One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power

by Smith, Douglas V.

  The U.S. Navy’s first blimp was the DN-1, delivered to Pensacola, Florida, in the spring of 1917. It was followed by sixteen B-type non-rigid airships, which were little more than an airplane fuselage suspended under an 84,000-cubic-foot helium-filled envelope. The mission was to patrol the East Coast of the United States in search of German submarines. Refinement in airframes and engines continued over the ensuing decades, and Navy blimps grew in size and complexity, ultimately serving with great success during World War II, and into the Cold War.

  But the real technological leap forward came with the design and construction of rigid airships, such as the German Zeppelins that had proved formidable scouts and bombers in World War I.

  RIGID AIRSHIPS

  The 1920 naval appropriations bill authorized the expenditure of $4 million to obtain two rigid airships. The visionary often called the “architect of Naval Aviation,” Admiral William A. Moffett, wrote to the Chief of Naval Operations shortly after becoming head of the Bureau of Aeronautics: “In the rigid airship we have a scout, capable of patrolling the Pacific in the service of information for our fleet. . . . The use and development of rigid airships is a naval necessity.”4

  The first American-built ship would be designated ZR-1 and construction began in a newly erected hangar in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in April 1922. Anxious to get into the air as soon as possible with a blue-and-gold behemoth, the U.S. Navy simultaneously sought to purchase a flight-ready rigid airship from the British builder Short Brothers. Upon the planned transfer to the United States, the British R-38 airship would have been re-designated as ZR-2, but fundamental design flaws led to catastrophic failure of the ship over the city of Hull, England, in 1921, and the death of forty-four crewmen, including sixteen Americans who were aboard preparing to accept the ship.

  Attention then turned to the construction of the huge rigid-framed ZR-1, the USS Shenandoah, which was closely modeled after a German Zeppelin that crashed in England during World War I. First flown in September 1923, the ZR-1 measured 680 feet in length and 79 feet in diameter. She was lifted by 2,100,000 cubic feet of helium, had a top speed of sixty knots and a crew of forty-three. It truly was a ship in the sky, which Navy leaders envisioned as the ideal long-range ocean reconnaissance platform, with extraordinary lift, range, and endurance. It proved to be an inferior design, however, and after two years of flight-testing (and public relations flights) it encountered a massive thunderstorm near Ava, Ohio. It broke up in flight and crashed in September 1925 with the loss of fourteen lives. Shaken by the two losses, the Navy designers redoubled their efforts.

  Over the course of the decade that followed, millions of dollars and scores of lives would be consumed in the quest to develop the technology and operational doctrine necessary to achieve the ambitious potential promised by rigid airships. The designers sought to arrive at an elusive formula: a ship large enough to carry the aircrew, food, fuel, and equipment to do the job, yet light enough to be lifted aloft by its helium-filled gas bags. The spiderweb of duralumin girders that formed the hull had to be light enough to fly, yet strong enough to handle the incredible aerodynamic loads and stresses experienced by what was fundamentally a fragile 700-foot-long cylinder suspended in mid-air. Looking back across nine decades of history, it can be argued that it was simply beyond the capabilities of the engineers of the early twentieth century to divine a workable formula. But the potential benefits of LTA flight were so great that courageous pioneers continued to risk reputations, careers, and even lives in their pursuit. Their quest culminated in two of the most remarkable flying machines ever to take to the sky under the command of Navy aviators.

