Transport: LZ-I29 Aloft

Like a monstrous, whitish grub dragged from its great cocoon, the new German dirigible LZ-129 last week nosed out of its hangar at Friedrichshafen for its first test flight. With Dr. Hugo Eckener in charge of a skeleton crew, the silvery 812-ft. airship, nearly twice the Graf Zeppelin’s size, drifted silently out over Lake Constance for three hours, behaved so perfectly that officials boasted further trials were superfluous.

Sole excitement came at the start of the voyage when a great, smoke-like cloud suddenly covered the entire dirigible as the four crude-oil motors started. Spectators who feared the ship was afire soon learned that the cloud was only a two-year’s accumulation of dust blown from the envelope in the slip stream.