CHAPTER IV
The Beginnings of Flight

In the spring of 1783, as the American Revolution was nearing a successful conclusion, two brothers named Montgolfier sitting before a fire at a little town in France found themselves wondering why smoke went up into the air.

That was just as foolish as Newton wondering why an apple, detached from the tree, fell down. Smoke had always gone up and apples had always come down. That was all there was to it.

But when men wonder momentous events may be in the making. In these instances epochal discoveries resulted: the law of gravitation and the possibility of human flight.

The legends of Icarus and the narrative of Darius Green are symbols of the long ambition of earth-bound men, even before the days of recorded history, to leave the earth and soar into the air. The Montgolfiers had found the key.

But a hundred years would pass before the discovery would be put to use. It was in 1903 that another pair of brothers, the Wrights, made their first flight from Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina. The first Zeppelin took off from the shores of Lake Constance in 1900.

The Montgolfiers wasted no time testing out their conclusion that smoke rose because it was lighter than the air. They built a great paper bag 35 feet high, hung a brazier of burning charcoal under it, and off it went. Annonnay is a small town but the story of that miracle spread far and wide. The Academy of Science invited them to the capital to repeat the experiment.

But while they were building a new bag a French physicist, Prof. J. A. C. Charles, stole a march on them. He knew that hydrogen was also lighter than air, so constructed a bag of silk, inflated it with hydrogen, sent it aloft before the Montgolfiers were ready.

Still the countrymen were not to lose their hour of glory. Merely to repeat what had already been done was not enough. Their balloon was to be flown from the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, before the king and court and all the great folk of Paris, with half the people of the city craning their necks to watch it pass over. So they loaded aboard a basket containing a sheep, a duck and a rooster, and these three became aircraft’s first passengers.

When the U. S. Army Air Corps years later sought an appropriate insignia for its lighter-than-air division, it could think of nothing more fitting than a design which included a rooster, a duck and a sheep.

Everyone was ready for the next step. A French judge had the solution. He offered the choice to several prisoners awaiting execution—a balloon flight or the guillotine. Two volunteered, felt they had at least a chance with the balloon, whereas the guillotine was distressingly final. They had nothing to lose. That word rang through Paris. A young gallant named De Rozier objected.

“The chance might succeed,” he said. “The honor of being the first man to fly should not go to a convict, but to a gentleman of France. I offer my life.”

Even the king protested at this needless risk, but De Rozier took off the following month, flew half way over Paris, landed safely. This happened on Nov. 21, 1783.

Among the witnesses to these experiments was Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador, himself a scientist of no small renown. He predicted great things for aeronautics.

“But of what use is a balloon?” asked a practical-minded friend.

“Of what use,” replied the American, “is a baby?”

A little later, on January 7, 1785, Jean Pierre Francois Blanchard, a Frenchman, and Dr. John Jeffries, an American, practicing medicine in England, inflated a balloon, took off from the cliffs of Dover at one o’clock in the afternoon, arrived safely in Calais three hours later.

Flight was here, though it would be a long time becoming practical. Dr. Charles and many others contributed, even at that early day. Knowing that hydrogen expanded as the air pressure grew less, at higher altitudes, Charles devised a valve at the top of the balloon, so that the surplus gas could be released, not burst the balloon. He devised a net from which the basket could be suspended, distributing its load over the entire bag.

The drag rope was evolved, an ingenious device to stabilize the balloon’s flight in unstable air. If the balloon tended to rise it would have to carry the entire weight of the rope. If it grew sluggish and drifted low, it had less weight to carry, as much of the rope now lay on the ground. These ballooning principles, early found, are still in use. But the “dirigible” balloon, or airship must wait for light weight, dependable motors, despite the hundreds of ingenious experiments made by men over a full century.

Since this is an airship story, we should first make clear the difference between the airship and the airplane.

The French hit on an apt phrase to distinguish them, dividing aircraft into those which are lighter than the air, such as airships, and those which are heavier than the air, like airplanes.

Airships are literally lighter than air. So are all free balloons, used for training and racing, and all anchored balloons, such as the observation balloon widely used in the last war and the barrage balloons of the present war.