  FLEET SCOUTS AND FLYING AIRCRAFT CARRIERS

  In the 1920s, American statesmen and military experts viewed the growing power of the Empire of Japan with concern, and recognized that the small and ill-equipped U.S. fleet was wholly inadequate to patrol the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean. In 1919, Captain (later Fleet Admiral) Ernest J. King reported to the Navy’s General Board: “I don’t see how the long distance reconnaissance is going to be carried out without using dirigibles.”5 After World War I, U.S. Naval Forces-Europe Commander Admiral William S. Sims stated: “I am thoroughly convinced by my observance of the naval lessons of this war that in the future rigid airships will be part of the fleet of every first-rate naval power.”6 The Navy had learned in the most painful way possible that neither the captured German design of ZR-1 nor the British design of ZR-2 resulted in a successful naval rigid airship. (In 1924 the Navy received a German-built Zeppelin airship, designated ZR-3 and named the USS Los Angeles, as a war reparations payment, but by treaty agreement it was to be used solely for “civil purposes.” It was a variant of a commercial Zeppelin design that had little application for the intended long-range scouting mission). In 1928 the Navy called for proposals to build a rigid-frame fleet reconnaissance airship, capable of launching and recovering fixed-wing scouting aircraft while in flight. Three companies submitted proposals, and the contract to build two airships (ZRS-4 and -5) was awarded in October 1928 to the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation, a partnership created in 1924 to share rigid airship technology. Executing the contract was another matter.

  The construction of the ZRS-4, the Akron, stands as one of the most remarkable performances in the history of American industry. In the two years, eleven months and 2 days between the moment the ink dried on the airship contracts in Washington and when the Akron was cast off from her mooring mast at Akron, Ohio, not only did a hangar to house the erection work have to be built, but a corps of technicians and production personnel had to be developed around a cadre of German engineers; hundreds of workers had to be trained to an art almost unknown in America; and thousands of drawings had to be translated into patterns and jigs for what was to be the largest airship in the world. In order to build these two airships Goodyear was obliged, in one leap, to create an industrial plant of a magnitude which the airplane industry required almost a quarter century to develop.7

  The statistics of the Akron and her sister ship Macon were remarkable:

  Total Gas Volume

  6,850,000 cubic feet

  Length

  785 feet

  Diameter

  133 feet

  Fuel capacity

  126,000 pounds

  Envelope covering

  33,000 square yards

  Total horsepower (8 engines)

  4,480 horsepower

  Maximum speed

  75 knots

  Range at cruise speed

  7,268 nautical miles

  Flight crew

  60 officers and men

  HTA aircraft

  4 Curtiss F9C biplanes

  Source: Richard K. Smith, Airships Akron and Macon (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1965).

  On 8 August 1931, First Lady Lou Hoover christened the USS Akron, named for the city in which it was built, then considered the “LTA Capital of the World.” The Navy now had the prototype of the fleet airship it wanted, but rather than being subjected to the type of slow and deliberate flight-testing one would expect for a totally new aircraft design, Akron was pushed to demonstrate her value to skeptical observers both inside the Navy and in the media. In fleet exercises, during a transcontinental flight to San Diego and Sunnyvale, California, and through numerous operations where her scouting aircraft were launched and recovered, the Akron demonstrated that she had the potential to provide the fleet with unprecedented intelligence-gathering capability.

  The U.S. Navy’s largest non-rigid airships, the ZPG-3W class, flew until 1962.

  But, as noted LTA historian Richard K. Smith has written “The Akron had been pushed unreasonably hard, with unrealistic expectations, and her inability to score a smash hit which corresponded to the airship propaganda of 1926–1931 made her performance appear as something of a failure.”8 In the fall and winter of 1932 she flew practice missions in which the Sparrowhawk airplanes left the hangar in the belly of the airship using a unique trapez
e system to launch and recover while the airship maintained a steady course. The envisioned concept of operations was for the airship to drop two scout planes from the trapeze, and then proceed at sixty knots for up to twelve hours of daylight, recovering the airplanes 720 miles from the drop-off point. The LTA/HTA team could theoretically sweep a path 200 miles wide, covering over 140,000 square miles of ocean. The HTA detachments on both Akron and Macon became very proficient on the trapeze, so much so that landing gear was removed on some planes, to be replaced with supplemental gas tanks under the fuselage. The concept of the “flying aircraft carrier” was hampered by poor radio communications and direction-finding equipment on the aircraft, but the “wing-hookers” performed with great dexterity, much like their “tail-hooking” colleagues on traditional aircraft carriers. The Akron’s continued development of these concepts was abruptly halted on 3 April 1933 when the ship encountered one of the most violent storm fronts to hit the east coast of the United States in a decade. The ship was forced into the sea, with the loss of seventy-three of the seventy-six crewmen aboard. Included in the death toll was Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, Chief of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, who had been a strong supporter of airships. The crash shocked the nation and rocked the Navy, particularly the crew of USS Macon, the sister ship that had been commissioned only weeks earlier on 11 March 1933. The fate of the Navy’s rigid airship program now rested entirely on the untested Macon.

