In 1922, the US Army airship Roma, a large hydrogen-filled blimp, hit power lines at a base in Hampton Roads, Virginia and caught fire, killing 34 of the 45 crew on board. Later that year, because of this crash, the Army and Navy announced that they would be moving away from flammable hydrogen as the lifting gas for airships, and moving to more inert helium, as soon as possible. The US then rapidly developed its helium production, which remained a government controlled monopoly until the 1990s.
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