The airship goes up and stays up because the buoyancy given by its lifting gas makes it actually lighter than the air it displaces, and even with the load of motors, fuel, equipment and passengers, must still use ballast to hold it in equilibrium.

The airplane, on the other hand, is heavier than the air. Even the lightest plane can stay up only if it is moving fast enough to get a lifting effect from the movement of air along the wings, similar to that which makes a kite stay up. A kite may be flown in calm weather only if the one who holds the cord keeps running. On a windy day, the kite may be anchored on the ground, and the movement of the wind alone will have sufficient lifting effect. So powerful are these air forces that a plane weighing 20 tons may climb to an altitude of 10,000 feet if its speed is great enough, and its area of wing surface broad enough to produce this kiting effect.

But an airplane can remain aloft only as long as it is moving faster than a certain minimum speed. Cut the motors, or even throttle down below this stalling speed, and the plane will start earthward.

The airship needs its motors only to propel it forward. It can cut its speed, even stop its engines, and nothing happens. It retains its buoyancy, continues to float. The airplane’s lift is dynamic, that of the airship is static.

The airship has some dynamic lift, also, because its horizontal fins or rudders, and the body of the airship have some kiting effect in flight. The blimp pilot, starting on a long trip, will fill up his tanks with all the fuel the ship can lift statically, then take on another 2,000 pounds, taxi across the airport till he gets flying speed and so get under way with many more miles added to his cruising speed.

This dynamic lift however, while useful in certain operations is still incidental. Primarily the airship gets its lift from the fact that the gas in the envelope is much lighter than the air.

Hydrogen is only one-fifteenth the weight of air, helium, the non-inflammable American gas, is a little heavier, about one-seventh. The practical lift is 68 pounds to the thousand cubic feet of hydrogen, 63 pounds in the case of helium.

Lighter-than-air ships are of three classes, rigid, semi-rigid and non-rigid. The rigid airship has a complete metal skeleton, which gives the ship strength and shape. Into the metal frame of the rigid airship are built quarters, shops, communication ways, even engine rooms in the case of the Akron and Macon, with only the control car, fins, and propellers projecting outside the symmetrical hull. The lifting gas is carried in a dozen or more separate gas cells, nested within the bays of the ship.

The non-rigid airship has no such internal support. The bag keeps its taut shape only from the gas and air pressure maintained within. Release the gas and the bag becomes merely a flabby mass of fabric on the hangar floor. Ship crews do not live in the balloon section, but in the control car below.

The British, apt at nicknames, differentiated between the two types of airships by calling them “rigid” and “limp” types, and since an early “Type B” was widely used in the first World War, quickly contracted “B, limp” into the handier word “Blimp.”

The third type, semi-rigid, has a metal keel extending the length of the ship, to which control surfaces and the car are attached, and with a metal cone to stiffen the bow section.

The rigid ship is of German origin. Developed by Count Zeppelin, retired army officer, and largely used by that nation during the war of 1914-18, it was taken up after the war started, by the British and Americans, and to a small extent later by France and Italy.

Non-rigid ships were widely used by the British and French, to a less extent by Italy and United States.

The intermediate semi-rigid was largely Italian and French in war use, though United States bought one ship after the war from the Italians, built one itself. The Germans also built smaller Parseval semi-rigids.

The rigid airships are the largest, the non-rigids smallest. The rigid has to be large to hold enough gas to lift its metal frame along with the load of fuel, oil, crew, supplies, passengers and cargo. The blimps can be much smaller.

The Army’s first airship, built by Major Tom Baldwin, old time balloonist, had 19,500 cubic feet capacity. Goodyear’s pioneer helium ship “Pilgrim” had 51,000 cubic feet. These contrast with the seven million feet capacity of the Hindenburg, and the ten million cubic feet of ships projected for the future.

The following table will show the range of sizes:

The Akron and Macon were 785 feet in length, the K type non-rigid, 250 feet long, the Navy “L’s” 150 feet long.

Let’s cut back now to the Montgolfiers. Progress was disappointingly slow. The simple balloon would only go up and down, and in the direction of the wind. Before it could be practical, men must be able to drive it wherever they liked, make it dirigible, or directable.

