The Story of the Airship 10

The Story of the Airship 10

No blimps have done this. The fleet might see no need for them to go out

for long periods. However, the possibility has been established, and

might be useful in the emergencies of war, or accident. While the

primary usefulness of the blimp lies in the coastal waters, it can go to

sea if needed—and stay out—can be used in convoy work or as a listening

post.

 

Other improvements were uncovered during the experiments. A sea anchor

or drogue was devised to enable the airship to “lay to” for extended

periods, without consuming fuel, in case it wishes to use its listening

devices against submarines, make repairs or for other purposes. Plans

have been worked out for landing on the water in quiet bays in calm

weather, utilizing flotation gear, or a three-point mooring to ordinary

mud anchors—facilitating servicing from nearby Coast Guard stations.

 

Perhaps a significant thing about these experiments is that the

principles seem applicable as well to rigid airships. The ability to

pick up ballast in flight may well eliminate the necessity for

ballast-recovery devices, with a substantial saving in cost, and an

impressive saving in weight.

 

By eliminating the heavy condensers, and translating that weight-saving

into fuel, it is estimated that the range of a ship of the Los Angeles

size could be increased by 20 percent and ships of the Akron-Macon size

by 15 percent, in the last case amounting to 1,250 miles of additional

cruising radius.

 

A trans-oceanic passenger airship could start out with virtually no

water ballast at all except a minimum amount for maneuvering, use its

fuel supply as ballast and pick up sea water as needed. This could be

done at 500 feet elevation, at the rate of 80 gallons a minute, using a

30 horsepower motor, could be done in half an hour a day. The ship need

not slow down materially while doing this.

 

Application of this principle to military airships of the rigid type

might be still more significant. The chief use for the rigid airship in

war would seem to be as a high speed airplane carrier, whose planes

would increase many fold its own reconnaissance range, and would be

expected also to do the major part of what fighting became necessary in

case of enemy contact. The airship itself in that situation would put

more dependence on its speed of retreat and its ability to seek cover in

clouds as the submarine does beneath the surface, than on its own

machine guns and cannons.

 

One thing brought urgently home to us in the first weeks of the present

war is that oceans are wide, and that the movements of even a huge enemy

fleet are difficult to discover in those endless expanses of water.

 

Large military airships of five or ten million cubic feet helium

capacity might prove exceedingly useful, if they were able to operate

away from their base for weeks or even months at a time, and they might

be able to do this by utilizing devices similar to those developed for

smaller non-rigids, resting on the sea in calm waters, mooring to

anchored masts they could lower into the water, picking up fuel from

tankers, getting supplies from neighboring ships—in addition to what was

carried to them from the fleet by their own planes.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VII

Adventures of the Goodyear Fleet

 

 

[Illustration: Airships flying in formation]

 

One of the lesser romances at least of aeronautics is the story of the

Goodyear airship fleet.

 

There is thrill and adventure in the narrative, daring and

resourcefulness, hazards faced by men who believed in their

craft—chances which were usually won. So this chapter might well be

dedicated to Airship Captain Charles Brannigan and Balloon Pilot Walter

Morton.

 

Morton was an old timer, who had flown balloons with Tom Baldwin, in the

far corners of the country. Between times he worked in the Goodyear

balloon room, a practical mechanic who could always make things work,

the salt-of-the-earth workman whom every foreman swore by, the aide

every pilot wanted alongside. Steady, self-effacing, courageous, with an

instinct for the right thing to do in emergency, Morton feared but one

thing. That was lightning.

 

He had flown many times through lightning storms prior to the helium

era, beneath a bag filled with inflammable gas, but he didn’t like it.

He knew its swift striking power.

 

“I could almost see the Old Fellow standing there throwing those darts

at us,” said Morton one afternoon in 1928, as he scanned the skies

before taking off in a balloon race out of Pittsburgh. “One would flash

past and miss, and he would say ‘I’ll get you next time,’ and there

would come another. And you can’t dodge in a balloon.”

 

The Old Fellow scored a direct hit that afternoon. Morton was flying

with Van Orman, Gordon Bennett Cup winner. The uncertain weather of the

afternoon had resolved itself less than an hour after the take-off, and

eight balloons were being tossed as a juggler tosses weights, a thousand

feet high, 10,000 feet, caught and tossed aloft again just before they

touched the ground. Morton’s balloon was hit at 12,000 feet, caught

fire, alternatively fell like a plumb bob or parachuted in the net,

landed without too much of a shock. Van Orman, unconscious, sustained a

broken ankle. Morton had been instantly killed.

