[jetrink]

The Hindenburg was one of only two passenger airships, so imagine if 50% of passenger aircraft eventually crashed. There was also no obvious route towards making them safer at the time. Even if the problem of flammability could be solved, they were very vulnerable to bad weather and it was still decades before modern weather forecasting.

[snakeyjake]

Forget 50%, the US Navy built five rigid airships.

ZR-1 through ZR-5.

The only one that wasn’t destroyed by a crash that also killed most if not all of its crew was ZR-3 and its history is filled with so many near-disasters that it was pure chance that the rigid airships program didn’t have a 100% loss rate.