American Hindenburg

In the early days of flight, airships were hailed as the future of war. Then disaster struck the USS Akron.

_{By Robert Weintraub}

One

It would be the greatest day in the history of Akron, Ohio. Forget the opening of the Ohio and Erie Canal, which allowed the budding metropolis to become an industrial center. No, the Rubber City—so-called because of the factories established there by Goodrich, Firestone, General Tire, and Goodyear—had never seen anything like this. Akron means “high” in Greek, and now, fittingly, the future was up in the sky.

Before the sun rose on August 8, 1931, people poured into the streets. Lloyd Weil, Akron’s mayor, had declared a holiday, freeing from their desks and assembly lines those workers lucky enough to have jobs during the depths of the Great Depression. Cars converged from all directions, carrying people from Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Erie, Toledo, and farther afield. Many navigated epic traffic jams en route to their destination: the Goodyear-Zeppelin Airdock, where the day’s action would take place.

In all, some 250,000 people came to witness the official launch of the new U.S. Navy airship. It would be called the USS Akron, after the city where it was engineered and built over a span of nearly three years. Dubbed by the press “the Queen of the Skies,” it was the culmination of America’s effort to conquer the heavens using dirigibles—vessels steered through the atmosphere buoyed by gas that was lighter than air. Aviation leaders and enthusiasts were eager to see the new ship take flight; Amelia Earhart was among the luminaries who came to Akron for the launch.

The city had the air of a carnival. Goodyear offered an aerial view of the festivities in a small blimp, a technological predecessor of the mighty airship, for a dollar a ride. A music teacher for the city’s schools had written a song for the occasion, and now glee clubs stood ready to belt out “Ode to Akron”:

Akron, beautiful airship,
Speed on your way;
Akron, beautiful airship,
Greet lands far away;
May you carry the message,
“Brotherhood of Man”;
Akron, beautiful airship,
As the world you span.

Thousands of people queued up in the bright sunshine to enter the egg-shaped hangar where the airship was moored. The building was so enormous it contained its own climate—rain occasionally fell inside. As the crowds streamed in, listening to no less than five brass bands blaring away, spectators blinked to adjust their eyes. Before them sat a behemoth.

Locals had seen Goodyear crafts drifting overhead before—the company had manufactured balloons since 1912, and its now famous blimps since 1925—but the Akron was an order of magnitude larger. It stood 14 stories high, ran 785 feet long, and weighed 400,000 pounds when fully loaded, dwarfing anything that had ever taken flight. The ship’s cavernous body, formed by a skeleton of curved metal sheathed in lacquered cotton, could have held everyone assembled, though the Akron’s official capacity was 2,200. It required fewer than 100 crew to fly.

As two radio broadcasters, James Wallington of NBC and Ted Husing of CBS, competed for superlatives to describe the ship to rapt audiences around the nation, the guest of honor arrived—the First Lady of the United States, Mrs. Lou Hoover, Herbert’s vivacious wife. She would perform the christening.

Preceding her at the microphone was the man most responsible for the day: Rear Admiral William Moffett, known in military circles as the “air admiral.” He reached out his hand and placed it gently on the Akron’s nose as he spoke. “We do not lead the world in our merchant marine, nor, alas, in our navy,” he said,” but we do, by the construction of this great airship, now take the lead in lighter-than-air in the world.” A roar went up from the crowd.

Moffett then quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—“sail on, not fear to breast the sea!”—before Mrs. Hoover stepped forward. “I christen thee Akron!” she declared. She pulled a red, white, and blue cord, and the front hatch of the airship opened. With a shriek, out flew 48 racing pigeons—the exact number of states in the Union.

As the brass bands struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” crewmen untethered a rope, and without a sound the Akron floated a few feet off the ground. When the crowd noticed that the ship had risen, a deep “oooohhh” rippled through the hangar. After a few minutes, the ship was pulled back to the ground, its brief maiden voyage over. Great success would surely follow—even if believing so meant ignoring tragedies that had gone before.

Two

The lone dirigible that features in popular memory is the Hindenburg, Germany’s commercial airship that exploded in flames on May 6, 1937, over New Jersey, while radio reporter Herbert Morrison famously screeched “Oh, the humanity!” into his WLS-radio microphone. Of the 97 people on board, 35 were killed, along with a member of the ground crew. But before the Hindenburg burned up, America had its own brief, tragic airship age, bankrolled by the Navy as a matter of national security.

