[brownbat]

Airline crashes have a surprisingly high survivability rate (because the typical crash is not the craft plummeting from 30k feet, but some kind of runway incident).

To your overall point though, hydrogen isn't that much worse. In fact, many leading airship disasters involved helium.

USS Shenandoah is typical of the most common enemy of airships--strong winds. The captain warned that the updrafts and storms in the Midwest would destroy the ship but was ordered to fly over several cities anyway, just for a promotional tour.

The deadliest airship disaster in history is not the Hindenburg, but the lesser known USS Akron, a helium ship that was simply destroyed in bad weather.