Finally at 7:00PM, conditions cleared up and the Hindenburg got clearance to land. .
After receiving their notification to land they wasted no time. At 7:08PM, it began its descent through the clouds. After it was under the clouds Captain Max Pruss realized that he had missed his target so he made a sweeping turn to the left to approach the mooring mast from the west. Shifting winds forced Pruss to make another, much sharper, turn to the right for an approach from the north instead. As Pruss valved off some hydrogen, to lower the ship a bit, lightning flashed in the south, he also dropped some water ballast to bring the ship to a complete stop in midair (Saari, Peggy).
At 7:21 the landing process was going just as usual, they dropped the mooring lines down to the ground crew to be fastened to the mooring mast. At 7:25, the outer cover of the giant airship began to flutter and a flame soon formed where the skin was fluttering. The frame the shuttered and one crewmember heard a muffled pop. After a few minutes, the stern was covered in flames and started to fall. The flames quickly worked their way through the center of the ship and shot out of the nose like a blowtorch. After thirty-two second the largest airship ever made was just a pie of burnt-up framework. Thirty-five of the ninety-seven aboard were killed and one ground crewmember died also.
At the time, Americans said that St. Elmo's Fire caused the explosion. St. Elmo's Fire is when something in the air has the same electrical charge as the air around it and some part of the object afloat touches the ground and allows the electricity to flow from the atmosphere to the object causing a flickering blue flame. The Germans argued that it was "brush discharge." They were basically saying that when the manila ropes touched the ground they became wet and the equalization of static charges between the ship and the ground would make the Hindenburg itself discharge electricity into the atmosphere (Platt, Richard).