Ingenious men, Meusnier, Giffard, Tissandier, Renard, Krebs, many others worked over that problem through the entire nineteenth century. They devised ballonets or air compartments to keep the pressure up. They built airships of cylinder shape, spindle shape, torpedo shape, airships shaped like a cigar, like a string bean, like a whale. But the stumbling block remained, the need of an efficient power plant.

The steam engine was dependable, but once you had installed firebox, boiler and cord wood aboard, there was little if any lift remaining for crew or cargo. Giffard in 1852 built an ingenious small engine using steam but it still weighed 100 pounds per horsepower, drove the ship at a speed of only three miles an hour. Automobile engines today weigh as little as six pounds per horsepower, modern airplane engines one pound per horsepower.

Man experimented with feather-bladed oars, with a screw propeller, turned by hand, using a crew of eight men. Haenlein, German, built a motor that would use the lifting gas from the ship—coal gas or hydrogen. Rennard in 1884 built an electric motor, taking power from a storage battery.

But real progress would have to wait for the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania and the invention of the internal combustion engine. When the gasoline engine came in, in the 90’s, the dirigible builders saw the long sought key to their problem.

While Count Zeppelin was experimenting with his big ships in Germany, Lebaudy, Juliot, Clement Bayard in France and most conspicuously the young Brazilian, Santos Dumont, were working with the smaller dirigibles. Santos Dumont built 14 airships in the first decade of the century, brought the attention of the world to this project. He won a 100,000 franc prize in 1901 for flying across Paris to circle Eiffel Tower and return to his starting point—and gave the money to the Paris poor.

The Wright Brothers made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, in 1903, opening a different field of experiment. France pushed both lines of research. After Santos Dumont’s dirigible flight, Bleriot started from the little town of Toury in an airplane, flew to the next town and back, a distance of 17 miles, making only two en route stops,—and the town erected a monument to him.

In 1909, Bleriot flew a plane across the English Channel and in the following year the airship Clement Bayard II duplicated the feat, carrying a crew of seven, made the 242 miles to London in six hours.

The year 1910 was a momentous one for all aircraft, with France as the world center. Bleriot and Farman, Frenchmen, Latham, British, the Wrights and Curtiss, Americans, broke records almost daily at a big meet in August that year, while at longer range the French and English dirigibles and the Parsevals of Germany, and still more important the great Zeppelins at Lake Constance droned the news of a new epoch.

A young American engineer, P. W. Litchfield, attended the Paris meet, saw these wonders, made notes. He stopped in Scotland on his way back, bought a machine for spreading rubber on fabric, hired the two men tending it (those men, Ferguson and Aikman, were still at their posts in Akron thirty odd years later), hired two young technical graduates on his return, tied in the fortunes of his struggling company with what he believed was a coming industry.

The next five years would see the nations of the world bending their efforts toward perfecting these vehicles of flight,—little realizing they were building a combat weapon which would revolutionize warfare.

CHAPTER V
Effect on Aeronautics of Post-War Reaction

Development of non-rigid airships slowed down after the impetus of the war had spent itself, as was the case in aeronautics generally and in all defense efforts.

With the Armistice of November, 1918, the world was through with war. Men relaxed and reaction set in. There would not be another major war in a hundred years. Well-meaning people everywhere grasped at the straw of universal peace, of negotiated settlement of difficulties between nations, of disarmament of military forces to the point of being little more than an international police force. Germany, the trouble-maker, had been disarmed and handcuffed, would make no more trouble. The world, breathing freely after four years, wanted only to be left alone.

Today with major countries striving feverishly to build guns and navies, it is hard to believe that naïve nations were scrapping ships only a few years ago and pledging themselves to limit future building. No one in the immediate post-war era could believe that men must prepare for another war, an all-out war more terrible and ruthless than men had known,—one which would send flame-spitting machines down from the air and through woods and fields, against which conventional foot soldiers would be as helpless as if they carried bows and arrows. Wishing only to live at peace with other nations, we could conceive no need to make defense preparation against frightfulness.

Congress was divided between “big navy men” and “little navy men,” and generals and admirals who brought in programs for expansion or even reasonable maintenance were shouted down. The public was in no mood to listen.