Germany had invented the first rigid dirigible, which used hydrogen to fly but got its size and shape from an internal structure, making it less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of aerodynamics. Most of Germany’s dirigibles were called zeppelins, after their inventor, aeronaut Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, and they were used as weapons in World War I to great effect. The airships terror-bombed England and scouted enemy positions in the trenches of Europe.

Top brass in the U.S. Navy took notice. “The performances of the Zeppelins were so remarkable that it is most necessary for the Navy of the United States to develop dirigibles of this type as soon as possible,” the service branch’s General Board wrote in 1919. The Navy’s urgency stemmed from concern about a potential war—not with Germany but with Japan. If conflict erupted with the Land of the Rising Sun, as many military planners believed that it would, the Pacific Ocean would become a vast, watery battlefield, and aerial reconnaissance to stave off attacks against U.S. assets would be critical. Airplanes were a relatively new technology; they were slow and unreliable, and had limited range. But the war had shown that airships could cover far more territory than any other available technology—British admiral Sir John Jellicoe believed that an airship could do the scouting work of two cruisers.

Admiral Moffett was the driving force behind the U.S. airship program. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, he was the son of a Confederate soldier who had enlisted as a private and was promoted so often for his battlefield bravery that he’d ended up an adjutant general. Growing up in a harbor city, Moffett turned seaward for his martial career, joining the Navy at the age of 20, in 1890. For his valor during the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration.

Once Moffett was promoted to admiral, he also became the first chief of the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics—the head of aviation for the U.S. Navy. He had no actual flying experience; few people did at the time. But he’d become enraptured by flight, and particularly by airships, after studying the impact of the German zeppelins during the war. He believed that the Navy’s success as a fighting force depended on aerial dominance. “Naval aviation must go to sea on the back of the fleet,” he wrote in 1925. “The fleet and naval aviation are one and inseparable.” By the early 1930s, Moffett felt that the rigid airship was the future, and its primary role would be scouting—particularly if the crafts could be used to carry and launch airplanes, effectively turning them into skyborne aircraft carriers, with an extraordinary range for reconnaissance.

Not everyone in the military agreed. Some thought that planes held more promise than the bulky airships. Others believed that the dirigible was a foolish idea altogether. “The airship has some valuable characteristics, but due to great vulnerability is of doubtful value in war,” a Naval board observed in 1925. Of the first four airships the Navy possessed, two had already crashed. One cracked apart at high speed during a trial flight in northeast England, where it was built; its hydrogen ignited and it plummeted into the Humber River, killing 44 of the 49 crew aboard. Another—the Roma, purchased from Italy—flew into power lines in Norfolk, Virginia. It exploded, killing 34 men.

The Navy’s response was to use less volatile helium to fill its crafts. Though the gas was rarer and more expensive than hydrogen, it would float the two remaining airships the U.S. possessed, including the first American-built dirigible, the Shenandoah (a Native American word sometimes translated as “daughter of the stars”). The ship was christened in October 1923 and soon became a wondrous sight in American skies as it traversed the country from sea to sea. Local chambers of commerce begged the Navy for flyovers. Hundreds of babies were named Shenandoah in tribute. A stripper in Boston reportedly worked a model of the dirigible into her burlesque act.

Then, on September 3, 1925, the Shenandoah came apart in a thunderstorm over rural Ohio—about 100 miles south of Akron, as it happened. Fourteen people were killed, and 29 survived by incredible means, including some who rode parts of the wrecked airship to the ground. One crew member straddled a section of a catwalk and held on for dear life. The disaster was the biggest story in the country for weeks, and the crash site, which spanned several acres, was picked clean by souvenir seekers.

Three of the four airships in the U.S. fleet had now been destroyed in midair; only the USS Los Angeles remained, and the chorus of voices opposing Moffett’s dream grew louder. “Congress clamored to close the Lakehurst Air station”—the Navy’s main airship base, located in New Jersey—“and terminate airship experimentation,” reads the official naval history of the airships.

Perhaps the most vociferous criticism came from Army brigadier general Billy Mitchell, who had loudly advocated for air power as the future of armed conflict. He accused the Navy and War Departments of “incompetence and criminal negligence” for the wreck of the airship and the crash of three Navy seaplanes around the same time. In a statement to the press, he said, “Brave airmen are being sent to their deaths by armchair admirals who don’t care about air safety.”

