Most of the minor accidents to Zeppelins were due to poor landings and high winds. At first this was not to be avoided, because of the huge bulk of these air-liners and their great buoyancy and the ease with which the wind could blow them against their moorings. With experience, though, this was eliminated. Indeed, the officers of the passenger-carrying _Schwaben_ never bothered about the weather, and went out when aeroplanes would not dare go up. The _Parseval VI_ made 224 trips about Berlin within two years’ time, remained in the air a total of 342 hours, carried 2,286 passengers, and travelled a distance of 15,000 miles. To compare this record with the long list of those who have lost their lives in aeroplane flying and experimentation is impossible and of no avail. The radical differences of construction make it much easier for the balloon to avoid disaster than the aeroplane. Whenever a wing breaks on an aeroplane or whenever the engine on a single-motored machine stops, the aeroplane must fall down or glide to a landing. These defects will undoubtedly be greatly overcome with standardized construction of aircraft and the establishment of proper landing-fields. The hazard, nevertheless, will always be there in some degree. Such an accident is not frequent with a lighter-than-air machine, which does not depend on its motor but upon gas to keep it afloat. Indeed, an airship may drift hundreds of miles with the wind with all its motors completely shut off—which, by the way, is another reason why the transatlantic fight with the air-currents, which move from America to Europe, seems to be a very feasible possibility for the lighter-than-air craft. The conservation of fuel under such a condition is tremendous. [Illustration: _Courtesy of Flying Magazine._ The R-34, the British rigid dirigible. The R-34 flew from East Fortune, Scotland, to Mineola, New York, a distance of 3,300 miles, in 108 hours and 10 minutes, and returned to Pulham, Norfolk, England, in 75 hours and 3 minutes, non-stop flight.] “It is unquestionably her long endurance and great weight-carrying capacity which gives the airship her chief advantage over the aeroplane,” says W. L. Marsh, the eminent authority on dirigibles previously referred to. “It will no doubt be conceded that in spite of the stimulus of war the airship is little further advanced in development than the aeroplane was at the beginning of 1915; and already airships have visited this country”—England—“which could with ease fly from England to America, carrying a considerable load of merchandise. A present-day Zeppelin has a gross lift of sixty-five tons, of which some 58 per cent is available for crew, fuel, ballast, merchandise, and so on. If we take the distance across the Atlantic in a direct line as two thousand miles we get the following disposition of our load of thirty-eight tons: