The Hindenburg had permission to dock at Opa-locka the week before it burned
A Pirep featured story · KOPF Miami-Opa Locka Executive, Opa-locka, FL
Glenn Curtiss founded Opa-locka in 1927 on the grounds of his Florida Aviation Camp. In 1933 the United States Navy built a dirigible mooring mast on the western half of the field — one of only five in the country. Big rigid airships needed somewhere to tie up, and a mast was a complicated piece of infrastructure: a steel tower 160 feet tall with a turntable at the top, ground crew of 200 men needed to walk a 800-foot zeppelin into the wind by ropes and bring it down to dock.
The USS Akron moored at Opa-locka. The USS Macon moored at Opa-locka. The German LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin moored at Opa-locka on its 1933 Caribbean tour and made the front page of the Miami Herald — partly for the airship itself and partly because a Cuban worker hired to handle the mooring lines disappeared after the ship left, prompting the paper's first front-page story about Cuban stowaways.
In late April 1937, the German operators of the LZ-129 Hindenburg requested and received permission to use Opa-locka's mast for a planned South American route extension. The paperwork was filed. The mast was inspected. Opa-locka was ready.
On May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg arrived at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey at the end of its first transatlantic crossing of the season. The ship caught fire on approach to the mast. Thirty-six people died over thirty-two seconds. After the disaster, the Navy concluded that hydrogen-filled rigid airships were too dangerous to operate, and Opa-locka's mast was torn down within a year. The site became Naval Air Station Miami; the dirigible-mast foundation was buried under the new construction. By 1967 — between Coast Guard operations, the Cuban Missile Crisis staging traffic, and a booming general aviation scene — Miami-Opa locka was the busiest civilian airport in the world.
You can taxi past the spot where the mast stood. There's no marker. But the Hindenburg almost ended its career here instead of New Jersey, and that fact lives in the airport's history file under the heading "Things That Almost Happened."