Moffet was forced to defend the program in congressional hearings and naval inquiries. “We will not lose faith. We shall build and operate as many of these rigid airships as possible, so that those men will not have lost their lives in vain,” he proclaimed to the press.

Moffett’s position came out on top; the military was not ready to give up what it saw as a distinct tactical advantage. For Mitchell’s criticism of the Navy, he was court-martialed and convicted; in response he resigned his commission. Moffett, meanwhile, managed not only to keep the program alive, but also to secure funds to build a pair of airships that were even bigger than their predecessors.

Dirigibles promised the Navy omniscience, dispelling the fog of war with blasts of helium fuel.

The first of the massive new airships would be the Akron, and it would be built by Goodyear. In 1923, the company had formed a partnership with Germany’s zeppelin industry, which relocated to America after World War I. Goodyear was eager to refine the technology for commercial air transport, and was one of the few companies able to take on such a colossal project: building the enormous hangar, recruiting and training hundreds of personnel, and hiring a multitude of engineers. “Goodyear was obliged, in one leap, to create an industrial plant of a magnitude which the airplane industry required almost a quarter of a century to develop,” wrote Richard Smith in his book The Airships Akron and Macon, published in 1965 by the Naval Institute Press. It took less than three years to accomplish—an extraordinary feat by the nascent military-industrial complex.

The new ship was more than 100 feet longer than the Shenandoah and much stronger: Its armored rib cage had three keels (previous dirigibles had only one) and a series of reinforced rings engineered from a new metal alloy called duralumin. The Akron’s eight Maybach engines were capable of accelerating to nearly 80 miles per hour, faster than any ship in the interwar years. Each motor attached to a massive, tilting propeller, providing horizontal and vertical thrust on command. For defense, the Akron was mounted with seven machine guns.

Most impressive of all, the vessel was designed to carry a flotilla of Sparrowhawk scout planes; a trapeze system would lower the planes from the ship’s belly and pull them in upon their return. This feature made the Akron the first flying aircraft carrier in history, and was intended to vastly increase its search area during reconnaissance. It would have required four cruisers—among the fastest oceangoing ships in the Navy’s fleet—to patrol the same square mileage that the Akron could, at least in theory, cover in a single flight. The notion of building a whole fleet of dirigibles using the Akron as a prototype, then sending the ships’ scout planes sweeping over the Pacific to report signs of enemy maneuvers, made the prospect of war with Japan less fearsome. Dirigibles promised the Navy omniscience, dispelling the fog of war with blasts of helium fuel.

Remarkably, a half dozen survivors of the Shenandoah crash signed up for duty on the Akron. Lieutenant Commander Charles Rosendahl, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery aboard the doomed dirigible, was named first commander. Lieutenant Commander Herbert Wiley would be Rosendahl’s executive officer. He’d served on the Shenandoah’s ground crew and was a veteran of the Los Angeles, the only airship in the U.S. fleet that had not crashed.

But if the Akron was a ship of dreams and redemption, it was also troubled from the start. The International Association of Machinists claimed that whistleblowers at Goodyear felt the ship was unsafe. One said he had “fear in his mind that the construction of the Akron was simply the building up of another situation that would end as the Shenandoah had.” Others claimed that the ship was overweight, though Moffett held that it would not affect the ship’s performance.

A few months after its first flight in the city of its birth, the Akron was torn from a mast connecting it to a support ship during operations. Weeks later, several congressmen visited the Navy’s Lakehurst airship base for a promotional flight. As they waited to board, a gust of wind lifted the airship and then slammed it down hard. The politicians were aghast. “I cannot conceive how anybody can make a statement just now that the ship will ever be the same after that jar,” said Patrick Boland, a U.S. representative from Pennsylvania. “When I see girders that snap off like pretzels … I know something is wrong.”

The public couldn’t help but pay attention. “The wind damaged the tail of the world’s biggest airship,” wrote The New Yorker, “making it, for the moment, wholly, instead of nearly, useless.”

