the story of the airship 14

the story of the airship 14

Here was the same problem of getting maximum strength with minimum

weight, of selection and treatment of light alloys, of intricate stress

calculations, and a hundred ingenious devices to measure those stresses,

enabling designers to turn out a scientifically designed structure. The

background was there—not to mention their experience and studies in

streamlined design—to reduce resistance, get maximum performance from

power plants.

 

The difference was that in the case of the airship savings in weight

mount fast, because of size. The importance of light weight and high

strength had come home to airship designers years before.

 

Their experience was directly applicable to the new field. Other orders

came in, from Curtiss, Consolidated, Grumman, and soon the huge plant

was humming with the production of parts for fighters and bombers.

 

Then a four-company arrangement was set up by the government to expand

airplane production still further, and after that an order for complete

planes. The original plant was now jam-packed with lathes and drills,

jigs and presses, and three huge new plants were built alongside and

across the road, and Goodyear Aircraft Corporation found itself with

thousands of men, building not only airships, but airplanes and airplane

parts as well.

 

Every large company took on new tasks in defense, but in this case

Goodyear was able to move quickly, and give unexpected support to the

airplane program by reason of its long research in a different field.

This result, it is true, grew chiefly out of research in rigid airships,

rather than non-rigids, but both played a part in another

instance—barrage balloons.

 

England was using them, might ask this country to supply some. The

American government too might have use for them. So, long before there

was even any hint of orders, Mr. Litchfield threw a new problem to the

engineers at Goodyear Aircraft and the operating men at Wingfoot

Lake—the job of designing an efficient barrage balloon. They were not to

make Chinese copies of foreign balloons, but draw on their experience in

lighter-than-air and see if principles and technique established there

could not be applied to design balloons which would ride with maximum

stability in gusty and unstable air. Men went to work, designing,

building, flying, observing, rejecting, altering, improving, week after

week, month after month, until several satisfactory types were evolved.

One of these was capable of flying at 15,000 feet, twice the usual

height. Orders began to come in, and the little group of men and girls

in the balloon room quickly grew into a large organization. The

department outgrew its quarters, took over room after room, expanded to

subsidiary plants outside Akron.

 

One instrument developed illustrates how the airship men were able to

utilize past experience in a new project.

 

Mounted alongside the winch on the ground, it gave exact information, as

often as was wanted, as to what the barrage balloon was doing, a mile or

three miles up.

 

This assembly included a moving picture camera, which continuously, or

at fixed intervals, or at any instant desired, by means of radio

control, would photograph recording dials and show these things: wind

velocity at the balloon, tension on cable, gas pressure inside the

balloon, temperature of confined gas, temperature and humidity of the

air surrounding the balloon, angle of attack at which the balloon faced

the wind, both fore and aft and from side to side, also a clock, which

showed the time the readings were recorded.

 

These pictures, when developed gave the engineers the data from which

they could modify designs and arrive at a type of balloon which would

ride most easily aloft, avoid undue tugging and surging on the

cable—incidentally permitting smaller gauge and weight cable to be used

for a given height with ample safety margin.

 

Perhaps the largest single result, however, growing out of the fleet

operations was that it had created manufacturing facilities, ships and

personnel on which the Navy could draw, as fully as it wanted, in

emergency, and with little more delay than the time it took for a man to

change his uniform.

 

Boettner, Sewell, Blair, Hobensack and Hill followed the others into the

service. Hobensack’s ground crew in California signed up with him in a

body, and men from other ground crews, expert in rigging, in motors,

radio, in mooring out and maintenance joined up. In the end only Fickes

and Crum were left at Akron to build the new ships, and Sheppard,

Crosier and Massic to test-fly them, then ferry them to their

destinations.

 

The student pilots at Wingfoot Lake had finished their training just in

time. About half of them went immediately into the Navy, were

commissioned and sent to the various bases, the others remained at Akron

as replacements to the other pilots, in testing and delivery flights, or

on key posts in airship construction.