If the usefulness of the Army and Navy was discounted during this period, more so was the rising new Air Force. Few were interested in airplanes, and these chiefly wartime pilots, who sought to keep aviation alive, made a precarious living flying wartime “Jennies” and “Standards” out of cow pastures, carrying passengers at a dollar a head, or how much have you. The word “haywire” came into the language, as they made open-air repairs to wings and fuselage with baling wire.

Lighter-than-air had no Rickenbackers or Richthofens to point to, but got some advantage during this period from the activities of the Shenandoah, completed in 1923, and the Los Angeles, delivered in 1924. These ships could not be regarded as military craft, carried no arms. The Shenandoah was experimental, based on a 1916 design. The Los Angeles was technically a commercial ship, with passenger accommodations built in, could be used only for training.

This grew out of the fact that the Allies planned to order the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen torn down but had held up the order long enough for it to turn out one more ship. This last ship would be given to United States in lieu of the Zeppelin this country would have received from Germany, if the airship crews, like those of the surface fleet, had not scuttled their craft after the Armistice, to keep them from falling into enemy hands. The Allies stipulated that the Los Angeles should carry no armament. It took a specific waiver from them for the ship to take part several years later in fleet maneuvers.

Other airship activities in this country were at a minimum. The blimps, little heard of in this country during War I, remained in the background. A joint board of the two services gave the Navy responsibility for developing rigid airships, the Army to take non-rigids and semi-rigids. The Navy maintained a few post-war blimps for training, had little funds except for maintenance.

The Army, having Wright Field to do its engineering and experimental work, fared somewhat better, carried on a training and something of a development program. It built bases at Scott Field, Ill., and Langley Field, Va., ordered one or two non-rigid ships a year, purchased a semi-rigid ship from Italy, ordered another, the RS-1, from Goodyear, operated it successfully.

The Army’s non-rigids, however, were overshadowed by the Navy’s rigids and even more by its own airplanes, with the result finally that the Chief of the Air Corps, Major General O. O. Westover, a believer in lighter-than-air, an airship as well as airplane pilot, and a former winner of the James Gordon Bennett cup in international balloon racing, told Congress bluntly that there was no point in dragging along, that unless funds were appropriated for a real airship program the Army might as well close up shop. And this step Congress, in the end, took, and the Army blimps and equipment were transferred to the Navy, and the experimental program started by the one service was carried on by the other.

The rigid ships were in more favorable position because they seemed to have commercial possibilities, and it was the long-range policy of the government to aid transportation. Government support to commercial airships could be justified under the policy by which the government gave land grants to the railways, built highways for the automobile, deepened harbors and built lighthouses for the steamships, laid out airports for planes, gave airmail contracts to keep the U. S. merchant flag floating on the high seas and air routes open over land.

On this theory Navy airships, even though semi-military, got some support during the reaction period, because they might blaze a trail later for commercial lines—which, with ships and crews and terminals, would be available in emergency as a secondary line of defense, like the merchant marine.

The little non-rigid blimps remained the neglected Cinderellas of post-war days.

The Goodyear Company at Akron, which had built 1000 balloons of all types and 100 airships during and after the war, stepped into the picture during this period with a modest program of its own. The first of the Goodyear fleet, the pioneer, helium-inflated Pilgrim, now in the Smithsonian Institute, was built in 1925.

In building this ship, Mr. Litchfield and his company indicated their belief in the value of big airships for trans-oceanic travel, for which the blimps would provide inexpensive training for pilots, and experience in operating under varying weather conditions.

The Pilgrim, the Puritan, the Vigilant, the Mayflower and the rest of the Goodyear fleet which followed—named after cup defenders in international yacht racing—would also uncover during the course of day-after-day operations, improvements in ships and operating technique, which would be available to its customers, the Army and Navy.

In building its own ships, Goodyear was following the tradition of American industry, which does not sit back and merely build goods to order, but has sought by developing better goods to anticipate and stimulate customer demand. In the automobile industry, for example, self-starters, closed cars, steel bodies, balloon tires, streamlining, and the rest were initiated by industry to increase public acceptance and further popularize the automobile. By building its own airships and flying them, Goodyear hoped to expand the market for military and commercial airships.

The doldrum period, which made progress difficult, came to an end with dramatic suddenness. In the year 1927 a youthful pilot flew an airplane, alone, across the Atlantic ocean, and in the following year a middle-aged scientist made a round trip from Europe to America by airship, with 24 people aboard. The imagination of America and the world took fire. Aeronautics started anew.