The mishap prompted another congressional inquiry, during which Moffett argued that the Akron was the “safest dirigible ever built anywhere” and “something we could all be proud of.” Ultimately, Congress agreed. The Akron was deemed sound, and funding for a second ship, then under construction at the Goodyear hangar, continued. Too much money had already been spent, and it was natural for hardware still being tested to suffer setbacks. What’s more, the Los Angeles had just been retired after several years of service without incident, while the German commercial airship Graf Zeppelin had racked up more than a million miles of flying time around the world. The Akron’s mishaps seemed a matter of bad luck, nothing more.

The Akron may have been off to a stuttering start as a military asset, but to the public it remained a rare glimmer of hope in 1932—a symbol of what the country and its workers were capable of creating, even as the national economy cratered. The Akron was due to participate in a war games exercise in the Pacific, so the Navy planned a nonstop cross-country trip, a days-long journey to the West Coast that would allow hundreds of thousands of Americans to gaze up at the airborne leviathan.

The Akron left Lakehurst in May 1932 bound for Sunnyvale, in Northern California. Its trajectory took it down the Eastern seaboard, then across the South and into the Southwest, delighting onlookers along the way. But the journey was not without incident. There were mechanical issues, a fuel-tank explosion, and, in Arizona, massive sandstorms. Paramount News positioned cameramen along the flight path and told them to be ready to film a crash.

After 78 difficult hours in the air, the Akron was low on fuel and made a pit stop at Camp Kearny in San Diego on May 11. The crew was exhausted and relieved, but the hardships would continue. The Lakehurst base had trained personnel who knew how to launch and recover airships—a complicated choreography of ropes and cables. Kearny, meanwhile, was staffed with new recruits: 200 eager but inexperienced men.

At 10:25 a.m., the Akron nosed through the Pacific fog at 1,200 feet. Thousands of onlookers, including the mayor of San Diego and numerous top military brass, were waiting at Kearny, along with a cameraman who framed the dirigible as it dropped its mooring lines. The ground crew was supposed to attach a heavy cable to a mast to hold the ship in place—there was no hangar at the base large enough for the ship. Other ropes would be secured to “spiders,” or fixed ground lines. But the crewmen were too busy gaping at the Akron to get to work.

The crew shouted down, imploring them to seize the mooring lines, but the recruits remained immobile. Rosendahl was forced to abort the landing. He then had to make a long, slow second approach to the base.

The Akron’s bow wasn’t tied to the mooring tower until 11:30 a.m., and the delay proved critical. Before the stern could be attached, the sun, now higher in the sky, heated the airship’s helium, rendering it extremely light. Suddenly, the Akron’s tail began to rise. Then several ballast bags broke free, dropping five tons of water from the ship. The stern rose quickly. If the crew didn’t act, the ship would soon be standing on its nose, putting all the men and matériel inside at grave risk. “Cut the mooring cable,” Rosendahl ordered. “Let everything go!”

Unfortunately, not everyone on the ground heard the order. As the Akron was freed from the mooring tower, it shot into the sky, trailing a rope that several men still held on to. One let go as soon as he realized what was happening. He fell 15 feet, breaking his arm but likely saving his life. Three other men weren’t so lucky: They were hauled toward the clouds as spectators gasped in horror. Some even fainted from shock. “Hysteria prevailed,” reported the New York Times. “Officers wept.”

As the ship reached 150 feet in the air, one of the unfortunate ground crew clinging to the rope, a sailor named Jack Edfall, lost his grip and fell to his death. At 200 feet, a second man dropped. “Kicking and waving his arms as he fell, Sailor Nigel M. Henton, the training station’s best gymnast, bounced on the hard-packed earth in a little puff of dust,” Time later wrote. “Ambulances which soon came shrieking up were not needed at all.” Henton had died on impact. One of the Akron crew saw it happen from above. “My God,” he said to the man next to him. “That kid smoked when he hit the ground.”

One man remained on the rope. He was a rugged, rawboned 19-year-old apprentice seaman named C. M. Cowart, whom everyone called Bud. A boxer training for the All-Navy Championship in the welterweight division, Cowart used all his strength to hold on.

Rosendahl radioed the base to say he would try to land again, but he soon realized that doing so was more likely to dash Cowart on the ground, killing or seriously injuring him. So Rosendahl headed toward the Pacific, where a drop from low altitude might not be fatal. Video cameras captured dramatic footage of Cowart’s wild ride as the Akron floated west.

