It’s Sunday morning in 1926. May 30th. And one entire page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat is devoted to one idea. The future of flight. Two flights had just claimed to fly over the North Pole for the first time (one by plane, one by dirigible), and scientists were doing what scientists do… predicting exactly what that meant for the future.

Those flights were part of an international race to the North pole that was front page news for months. We’ve covered the dog who made it to the North Pole, but not the part where people were genuinely excited for the future of flight because of all this.

So let’s see what they got right, and where they were way off.

They said the Arctic route would mean "the distance between New York and Japan is halved by utilizing the Arctic route."

✅ Correct. Polar routes are standard today on transpacific flights.

They said "the logical outcome is becoming a matter of increasing importance to the commercial air pilot." Meaning regular commercial flight was inevitable.

✅ Correct. Commercial aviation now dominates global travel entirely.

They said big airships "can carry 100 passengers with attendants in comfort at 80 knots" making the journey "approximately sixty hours."

✅ Right on the passenger comfort expectation. Wrong on the timing (more on why later). That's basically a modern long-haul flight.

They said airship lines would make "a voyage more comfortable than is possible with present ocean vessels."

✅ Correct in spirit. Though not sure I’d consider a flight today more comfortable than an ocean liner from the 1920’s.

The problem? Every single prediction assumed all of these comforts and speed would be brought to you by the dirigible. A giant hydrogen airship the size of ocean liners. It would have swimming pools. Promenade decks. Staterooms.

❌ No problem, just four million cubic feet of gas keeping you aloft over the Arctic at eighty knots. They considered this completely reasonable and entirely inevitable.

This article was written eleven years before Lakehurst, New Jersey. May 6th, 1937. The Hindenburg.

To quote Herb Morrison on WLS Radio. "Oh, the humanity."

Thirty-four dead. And officially the end of the dirigible era.

Sometimes our predictions are spot on. Sometimes they’re dead wrong.

See you tomorrow.

-Chris

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