As was the case yesterday, I write to you from Friedrichshaven. It is a small town in a picturesque setting on the north shore of Lake Constance in southern Bavaria. Across the lake is Switzerland, resplendent against a backdrop of the Alps, and here in Friedrichshaven itself, the ghost of Ferdinand, Count Zeppelin, is all-pervasive.
Zeppelin's first airship was the 420-ft-long LZ1, which made its maiden flight in July 1900, and ushered in the golden era of these giant aircraft. After several years of development, the Deutschland followed and began commercial flights from Dusseldorf in 1910. In the four years before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, it carried 34,000 passengers without a single fatal accident - a remarkable achievement in those early days of aviation.
The airships were so successful that for a time it was confidently assumed that Zeppelin's aircraft, built at the headquarters of his corporation here at Friedrichshaven, represented the future of civil aviation, with aeroplanes playing only a subsidiary role.
The views of one Capt William Pollock, writing in the early 1920s, were perhaps typical of the time: "As civil flying becomes widely recognised as a safe and speedy means of transport from one country to another, it is probable that aeroplanes will merely perform the function of feeders for big rigid airships and super flying-boats.
"The Atlantic and the Pacific should in time become largely all-airship routes, together with those from Cape Town to Sydney and San Francisco to Tokyo. A round-the-world airship route from London would be via St Johns, Ottawa, Vancouver, Fiji Islands, Auckland, Melbourne, Singapore, Madras, Cairo and Malta, and so back to London."
And so, for a time, it seemed. For a brief period during the late 1920s and the 1930s, the great airships provided those who could afford it with the ultimate in smooth, silent, flying comfort. But during the 1930s a number of tragic and well-publicised disasters - notably the British R101 in 1930 and Zeppelin's Hindenburg in 1937 - swung public opinion strongly against the use of airships, and they were more or less abandoned.
Zeppelin himself, however, harboured no illusions. Before his death in 1917, at a time when Zeppelins were being used with only limited success on German bombing raids, he became resigned to the fact that his brainchild's days were numbered: "Airships are an antiquated weapon," he declared: "It is the aeroplane that will control the skies."