Perhaps no events in years have appealed so fully to the public consciousness or had such dynamic effects. Almost from the day of Lindbergh’s flight and the Graf Zeppelin’s arrival at Lakehurst, aeronautical engineers found themselves with money to spend in research and machinery. Airports unrolled across the carpet of America, night lighting came in, pilots became business men, appropriations were rushed through Congress, state assemblies, and city councils, and aeronautics became Big Business almost over night. The period of inaction and of reaction was over.

CHAPTER VI
Airship Improvements Between Wars

The wartime airship was a cigar-shaped gas bag with an airplane cockpit, open to the weather, slung below. The contrast between it and the sleek, fast, streamlined Navy airship of today is almost as striking as that between wartime planes and automobiles and modern ones.

Many improvements have been made, even though the airship has not had the experience of building thousands of units, as the automobile and airplane have had, or ample funds for research and experiment. Less than 150 non-rigid airships have been built all told since 1914.

The “B” type blimp, chiefly used in the World War, contained 80,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, though some British and French non-rigids were built in larger sizes, and the United States Navy “C” ships, toward the end of the war, had 200,000 cubic feet of lifting gas. These compare with the 416,000 cubic feet of helium in the new Navy “K” ships. Speed, under the pressure of war needs moved up from 47 miles in the “B” to close to 60 in the “C,” but is around 80 in today’s “K” ships.

Wartime ships carried three to five men and a day’s fuel. Today’s carry eight or ten, enough pilots, radio men, navigators, riggers and mechanics for two full watches, though normally everyone is on duty during patrols. The “B” was good for perhaps 900 miles, the “K” for well over twice that distance.

Wartime ships had to keep the control car well away from the bag to prevent sparks from igniting the hydrogen gas. A windshield was the pilot’s only protection from the elements. Modern ships, using non-inflammable helium, have closed cars, streamlined into the bag, ample room for navigation and radio, sleeping and eating quarters, even a photographic dark room, can be heated and noise-proofed.

Early airships were pulled down and held by a large ground crew, a pneumatic bumper bag on the car cushioning its landing. Today’s ships land on a swiveled wheel, roll up to a mast—or taxi off across the airport like an airplane and take off.

These, however, are merely flight factors. More important is it that the wartime blimp was to a large extent hangar-bound. It could go no further from its base than it could safely return before its fuel was exhausted.

Today’s ships are expeditionary craft, can go almost anywhere, stay as long as they want. They are no longer land-bound, can be refueled and reserviced at sea. They are much safer, rank high in this respect among all carriers whether on land, sea or in the air.

Three independent lines of study contributed to these results, those of the Army, Navy and Goodyear, each free to follow its own ideas, to observe results found by the others, adopt them, use them as starting points for further developments, or discard them.

The improvements were achieved in a relatively short period. The army started in after the war and carried on a continuing program till 1932. The Navy, absorbed in its rigid airships, did not get into non-rigids till the early 1930’s. Goodyear built the Pilgrim in 1925 but its development program really began with the blimp fleet in 1929.

Noteworthy improvement was found during this period in materials, structure, design, engines and radio communication, with outstanding advances along three major lines.

First was increased safety, permitted by helium gas. Wartime airships used hydrogen because it was all they had, had to develop what protection they could against fire through construction devices and operating technique. Hydrogen was not only inflammable, but under certain conditions explosive. World War pilots had to fly their hydrogen ships through thunder and lightning storms, dodge inflammatory bullets if they could. Zeppelin sailors wore felt shoes, with no nails to create a spark, used frogs for buttons, had to guard against static.

It was a fortunate thing for the airship world when a gas was found in 1907 in Dexter, Kansas, which would not burn. Curious scientists, asking why, found it was helium, a gas previously identified (in 1869) only in the rays of the sun. Helium gas is inert, refusing to combine with any other element, does not deteriorate metal or fabric. It was not much heavier than hydrogen, the lightest of all gases, so proved a welcome gift to lighter-than-air.

