Death of a Dirigible (February 1959 | Volume: 10, Issue: 2)

Death of a Dirigible

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Authors: John Toland

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February 1959 | Volume 10, Issue 2

Over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the sky was unsettled on the afternoon of September 2, 1925. At times it was almost clear; then ominous clouds would scud across the field of the Naval Air Station and disappear as quickly as they had come. The airship Shenandoah , nose to her high mooring mast, was floating gracefully with the variable breezes. Her twenty gas bags were about 91 per cent full, her tanks loaded with 9,075 pounds of water and 16,620 pounds of gasoline. Sailors were riding up the elevator to the top of the mast. The 682-foot ship—her Indian name meant “Daughter of the Stars”—was almost ready for her fifty-eighth flight, a tour of Midwest state fairs. Everybody wanted to see the flying battleship.

Commander Zachary Lansdowne, the Shenandoah ’s skipper, had not liked the original orders for this trip. A native of Greenville, Ohio, he was familiar with the line squalls that swept over that part of the country during the summer, and he had officially requested that the tour be postponed. The Navy had put it off until early September, but rejected any further delay. It would disappoint too many thousands. And besides, the Shenandoah had already flown 25,000 miles in all kinds of weather.

Now almost the entire crew of 41 officers and men, together with two observers, had gone aboard. Not far from the base of the mast, Lansdowne was talking quietly with his wife. An Annapolis graduate with considerable lighter-than-air experience before taking command of the Shenandoah , Lansdowne was a tall, rangy, rawboned man who had a reputation as a strict disciplinarian aloft, but also as an understanding and affable officer who lent a sympathetic ear to the personal problems of his crew. Now he said good-by to his wile and walked toward the mast.

At 2:52 P.M. the nose cone of the ship slid gently from the socket of the mast. The dirigible lifted slowly. Water ballast streamed first from amidships, then from the tail—2,225 pounds of it in all. The Shenandoah swung around the mast and a few minutes later headed west into the uncertain sky.

Margaret Lansdowne turned her back as the dirigible sailed out over the pine woods. So did the other wives who had come to the field. It was considered bad luck to watch your husband’s ship fade out of sight.

The graceful Shenandoah was the first rigid dirigible made in America. Started in 1920 at the naval aircraft factory in Philadelphia, its construction had been held up many months by the failure of Congress to pass appropriations. The design of the Shenandoah was almost identical with that of the captured wartime German Zeppelin, the L-49 , but American navy engineers had made one great step forward. From a natural gas found in exploitable form and quantity only