Somehow, Cowart seemed to be enjoying himself. He waved at the crewmen above him, then stuffed his white hat inside his coat—he didn’t want to drop it and be responsible for losing government property. “Hey!” he yelled. “When the hell are you going to land me?”

Dick Deal, boatswain’s mate second class, volunteered to be lowered in a bosun chair—a slab of wood attached to a harness that allowed sailors to dangle over the side of a ship, not unlike a window washer. It was a risky procedure; Deal was pioneering a maneuver that would later be used in rescue operations by the Coast Guard, among others. He swung back and forth like a pendulum, far above the Pacific, reaching for the rope holding Cowart. Deal tried and failed and tried again. Finally, after 15 breathless minutes, he grabbed the rope and tied a second line to the one Cowart held. Slowly, the crew hauled the seaman up.

It took over an hour, but at last Cowart was pulled aboard the Akron. “Cowart O.K.” was Rosendahl’s message to the ground. Offered smelling salts, Cowart instead growled, “Gimme something to eat.” Then he asked for a tour of the airship.

Rosendahl came to greet the plucky ground crewman. “Son, what did you think of your ride?” he asked. With a wide grin, Cowart replied, “Captain, that was a lilly dilly!” Later, Cowart told reporters, “I didn’t do anything—I just hung on. Yes, I saw [the other men] fall—it was awful, but I couldn’t do anything.” Rosendahl called Cowart “the coolest cucumber I ever saw.”

Rosendahl blamed the incident on “peculiar atmospheric conditions,” and Cowart’s triumphal ending helped obscure the fact that the Akron’s trip to the Pacific, meant to celebrate the ship, had resulted in two deaths. It was the worst incident yet for the Akron, yet it evaded further scrutiny. The Los Angeles Times summed up the prevailing mood in an editorial: “The ship had a real test and emerged with flying colors.”

The West Coast war games also burnished the Akron’s reputation—the airship located the “enemy” fleet of ships and seaplanes, often while flying undetected, and did so without the benefit of its scout planes, which had been left behind because of issues with the gear used to retrieve them in midair.

That fall, Moffett and his dirigible program were given yet another boost by presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A former assistant secretary of the Navy and a close friend of Moffett’s, Roosevelt was a proponent of airships. After winning the presidency, the Akron even flew over his inauguration festivities, during which he reassured the country that there was nothing to fear but fear itself.

Despite the Akron’s troubled start and the San Diego tragedy, the future seemed bright for America’s airships.

Three

The Akron stood in Lakehurst’s Hangar No. 1, a giant at rest. It was April 3, 1933, and the ship was due to lift off for its 59th flight. The main goal of this mission was to detect radio signals emanating from New England. The area was littered with radio beacons that transmitted information about weather, air traffic, and potential hazards, but they sent signals on a range of bandwidths. Unless a ship or plane—or, in this case, a dirigible—knew the correct frequency, the beacons were useless. The Akron planned to fly for roughly 48 hours off the Atlantic coastline and draw a fix on as many beacons as possible, logging the information for future use.

But the sky was lowering, and the forecast showed wind, fog, and the possibility of a small storm. Lieutenant Commander Wiley, one of the veterans of the Shenandoah and second-in-command of the Akron, consulted the ship’s young aerologist, Lieutenant Herb Wescoat, who stated unequivocally that the weather would not be conducive to radio work for at least another day. Flying was at the captain’s discretion.

Rosendahl had recently taken another command, so the call would be made by a new captain, 42-year-old Commander Frank McCord. He was an experienced mariner but had worked very little on airships. Before he could weigh in on the aerologist’s report, he received a phone call from Washington. The skipper answered, spoke for a moment, then hung up. The admiral was coming.

Moffett was on his way from Washington, D.C., and there would be two other passengers of note as well: Alfred Masury, vice president of the Mack Truck Company, and Lakehurst’s commanding officer, Admiral Fred Berry. Moffett enjoyed flying aboard the Navy’s airships—he once disembarked in midair via one of the Sparrowhawks, returning to his office by plane—and wouldn’t be coming 200 miles just to wave at the Akron and drive back to D.C. McCord likely felt a duty to fly with the admiral on board, whatever the weather conditions.

