Some hobbies begin with a book. Christian Michel’s airship obsession began when a blimp parked at his flying club.
The site explains that in 1996 a WDL advertising blimp was stationed at the club during a Germany-wide tour. Bad weather meant time on the ground, which meant time talking with the crew. The result was an interest strong enough to become a dedicated airship photography site.
The archive is organized by aircraft family rather than by whatever happened to be popular that week.
There are Aeros, Lightship, Skyship and WDL blimps, hot-air airships, and a large Zeppelin NT section.
A personal record of the airship revival
The Zeppelin material is especially useful because it follows events over time.
The gallery includes Aero 1997 appearances, flights in the late 1990s, the Zeppelin parade over Lake Constance in 2000, passenger operations, a first personal flight in 2002, the first flight of Zeppelin NT number three in 2003, a ferry to Japan, operations in California, and aircraft being prepared for overseas work.
This is not a comprehensive institutional history of lighter-than-air flight.
It is better understood as one enthusiast’s visual chronology of modern airships appearing in the real world.
That distinction matters. Aviation museums preserve major designs and official milestones. Personal sites often preserve what an aircraft looked like tied down at a local field, arriving for maintenance, carrying advertising, loading onto a ship, or operating a passenger route.
Those are the details that make a technology feel used rather than merely invented.
The homepage’s last listed update is from 2009, and the design still looks like the period in which these galleries were assembled.
CacheRat’s 1,967-domain Ancient Web research list repeatedly turns up this pattern: one person notices something unusual, keeps looking, and accidentally builds a historical archive.
Modern Airships began with a delayed blimp and ended up preserving a slice of the modern lighter-than-air revival.