It is the result of my short-term love affair with that spectacular moment in history. I hope that you will humor me. And I hope you enjoy the ride.

I’ve long been familiar with the iconic photos of the Hindenburg’s destruction and with Herb Morrison’s famous exclamation, “Oh, the humanity!” But until I began researching this book, I couldn’t tell you the name of a single person on board the airship. Thirty-six people lost their lives when the Hindenburg exploded over Lakehurst, New Jersey, and I wanted to know who they were.

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, , 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, , 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.

That said, much of what happens here is pure fiction. I took all the known disparate details, from the dogs on board to the mail drop over Cologne, and wove them together in a way that made sense to me. I claim to have no special knowledge. I simply wanted to find a good story and then tell it in a way that would bring these people and their journey to life for you. And in so doing I am deeply aware that I have written about people who really lived. I have assumed things about them. I have put words in their mouths. I have made them do things—sometimes noble and sometimes despicable—that they likely never did in real life. That is the risk I took, and it is sobering to say the least. I know from experience how the loved ones of real people may read a fictionalized account of an event and then feel compelled to contact the writer. So I did my best to be honest and honorable on these pages.

In some instances dialogue and phrases were taken directly from written accounts and interviews of Hindenburg survivors. A few examples include the incident with Joseph Späh and his arrival at the airfield, both the ruckus he caused and the soldier’s examination of his daughter’s doll. Leonhard Adelt said the ship was “a gray object in a gray mist, over an invisible sea.” I took the liberty of using his words in a scene with Emilie Imhof. The near crash off the coast of Newfoundland actually occurred during a flight to Lakehurst in 1936. Gertrud’s trouble with the customs officer in Frankfurt was an event that in reality happened to Margaret Mather. Werner Franz’s dramatic escape from the airship—although seemingly unbelievable—unfolded exactly as written here and has been described in numerous places over the years. In the end I wanted the passengers’ thoughts and words and experiences to permeate this novel. It is about them, after all, and to portray this flight as they saw it was important to me. Again, my primary sources of research—in particular Hindenburg: An Illustrated History and —helped tremendously in my search for specific details of their experiences, escapes, and tragic deaths.

It bears repeating that this book is fiction. But it is my fiction, and I am desperately proud of this story. I hope you come to love this book the way I do. And I hope you remember these men and women. Because they deserve to be remembered.