When I was nine years old, a small airship flew over my school in Kent during our lunch break. It was a light（轻的） ship A60 Plus, a little bit like that one, advertising Mazda cars. And I'd never seen anything like it in my life. I stood there for as long as I could, watching it bump around in the cloudy skies above my school, until it disappeared into the distance. Little did I know then, but that moment, that lunch break, was one of the most significant moments of my life, because it sparked（发动） a passion for airships that has never left me. Sadly, airships are a very rare sight in our skies these days.

  Few people have seen one, let alone flown in one. And let's test that theory. Hands up, those of you, and I'm going to have to look through the lights here, hands up those of you who have flown in an aeroplane. Yeah, that's the vast majority of you. Hands up then, those of you who have slightly different questions, been on a cruise ship. Decent percentage.

  Hands up then, those of you who have flown in an airship. Not a hot-air balloon, but an airship. I know about you over there, but otherwise, tumbleweed. Well, a few years after I saw that airship, I was fortunate enough to fly on, and actually to fly, the Goodyear Blim. And this remains one of the outstanding memories of my life, organised, in fact, by my dad, who's here today. Thank you very much indeed, dad.

  For years afterwards, actually, that did deserve a round of applause. He didn't know what he was doing when he did that. For years afterwards, whenever anyone would ask me what I wanted to be when I left school, I'd say, well, I want to be an airship pilot, of course. Strange child, I'm sure many people thought. And needless to say, that ambition did not quite come to fruition（ 实现）. And obsessively reading about the history of airships, I came to realise that my dream to fly was far out of reach because of a single moment nearly 90 years ago.

  A moment that cut short the airship dream and robbed the world of a unique and valuable technology. And I think that that loss is something that we should think about, because it's not just that we've lost a uniquely（adv独特地） photogenic form of transport, and objectively（客观地）, airships do look pretty cool. My concern is that because of this one moment nearly 90 years ago, we've lost a form of aircraft that could make（使） a positive contribution to the modern world. An aircraft that can lift heavy loads and move them thousands of miles. An aircraft that can hover（盘旋） in the same place for days on end. An aircraft that can deliver life-saving humanitarian（人道主义的） aid directly to the point of need without infrastructure.

  An aircraft that can transport passengers in spacious（广大的） comfort as opposed to the cramped conditions on airliners. An aircraft that can do all of this in a genuinely sustainable way, using low or zero emission or even electric propulsion（ 推进力）. All of this lost to us because of a single moment nearly 90 years ago. 7.25pm on the 6th of May, 1937, Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey（运动衫）. The German airship LZ129 Hindenburg, the largest flying object ever seen, hovers around 800 feet from her mooring mast（桅）. Late arriving into Lakehurst because of earlier thunderstorms, she is moments away from successfully completing her first transatlantic（大西洋彼岸的） voyage of the 1937 season.

  On board, her 36 passengers, that's about half her capacity of 70, scan the waiting crowd for glimpses（一瞥） of friends and family. Forward, in the airship's control car, the Zeppelin's captain Max Proust calls down a cheery hello to Charles Rosendahl of the US Navy, the air station commander and himself a brave and experienced airshipman. There, Rosendahl later wrote, "In an imposing（把…强加） silence, the vast silvery（银色的） hulk of the Hindenburg hung motionless like a framed, populated（构成人口） cloud." Many people seem to have experienced that same motionless moment, that same sudden silent pause that Rosendahl described. Passengers in the ship's comfortable lounge reported feeling as if everything had grown strangely silent. Then observers on the ground noticed a lick of flame shoot up from the stern（船尾） of the airship on the port side and they saw the ship's fabric covering（遮盖物） flutter strangely.

  Officers in the control car initially thought that perhaps one of the long mooring lines had snapped（突然折断） and senior officer Albert Sampt looked out of the window and to his horror, he saw the vast airship hangar lit up in a fiery reflection（反射） and at the same time, someone in the control car called out the sickening news that the Hindenburg was on fire. If you know one thing about airships, you know the Hindenburg disaster.