For some reason, not explained except on the theory that Providence takes special interest in America, helium has been found in quantity only in this country. It is a component, present to the extent of two or three percent in certain natural gas, though ranging as high as eight or ten percent in favored areas. It can be separated by compression and liquefaction from the natural gas,—which is that much improved by the removal of the non-inflammable content.

The world’s chief known supply of helium lies in certain sections of Texas, Kansas, Colorado and Utah. More important, United States is the only country having great pipe lines, can distribute natural gas from Texas to cities as far away as Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago. Without such a market operators would have to separate and release the 95% of natural gas to get the 5% of helium, and costs would be still higher.

Helium is perhaps the most useful of the few natural monopolies given to this country.

It was only toward the end of the World War, however, that Army engineers worked out a process of separating helium from natural gas. A plant was built at Fort Worth and the first cylinders of helium had reached New Orleans ready for shipment to France to inflate observation balloons when the Armistice was signed.

Army, Navy and Bureau of Mine engineers worked thereafter to increase production and cut costs, but as late as 1925 Will Rogers called attention to the fact that the Navy had not been able to get enough helium to supply both the Shenandoah and the Los Angeles at the same time. If one was using the helium the other had to stay home. Two ships, and only one set of helium, he commented.

The use of helium cut the casualty list on the Shenandoah, would have saved the Hindenburg. Non-rigid airships have had no fire or explosive accidents since helium came into use as the lifting gas.

It was the loss by a hydrogen fire of the Italian-built Roma, after it struck a high tension line at Langley Field in February, 1922, which fixed the policy of “helium only” for U. S. Army and Navy airships. The Army’s C-7 was the first airship to use helium. In building the Pilgrim in 1925, Goodyear followed the same policy—even though it had to pay $125 a thousand cubic feet for helium while it could have obtained hydrogen for $5 per thousand.

Further improvements and increasing volume of production brought the cost down in time from $125 to less than $20, and helium expense became relatively unimportant in providing safety for Goodyear’s airship operations.

Important too during this period was the Army’s development of tank cars for transporting helium. A large item of helium expense was freight, the cost of hauling 130 pound metal containers which held 170 to 200 cu. ft. of the gas. It took 250 such containers to inflate Goodyear’s smallest ship, the Pilgrim. The tank cars hold 200,000 cu. ft. of gas, almost enough to inflate two Goodyear airships.

Experiments with specially woven fabric and the use of synthetic rubber cut down the losses resulting from diffusion, and where formerly it was necessary to remove the helium and purify it every six months, diffusion losses were cut to one or two per cent a month, with purification needed only every other year.

In addition to increasing safety, helium permitted improvements in airship design. The wartime craft had its control cars suspended by cables from finger patches cemented to the outside of the bag. But with helium ships the car could be built into the bag, attached by an internal catenary suspension system to the top of the gas section. Each exposed suspension cable, no matter how small, creates parasitic resistance from the air, so that the removal of yards of steel and rope had the result of increasing the speed of the ship with the same horsepower.

The second set of major improvements centers around the mooring mast. The mooring mast idea was not new. The British had built the first ones during the World War for its large rigid ships, found that a ship attached to it would swing easily, like a weather vane, continuing to point into the wind, and that a well streamlined ship would hold securely even in winds of great velocity.

When Alfred E. Smith ordered a mooring mast built on top the Empire State building, it was with the assurance from his engineers that even with the tugging of the 150-ton Graf Zeppelin, the strain would be little more than the normal push of the wind against the building itself, that the added stresses would be negligible.

The Germans had had little occasion to use mooring masts. Friedrichshafen, where most of the Zeppelins were built, lay in a natural bowl, well protected from the winds, and ships could take off and land, be walked in or out of the hangar with little risk from the weather.

Lakehurst, on the other hand, lay in an exposed position, in the path of coast-wise storms, a frequent battle-ground between onshore winds from the ocean and storms breaking over the mountains from the west. A study made later to determine bases for projected American passenger operations showed that of weather conditions prevailing between Boston and the Virginia Cape, those at Lakehurst were almost the most unfavorable.

People knew little about airship operating when the Navy base was moved from Pensacola to Lakehurst on a waste site in the Jersey pine lands which the Army no longer needed after the war as a proving ground for its artillery.