 

The experience accumulated by the blimp pilots under varying weather

conditions over the country proved useful to the Navy, particularly in

the expeditionary operations which coastal patrol would demand. It was

useful as well in helping train navy aviation cadets for the growing

airship fleet. Five of the pilots, Sewell, Boettner, Rieker, Stacy and

Smith had reached the rank of lieutenant commander by the end of 1942,

and Lange, full commander, had become commanding officer of a new Navy

station on the west coast. Two of the public relations men, Lieutenants

Petrie and Schetter, old airship troupers, followed the fliers into

uniform.

 

The airship service suffered its first casualty in 1942 when Lt.

Trotter, gallant and resourceful pilot of balloons and ships, was killed

in a collision, in which Lt. Comdr. Rounds also lost his life.

 

The Goodyear fleet passed out of existence with the war. The ships being

the same size as the Navy training ships, it was a simple matter to

change them over, paint the new name on their broad sides.

 

Facilities for ship construction became useful also in the new war. An

airship hangar is unlike any other structure in the world. It must be

broad and high and free of supporting girders. There were two large

airship docks at Akron, half a dozen smaller ones over the country. At

hand, too, was equipment for helium purification and storage, along with

radio and weather gear, mobile mooring masts and other specialized

equipment which only lighter-than-air uses. There was the balloon room,

too, with a wealth of experience dating back to the first World War, and

which with new jobs like building barrage balloons, rubber rafts and

assault boats grew to large dimension.

 

Wingfoot Lake was more than doubled in size, and the large airship dock,

occupied at first by heavier-than-air production, had to be changed back

later for airship assembly, to meet the Navy’s mounting demands for

ships. The bases at Washington and Los Angeles were converted to other

aeronautic uses; the two-ship dock at Chicago and the one at New York

were torn down and moved to Akron to provide additional space for ship

assembly.

 

And so the fact that the company had maintained an airship fleet for a

number of years had the result that in emergency when the Navy needed

ships and men to fly them, Goodyear was ready. All of which was not

foreseen when Mrs. Litchfield pulled a cord to release a flock of

pigeons and christen the pioneer ship Pilgrim, at a pasture-airport

outside Akron in 1925.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IX

Vulnerability of Airships

 

 

[Illustration: Airship and escort warship]

 

Mention airships and most people will immediately raise the question of

vulnerability.

 

Large, slow moving, a tempting target, airships could be shot out of the

sky by ship or shore guns, or by hostile airplane fire, it is argued,

almost as easily as a dinner guest touching his cigaret to a toy

balloon.

 

And this is probably true, with reservations, if enemy ships or

anti-aircraft batteries or planes were around. But the airship,

non-rigid, has no more business in such areas than a British airplane

carrier would have to drop anchor in Hamburg harbor.

 

It was because of the imminence of attack from sea or shore or air that

neither England nor Germany used airships in the present war,

particularly since they would have to use the inflammable hydrogen gas.

It was because such attack on American airships from any of these three

sources was much less likely—and that we have helium gas, which does not

burn—that this country is using them.

 

Their chief field of operations is not off the enemy’s coasts but our

own, along that broad ribbon of waters used by our coastwise shipping,

an area roughly marked in the Atlantic by the 100 fathom curve, the

favorite fishing grounds of enemy submarines. Thousands of miles of blue

water, not the narrow lanes of the North Sea or British Channel are

between them and the shore guns of an enemy.

 

An enemy fleet, though likelihood of this seems remote, might penetrate

those coast waters in attempted invasion, attack the blimps with

anti-aircraft fire. But such an enemy, arriving in force, would have

either to knock out our Atlantic fleet, or slip past it in surprise

attempt. In the remote later contingency, the information relayed back

by airship radio that the enemy was moving in would be worth losing

airships or any other craft, to get.

 

The third hypothesis, attack by airplane, is also conceivable. But if

long-ranging enemy planes were able to get that close to our shores

they’d have more important business in hand than wasting time and powder

on a helium bubble bobbing in the air, 10,000 feet below—which in any

event would already have radioed the news ashore.

 

In the fairly remote contingency that the airplane did choose to attack