The Akron’s crew prepared to launch. Among them was Dick Deal, who’d rescued Bud Cowart over the Pacific. A veteran airship man, Deal had been slated to be aboard the Shenandoah for its final flight in 1925, but when a crew member named Ralph Joffray asked to take his place, hoping to ride the ship to visit family in the Midwest, Deal swapped missions. He was horrified when Joffray fell to his death when the airship went down. (Some people called him “Lucky” Deal after that, and he wound up marrying Joffray’s widow, Gertrude.)

Deal caught a ride to the Lakehurst base with Harry Boswell, another of the half dozen survivors of the Shenandoah who worked on the Akron. An elevator officer, Boswell was boyish and lighthearted, but he grimaced as he drove down roads bracketed by scrubby pines and dwarf oaks. He looked up at the sky through his windshield. “I hope they have the good sense to cancel this flight,” he muttered to Deal.

They did not. Around 6:15 p.m., the Akron was nearly ready for liftoff. McCord and Wiley examined a new weather report, which did nothing to change their minds even as fog descended over the base. Out of caution, McCord canceled the planned airplane hook-on exercise, which allowed the Sparrowhawks’ pilots to exit the ship. Just before the hatches were shut, a final crew change was made: Sid Hooper, a mechanic, was told to stand down, as another man needed training hours. Hooper shrugged and handed over the gear needed to endure the Akron’s flights, which were chilly because of the altitude: a heavy, fur-lined gaberdine jacket; a skull-cap flight helmet; and sheepskin-lined boots. Hooper’s replacement, Vic Anderson, quickly slipped on the items and joined 75 other men on the ship. In the fuss, no one remembered to load the boxes of life jackets, which remained on storeroom shelves inside the base.

At 6:25 p.m., the huge hangar doors swung open, allowing fog to curl inside. The damp cold of an early spring permeated the airship. Visibility was limited, so the ship was walked out—pulled by a mobile mooring mast attached by rope, making the Akron rather like an immense dog on a leash.

Everyone aboard was at his post. The control car, which sat at the bottom of the ship, was crowded: There was McCord, with Wiley at his elbow; a half dozen other crewmen; Masury and Berry; and Moffett, who stood behind the navigator, rapt as always during flights aboard the Akron. In a tiny cabin above the control car was the radio operator’s room. The ship’s radio officer, Robert Copeland, squinted out his window through the gloom, looking for his wife, who had accompanied him to the base that evening. Copeland usually forbade her seeing him off. “It makes me nervous,” he told her. But tonight he’d given in to her pleas, then listened as she asked over and over about the dangers of lightning. Copeland laughed and assured her that “the lightning will just pass through our propellers and won’t hurt us.” Now he tried but couldn’t spot his wife through the murky air.

The ship was flying blind in the middle of a storm, with nothing but dark, swirling ocean below.

Dick Deal was at his station in the ship’s bow. At the Akron’s other end—nearly a sixth of a mile away—was Metalsmith Second Class Moody Erwin. It was his job to lean out a window and release the X frames, blocks of wood that held the Akron’s horizontal fins down while the airship taxied. (These were an improvement made after the Akron had slammed into the ground in front of the congressmen the year before.) At 7:28 p.m., Erwin pulled the X frames away. The Akron’s propellers, powered by the massive Maybach engines, spun up. The ship’s mooring ropes were cast off.

A small crowd had gathered to watch takeoff, including Sid Hooper, Robert Copeland’s wife, assorted ground crew, and a few curious civilians who lived nearby. The group waved and cheered as the ship left terra firma. Foot by foot, it lifted into the fog. By 300 feet, it had disappeared into the soupy sky, its engines still whirring audibly. Eventually, the onlookers dispersed, returning to their cars and driving home through the gloaming.

Once the airship attained a cruising altitude of 2,000 feet, McCord planned to take the Akron on a circuitous route to avoid the coastal weather and give Moffett and Masury a treat—inland, then south, where the views would be clear, then out to sea and eventually north. The ship was en route to Newport, Rhode Island, where the weather report was for clearer skies. Estimated arrival time was 7 a.m. Copeland wired the ship’s route to the radio room back at base: “Akron flying Lakehurst to Philadelphia to Delaware Capes, thence along coast.” It would be the last clear message received from the airship.