 

But aerologists learned things that afternoon about the force of

vertical movements of the air. The balloons gave a perfect track of what

went on. One balloon was falling so fast that sacks of ballast thrown

overboard lagged behind it, while a hundred yards away another balloon

was shooting upward at similar speed.

 

We still know less than we should about the movements of the air, this

new world into which the Aeronautic Age is moving. The Pittsburgh

tragedy may save many lives, avoid other tragedies.

 

The Brannigan story is shorter, no less dramatic. High-spirited, keen, a

captain whose ship and crew must always be shipshape, Brannigan had come

to Goodyear from the Army—where he had already distinguished himself by

making repairs in mid air to the semi-rigid Roma, ripped by a splintered

propeller—saving a comrade as an incident to the job—had quickly won his

captaincy at Goodyear, was one of its best flyers.

 

At Kansas City one afternoon in 1931 a Kansas twister headed for the

airport. Seeing the weather uncertain Brannigan had stopped passenger

flying, put his ship on the mast. Now he ordered his mechanic to get off

and cut the ship loose. Once aloft, with helium gas, he was not afraid

of any storm that blew. But before the ship could clear the mast, the

storm had struck, with full fury. The anchors holding the mast pulled

out of the ground and the ship, with the mast attached, was hurled into

the nearest hangar, ripping one motor off. That was Brannigan’s cue to

jump. The door had been propped open for a photographer’s camera. But he

had one motor left, the bag was undamaged, the mast had fallen clear. He

wouldn’t give up his ship as long as there was a chance to save it.

 

[Illustration: Reunion in Akron—The ships comprising the Goodyear

fleet, could tell stirring stories of battles with the elements

waged in many states.]

 

[Illustration: Some of these pilots flew airships in the first war,

others came in later from the technical schools—many now are flying

airships for the Navy.]

 

[Illustration: From this pocket handkerchief size airport, off the

Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, Goodyear ships carried

thousands of passengers, from all over America.]

 

[Illustration: The Mayflower landed on the deck of the SS Bremen,

took off passenger P. W. Litchfield.]

 

[Illustration: The Enterprise lands to rescue the crew of an

ice-locked steamer in Chesapeake Bay.]

 

However the storm was not to be denied, and before he could get

altitude, the wind threw the ship into a nest of high-tension wires, set

it afire. Brannigan climbed out, walked to a nearby automobile,

transferred to a second car enroute to the hospital after a

collision—and died the next day from third-degree burns.

 

He called Furculow, his co-pilot, just before the end, told him to see

that the men in the crew were taken care of, that they were not

penalized for the loss of the ship. Furculow, now flying airships for

the Navy, is not the only man in Goodyear who will not forget Charley

Brannigan. It is on such men that the traditions of the service are

built. Any cause for which men give their lives cannot be held lightly.

 

The Goodyear Company had built a few airships of its own prior to the

1925 Pilgrim, when helium became available. Best known of these was the

“Pony Blimp” which operated out of Los Angeles from 1919 to 1923, flew

passengers to Catalina, worked for the movies in Arizona and Wyoming.

 

But the real beginning came with the Pilgrim, the larger Puritan and

still larger Defender, as the Goodyear fleet came into existence in

1928-29.

 

Early pilots had no specific instructions except to take the ships out

and fly them—fly them hard, find out all they could about them, see what

weaknesses and shortcomings there were and how to improve them. It was

another test fleet, repeating the history of the automobile.

 

The pilots were supposed not to get hurt, but they were to fly in all

kinds of weather they felt it safe to fly in. They might lose a few

ships, but were expected to be able to walk away from them, not to get

in any trouble they couldn’t get out of. They had an advantage over Army

and Navy fliers in having a free hand as to where they might go. They

were expected to make mistakes but should learn from them.

 

Such instructions, largely unwritten, acted as a challenge to the

pilots, a high-spirited and courageous group. Starting with a few men

who had flown airships in the World War, or helped build them in the

balloon room and the machine shop, they added some technical school

graduates in 1929, and others as needed.