  The Macon proved to be a strong and capable ship, and her move to her new base in Sunnyvale, California (rapidly named Moffett Field in honor of the deceased Admiral), enabled her to work directly with the ships of the Pacific Fleet. Macon’s performance proved that large rigid airships could perform many of the missions expected of them, but on 12 February 1935, an unexpectedly strong gust of wind caused a failure in the rear upper fin area. As the stern dropped, ballast was released causing the ship to rise well above its maximum pressure height to over 4,800 feet. Automatic pressure relief valves opened to prevent the gas cells from exploding, and the large quantity of gas vented off made the ship too heavy to remain in the air. It touched down relatively gently on the ocean surface and eighty-one of the eighty-three crewmembers survived as the ship was abandoned. The days of Navy rigid airships immediately came to a close. Three of the U.S.-built rigids had crashed, and the Navy walked away from the huge potential these ships held. Decades later, literally thousands of aircraft would be lost to accidents as the Navy transitioned from propeller aircraft to jet-propelled planes, yet development continued because of the great potential seen in the new technology. Perhaps the decision to end experimentation with rigid airships after three crashes was an ill-advised rush to judgment. Some historians have speculated that the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor could have been detected had a “flying aircraft carrier” and her scouting planes been on station.

  ZPG-2s in hangar.

  BLIMPS . . . “THEY WERE DEPENDABLE”

  while the Navy abandoned rigid airships in 1935 after the loss of Macon, it continued to operate small blimps into the 1940s. The smaller and less expensive blimps were seen as good observation platforms for coastal defense and as a potential partial answer to the threat of enemy submarines. As war clouds gathered in the Atlantic and Pacific, the nation prepared by ordering the procurement of forty-eight non-rigid blimps as part of the “10,000 Plane Program” passed by Congress in June 1940. Growth would continue as America entered the war, and by 1945, 168 blimps would be in service, 134 being the modern K-class airships, which were 240 feet in length, with an envelope carrying 425,000 cubic feet of helium and a crew of 10. Over the course of the war, they would log 55,900 operational flights and accumulate 550,000 hours in the air. Blimps escorted 89,000 ships, and no ship under blimp coverage was sunk during the war. They maintained an 87 percent readiness rating, and flew when bad weather grounded HTA aircraft. They conducted rescues of pilots down at sea, searched for mines, helped route convoys, and delivered packages and personnel onto the decks of ships at sea. Nearly 12,000 officers and men crewed the airships and support stations, which ranged along both coasts in the United States, into South America, and even to French Morocco. The airships of Squadron 14 made the first transoceanic flight from the United States to Morocco in 1944. One measure of the airship’s impact can be found in the words of Nazi Grand Admiral Karl Donitz who wrote after the war that “the American blimps were very disturbing to German U-boat activity.”9

  THE LAST HURRAH

  Just as with every other type of aircraft, huge numbers of airships were decommissioned at war’s end, with one company buying twenty-nine airships as flying billboards. Navy interest continued at a slow but steady pace, and in 1954 a ZPG-2–class airship set a world record for unrefueled flight by logging two hundred hours (eight days) in the air. The last airship design to actually be produced and serve with the fleet was the ZPG-3W Airborne Early Warning blimp. It remains as the largest non-rigid to ever fly, measuring 403 feet long, with an envelope containing 1.5 million cubic feet of helium. It flew from 1958 until August 1962 when the Navy terminated all airship operations, primarily as a budget-cutting measure. Thus ended four decades of Navy LTA flight, filled with triumphs and tragedies. The airships are gone, but their accomplishments should not be forgotten.

