CHAPTER VIII

Results of Fleet Operations

Goodyear airships made some contribution during the 16 years of fleet operations, to flight and ground handling technique. They also contributed to men’s knowledge about weather. For wherever it is flying, an airship, by the very nature of the craft, is continually registering the effects at that point of certain components of weather. And the ships covered a considerable part of the country fairly thoroughly.

The nature and movements of air currents can be studied only incompletely from the ground, for conditions there are merely the result of forces aloft. Only two vehicles leave the ground and use the air as highways. Of these the airship is vastly more responsive to changes in temperatures and barometric pressure than the airplane, because of the lifting gas in its envelope, and somewhat more responsive to changes in wind directions and velocities, because of its greater displacement of air.

Goodyear airships have traveled widely, have seen at first-hand the effects of rain and snow, fog and sleet, wind and whirlwind, thunderhead and lightning storm. More important they have been spectators at the unseen battle waged endlessly between cold fronts and warm ones across the great central plains, continued with renewed vindictiveness through mountain ranges and valleys.

The information brought by these voyagers has not been without value to the men in the airport control towers, who are studying weather phenomena in the effort to make flying safe.

A whole new science of weather interpretation has come in with air transport, and the U. S. Weather Bureau has other duties than advising farmers about planting and harvesting crops. It may be merely coincidence that when a new chief had to be selected for the Weather Bureau a few years ago an airship pilot was selected—Commander F. W. Reichelderfer of the Navy, who had long studied the movement of air masses and their effect on flight.

Army and Navy ships put in more actual flying days per month than Goodyear ships, when on coastal patrol, because once out at sea the service ships were out for all day—and an airship, by picking its time, and using its mast, can always get out and get back.

Goodyear pilots had a different sort of job. They were operating over land, flying 100 passengers a day, at 10 to 15 minute intervals, in one town after another. They might suspend operations when ceilings were low, or winds high, or gusty, not because they couldn’t fly under those circumstances, but because flights would be less agreeable, and might be hazardous for their passengers. However, the ships themselves, having no shelter at hand, had to stay out and take it. Their job was to interest the people of America in lighter-than-air, and they had to go wherever people were, regardless of what flying weather might intervene.

So between Navy, Army and Goodyear airships operating over a period of years, it was fairly well demonstrated that there is very little unflyable weather for lighter-than-air craft. That is a conclusion of no small importance.

Winds of gale force may make it prudent for the airship to stay in the hangar or on the mast, and conditions of zero ceiling, zero visibility, which ground other aircraft, would make operations hazardous, especially over mountainous country, but even the most adverse weather conditions would hardly keep the airship at home if an enemy was at large. Any time submarines are operating the airship can be available to seek them out.

Another result emerging from the fact of fleet operations was that flying men and construction men, working together, became a closely knit group. Engineers learned to fly ships, and flyers took their turn in the shops. In building airships for the Navy, at the speed demanded by war conditions, the control cars were built in the shop and the envelopes cut out and fitted and cemented together in the balloon room. But operating men, flyers and ground crew men, mechanics and riggers and maintenance men took over from there, put the ships together—assembled them, tested them out, delivered them to the Navy.

It was this co-ordination between men in green eye shades, working over the drafting board and wind-tanned pilots, studying gray skies and phosphorescent control boards, which enabled the organization to meet the war emergency of large scale production of non-rigid airships.

There was another by-product result arising from the fact that the company, even in the doldrum days, when there were few orders for ships, had kept its engineers at work on research and its ships flying on experimental missions. It all happened suddenly, a colorful circumstance not often found in the sober humdrum of the business world.

A great plane manufacturer, having more defense work than its crowded shops could handle, looked around for some company with experience in the fabrication of light metal, to whom it could farm out some of the details.

Goodyear Aircraft Corporation, the aeronautic subsidiary, was asked to build tail surfaces for Martin bombers. A curious thing happened. Men whose work had been primarily with airships, rather than airplanes (omitting the quite different field of airplane tires, wheels, and brakes) found themselves on familiar ground when they swung over to heavier-than-air construction.

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.