I do wonder

Episode 22 of Season 7 will be called Once Upon a Zeppelin.

This is the family crest of the von Zeppelins, the same family the airships are named after.
Could the inventor/promoter/producer of Equestrian airships have been a donkey?

Comments

[Boulder]

I'm guessing that's it's right ear twitched forward, but it does look like a unicorn horn, hard to tell. What a bright red tongue, rude little fellow isn't he?

[Miss Appolonia]

4520000
Yes, it's a bit unclear in that picture. This one's better.
badwindsheim-ferienwohnungen.de/images/wappen_zeppelin_200.gif
They always seem to put great emphasis on the tongue.

[howard035]

I'm going to have to demand that airships were invented by a donkey now!

Perhaps a certain donkey needed some kind of device to rapidly travel across Equestria in search of his lost love?

[Miss Appolonia]

4520079
Maybe Cranky Doodle Donkey is an alias, or a nickname, acquired in his travels. Maybe he is descended from an old Germane noble family. It would make him being at the Grand Galloping Gala very plausible, now that I think about it.
Ferdinand von Zeppelin was the guy that linked the family name to the airships by inventing them... Since another donkey, Matilda, has a name that us humans would call 'normal', maybe his birth name is indeed Ferdinand?

[Boulder]

4520103 4520079 'To stoke the boiler' as it were, the rail lines have only been a recent thing in Equestria I think as evident by the increase in the last update of the official map.
2012
img01.deviantart.net/8cc6/i/2012/217/d/4/hi_resolution_equestria_map_by_pixelkitties-d59w4iv.png
2015vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/a/a4/Map_of_Equestria_2015.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20151205072352
So in Cranky's youth an airship, for some equine without magic, would be a valid possibility for fast travel if he was stubbornly refusing help from ponies in his search. The thing will be airships are already mentioned crashed in Skyreach (If you want to add it to the Weedverse that is.), but we don't know how old they are, although I would place them as older than Cranky. Unless he's like Methuselah or something and is far more ancient than we know.