  POST SCRIPT

  Navy aviators have soared into the air to defend the nation for a century. For nearly 40 percent of that time, a small but determined branch of intrepid airmen labored with distinction in an effort to master the technology of buoyant flight. Their aircraft harnessed the lifting power of lighter-than-air gases that enabled them to sail the skies for periods measured in days, not hours. They flew in peace and in war, and hundreds of aviators gave the full measure of devotion at the hands of enemy fire and of hostile winds. In the course of building and flying airships, pioneering work was done in aeronautical engineering, meteorology, metallurgy, electronics, and command and control. Airships contributed to victory in World War II through convoy protection, search and rescue, and anti-submarine and anti-mine warfare. They also contributed to the security of the nation during the Cold War, as they patrolled the coast to detect potential submarines, enemy bombers, and missiles. It is indeed appropriate to recall and respect the accomplishments of the Navy aviators who flew low, and slow, but with dedication and distinction!

  NOTES

  1.Robert Jackson, Airship (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), p. 61.

  2.Ibid., p. 64.

  3.Rick Archbold, Hindenburg: An Illustrated History (Toronto, Canada: Madison Press Books, 1994), p. 35.

  4.William F. Trimble, Admiral William A. Moffett (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), p. 125.

  5.Richard K. Smith, The Airships Akron and Macon (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1965), p. xxi.

  6.Ibid.

  7.Ibid., p. 31.

  8.Ibid., p. 62.

  9.J. Gordon Vaeth, Blimps and U-Boats (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1992), p. 172.

  CHAPTER 5

  Big Guns versus Wooden Decks: Naval Aviation Officer Personnel, 1911–1941

  Donald Chisholm

  Cold steel is not worth a damn in an emergency. You need men to direct it.

  —FRED BRITTEN, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, 15 May 1934

  You were selected because you were not regarded as a crank, but as a well-balanced man who should be able to assist in building up a system of aviation training in the Navy. I’ve no doubt you see the importance of avoiding the hippodrome part of the business and will not do stunts just for the sake of notoriety or to thrill the crowd.

  —CAPTAIN WASHINGTON I. CHAMBERS to Lieutenant Theodore Gordon “Spuds” Ellyson on his orders to work with Glenn Curtiss, January 19111

  Aviation came to the U.S. Navy at a little more than one hundred years into the latter’s existence. At its nascence, it was obvious to no one how naval aviation would turn out. How quickly and in what directions would its technology develop? What specific
forms would it take? How potent would be its capabilities? To what purposes would it be put? What doctrine would be devised to orchestrate its employment? What would be its relationship to the Navy’s existing ways and means of executing its traditional missions and roles? No matter the specific answers to these questions, aviation, like all such profound innovations, also substantially disrupted the equilibrium of the organization into which it was introduced and its preferred ways of doing business.2

  Now, at its one-hundredth anniversary, we have a pretty fair idea of how Navy aviation turned out.

  Although now many years distant, Navy aviation’s three first decades made up the critical period for setting the foundation and parameters for its future development and created the possibility of its present status. The answers to the questions posed above were limned out: carrier-borne fixed-wing aircraft would become aviation’s central focus, while long-range patrol aviation would play a supporting role; battleship and cruiser scout aircraft would first be relegated to secondary status and then disappear entirely (with some of their functions taken up by helicopters), as would dirigible lighter-than-air craft. Carrier aviation would supplant the surface capital ship as the Navy’s principal offensive weapon for fleet actions and land attack, with spectacular effectiveness in the World War II Pacific Theater, thereafter rendering the United States the world’s dominant maritime power and, in turn, making possible the free use by all nations of the earth’s ocean commons.