This defect proved an advantage. The Navy was forced by the very nature of things to concentrate on a problem which had been no problem to Doctor Eckener and his associates. At the urging of Admiral Moffett, Commander Garland Fulton, Lieutenant Commander C. E. Rosendahl and others, Navy engineers built a high mast, 180 feet tall, following British practice, with a service elevator inside, then tackled the problem of keeping the ship on even keel against up and down gusts. Since the wind does not come out of the ground, a low mast was suggested, half the height of the ship, so that when anchored the ship would all but rest on the ground. The Navy was working on this when an incident happened to strengthen the argument.

The co-incidence of a wind shift, and rising temperatures one afternoon as the Los Angeles was resting comfortably at anchorage, started the tail rising, and it continued to rise till it reached almost 90 degrees. Then the ship turned gently on its swivel, and descended easily on the other side, with no more damage than some broken china in the galley. Still a 700-foot airship has no business doing head-stands, so the low mast development was rushed through. It proved successful.

The next step was to make the low mast mobile, so that it could not only hold the ship on the ground but take it in and out of the hangar. First of these was Lakehurst’s famous “iron horse,” a giant motor-driven tripod, which rolled out on the airport, hauling incoming ships into the hangar, took advantage of daylight calms to take ships out into the field ahead of time so as to be ready to leave on schedule.

On the Graf Zeppelin’s trip around the world in 1929, hangars were available for fueling stops at Lakehurst, Friedrichshafen, and curiously enough in Japan, a German shed turned over to the Nipponese after the 1918 Armistice, having been re-erected at Tokio. There was none however on the American West Coast to house the ship after its long trip across the Pacific. So the Navy, under direction of Lieutenant Commander T. G. W. Settle, hauled a mast up to Los Angeles from San Diego (it had been erected there for the Shenandoah’s flight around the rim of the country in 1923) anchored it with guy wires. It served the purpose perfectly.

The Germans, skeptical at first, became convinced of the value of the mast, themselves erected masts at Frankfort, and Seville, at Pernambuco and Rio de Janiero, used them as terminals.

Once the masting technique had been worked out, the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg, in the years 1930-6, made a record of regularity which no other vehicle of transportation has approached. They took off at times over the ocean for Europe when all other aircraft in the area was grounded, when the fog hid the entire top half of the ship, and the ship disappeared into the fog within a few seconds after the “Up Ship” signal was given. What few delays appear on the record were due to waiting for connecting airplanes to arrive with the latest European mail for the Americas.

So far the use of masts had been entirely a matter for the large rigid airships. The Army did the first development work on high and low masts for its smaller ships at Scott Field, as well as a landing wheel for them to ride on. A situation at Akron started experimentation along a different line. At Goodyear’s Wingfoot Lake Field, Mr. Litchfield frowned over the expense of having a considerable crew on hand to land and launch the blimps, with little to do after the ship was in the air. To an Army or Navy post, with plenty of men in training, this surplus of men was no difficulty, but any private corporation operating passenger airship lines would find the expense burdensome.

He put the question to his men in 1930, offering cash prizes for the best solution. Out of many ideas, one clear-cut line of progress appeared. This was to make the ground crew truck a maneuvering base, with a mast on top, which could be folded down when not in use. The truck then could not only hold the ship on the ground, but guide it in and out of the hangar with more security than by using a large number of men. Extra wheels mounted on outriggers kept the truck from being turned over by side gusts. In succeeding years the ground crew truck became a traveling mooring point which could follow the ship across country, give it anchorage when night fell, and at the same time act as a traveling supply depot, machine shop, radio cabin, and crew quarters.

A portable mast, built in sections, high enough for ships to mast at the nose, was the next step. It could be set up on an hour’s notice, anchored by guy wires and screw stakes for more extended operations. Gradually the airship became independent of the hangar, came to use it only for overhaul and the purification of its helium gas. The blimp could be fueled and serviced completely in the open.

Lacking a dock in San Francisco, at the time of the Exposition in 1939, the Goodyear blimp Volunteer moved up from Los Angeles, based on a mast for five months. The only time it sought shelter was when a splinter from the propeller pierced the bag, causing a leak. The ship flew 60 miles down the bay to the Navy base at Sunnyvale, like a boy coming in from play to have a splinter removed from his finger, went back again, didn’t even stay over night.

