What Really May Have Caused The Hindenburg Disaster

It is one of the most memorable disasters ever to have been captured on film. On May 6th, 1937 The great German airship Hindenburg was reduced from a majestic, soaring collossis hovering peacefully in the sky to a roaring ball of flames crashing into the ground while mooring at a naval air base in lakehurst, New Jersey. The 800 foot airship took less than one minute to destruct and of the 97 aboard (36 passengers and 61 crew) 35 died (13 passengers and 22 crew) leaving 62 survivors. Most people have heard the audio commentary of reporter Herbert Morrisson and his famous exclamation "....Oh The Humanity..." as he witnessed the disaster first hand and was overcome with so much emotion that he could no longer speak.
For decades it has been suspected that the cause of the accident may have been the fact that the airship was filled with a flammable gas called hydrogen instead of the much safer and non-flammable helium with which most airships were inflated. It is well known from the footage of the disaster that when the Hindenburg was attempting to moor it was a rainy day with thunder and lightning booming in the area. The theory goes that perhaps with all the static electricity in the atmosphere on that day that it somehow must have sparked the hydrogen on board the airship and caused it to explode in a fireball. This sequence of events has been accepted ever since the accident occured but in more recent years has been challenged by some scientists and experts and been replaced with other possibilities. One of the more interesting ones is that it was not the hydrogen that caused the explosion that occured but instead may have been the paint that coated the entire surface of the airship. Research has uncovered that the paint that was used to give the Hindenburg its shiny mirror like metallic appearance contained iron oxide which is an ingredient that is used to make rocket fuel in addition to some other chemicals which would have made it extremely flammable. They claim that the proof lies in the footage of the disaster itself. On the tape of the tragedy it can be seen that after the initial spark starts a fire in the tail of the airship that it is the outer surface of the ship that is consumed by flames first and that the flames ran along the outside and spread. That is the part of the ship where the metallic paint was present. If it had been the hydrogen exploding then there would have been additional explosions following the initial one and they would have originated from within the sections of the airship where the hydrogen was stored in its internal tanks. Another fact revealed in the footage is that the Hindenburg was still air born for several seconds while it was being consumed by flames on the outside of the ship which would indicate that the hydrogen inside the internal tanks had not yet caught fire and was still functioning to keep the ship floating above the ground.