In the winter of 1940-41 the “Reliance” which had been spending its winters in Miami, using a wartime Navy hangar which the city had moved up from Key West, found that building commandeered for defense work. So a mast was set up on the Causeway, and the ship operated with no other home than that for six months, saw no shelter from the time it left Wingfoot Lake in early December till it returned at the end of May.

The Navy had a different problem as it moved into the non-rigid picture in the early 1930’s. Its problem was only incidentally to operate away from its base at Lakehurst. Ships were getting larger in size, and masts were needed where they could be moored outdoors, or taken in and out of the hangar. The solution was a smaller replica of the rigid airship’s “Iron Horse” except that it moved on large rubber tires, and was towed in and out by tractor, rather than carrying its own power plant.

A portable mast was also developed for the Navy blimps, with a special car to haul it around. This mast could be sent to Parris Island or some point in New England, ahead of time, set up and used as a temporary base for radio calibrating or other missions.

Navy ships basing at Lakehurst have operated for weeks at a time along the coast as far north as Bath, Maine, and as far south as the Carolinas, with a portable mast as headquarters.

Utilization of the mast principle by non-rigid airships not only greatly increased their radius of operation, and cut down landing crews, but increased the number of operating days per month.

Pilots of early airplanes used to go out on the airport, hold up a handkerchief, and if it fluttered, conclude it was too windy to fly. So early airship pilots, with anemometers on the roof of the hangar and at points over the field, judged it too risky to take the ships out if the wind was higher than four or five miles an hour, and then only if it was down-hangar in direction.

Modern airships lose few flying days because it is too windy to go out. Under war conditions, when risks must be taken, which need not be taken for passenger or training flights, very few days would be wasted if there is military necessity for it.

Navy non-rigids miss few rendezvous with the fleet in exercises out of Lakehurst, regardless of the weather outside.

If the portable mast revolutionized airship operations over land, experiments started by the Navy in 1938-39, largely under the direction of Lt. C. S. Rounds, promise to be just as important in over-water operations. These showed that the airship could pick up ballast from the ocean, could get fuel from a passing ship, could change crews at sea.

Ballast is important to a vehicle which growing continuously lighter as it uses up fuel, must still be kept in equilibrium. Transoceanic Zeppelins, using hydrogen, had to fly high enough to “blow off” the surplus gas once or twice during a trip to compensate for the ship growing lighter. But hydrogen was cheap, and could be manufactured as needed. American ships could not afford to waste helium, which was a natural resource. Army and Navy engineers had worked on this, and equipment developed for the Akron and Macon to condense the gases from the burned fuel was able to recover more than 100 pounds of water ballast for every 100 pounds of fuel used.

The blimps didn’t use these since they ordinarily would not be out for more than a day at a time, still a ready source of ballast would make it unnecessary to valve helium on long flights.

Ironically enough a whole ocean full of ballast lay below seagoing airships, but no practical method had been devised to take the sea water aboard until the Navy tackled the problem in 1938.

That problem may be visualized in the obvious difficulty of maintaining physical contact between an airship and a surface ship. The two move in different media, one influenced mostly by the waves, the other mostly by the wind. The surface ship is moving up and down, the airship subject to gusts which might break the contact or thrust it violently against the masts or superstructure of the surface ship. Servicing has been done under favorable circumstances, but could not be relied on as standard procedure.

The solution reached was this. The pilot swings his ship down to within 100 or 150 feet of the water, lowers a hose with a small bronze scoop, not much wider than the hose, so as to lessen the drag.

Twenty-five feet up from the scoop is a streamlined cylinder, blimp shaped, carrying a small electric pump. This cylinder, nicknamed the “fish”, has tail fins to keep it from spinning, and skims along the surface or jumps out like a porpoise, but the scoop is far enough behind and heavy enough to trail easily beneath the surface, stays directly in the ship’s wake, continues without interruption to pick up ballast for the airship above.

The whole gear weighs slightly more than 100 pounds, can pick up water at cruising speed, can function in rough water or smooth. The Navy J-4, chiefly used in these experiments, normally consumes 500 pounds of fuel in five hours of flying at cruising speed. It was able to pick up that much water ballast in seven minutes.