As the Akron passed over Philadelphia, lightning was spotted roughly 25 miles to the south. Generally, in a thunderstorm, airships remained over land, where it was easier to keep one’s bearings: There were landmarks and, at night, illuminated areas for guidance. In the event that the worst happened, being over land helped facilitate rescue efforts. It was also common maritime knowledge that winds tended to be less severe on the western side of a storm. Knowing this, Wiley suggested at least twice that the ship move west and further inland for the time being. McCord disagreed. How much he took into account what Moffett wanted is impossible to know, but he surely didn’t wish to arrive in Newport far behind schedule with such an esteemed passenger on board.

Though McCord didn’t know it, he was working with incomplete information: Only about two-thirds of the latest weather report had made it to the Akron, perhaps because of radio interference. In fact, the looming storm was far larger and moving much faster than anyone on board realized.

While battling wind and fog, the Akron began to veer off course. Soon the ship passed over crashing surf, going “feet wet”—clearing land—near what everyone aboard assumed was Asbury Park, New Jersey, but was likely 30 to 40 miles south of there. Then it flew out over the black Atlantic.

By 11 p.m., the storm seemed to be chasing the ship. Lightning flashed all around as corkscrew winds altered the Akron’s course, subtly but incessantly. The radio room tried to raise Lakehurst but heard only static. The ship was flying blind in the middle of a storm, with nothing but dark, swirling ocean below. McCord and Wiley decided to reverse course and make for the coastline, in the hope that the ship’s navigator, Lieutenant Commander Harold McClellan, might pick out a landmark.

Around midnight, word came from a lookout: Land sighted. This sent a chill through the control room. The ship should have been at least a few miles from shore. With no sense of where they were headed and visibility nil, McCord ordered a hard turn southeast. “One hundred twenty degrees compass!” he shouted, and the Akron headed back out to sea—directly into the heart of the maelstrom.

Midnight meant a change of watch; most of the crew remained unaware of the confusion in the command car. Now off duty, Moody Erwin headed to the ship’s galley for a sandwich and some coffee before trying to sleep. Dick Deal, also relieved of his post, went to the smoking room. A few other men were there, including Elmer Fink, the ship’s engineer and resident comedian. When a thunderclap echoed through the Akron, Fink quipped, “That’s beer kegs being rolled around!” (It was a timely joke. After a few years of Prohibition, low-alcohol “near beer” was set to become legal shortly after the Akron’s flight.) When Deal had finished smoking, he remarked, “It’s a bad night for airships,” then said good evening and went to his bunk. But he didn’t sleep.

Neither did Moffett. The buffeting and noise from the storm made it impossible to rest, even for an old sea dog. So Moffett swung out of his bunk and made his way back to the control room, where McCord and Wiley remained at their stations. The two men were peering out the windows into the gloom, hoping to see something, anything, to help them navigate. They were also trying to ascertain the direction of the storm from the location of the lightning. “Was that flash on your side?” someone would yell when a bolt lit up the air. But the lightning crashed all around them. Thunder ripped so close that every man in the airship felt it deep below his sternum. To Wiley it seemed like the sky was cracking in two.

Then a shout: “We’re falling!”

Downdrafts sheared the ship’s nose toward the sea. Wiley raced over to the large elevator wheel, which controlled altitude, and with the other crew members tried to haul the Akron’s nose up. The power of the wind and the ship’s bulk made it a Herculean task. But pull by belabored pull it worked. “I got it, sir,” said one of the crewmen, his face dripping with sweat.

Wiley checked the altimeter: The ship was at 1,100 feet—lower than the usual hard deck of 1,500 to 2,000 feet—and still falling. But at least it was on an even keel. The Akron fell below 1,000 feet and continued to drop. The crew needed to gain elevation. The immense ship required a lot of room to maneuver, and it was running out of it quickly.

“Should I drop ballast, Captain?” Wiley asked McCord. “Yes,” McCord replied, and ordered the crew to increase engine speed. Wiley pulled a knob, and some 1,600 pounds of water cascaded into the night. The ship quickly gained altitude and settled at about 1,600 feet. A sigh of relief went through the control car.

Unknown to McCord, the storm was causing yet another problem: Normally, the altimeter—a ten-dollar instrument on a multimillion-dollar airship—had a sizable margin of error. But the storm’s barometric pressure was so low that it compromised the altimeter’s mercury, producing wildly inaccurate readings.

As the clock approached 12:30 a.m., the storm became even more violent. The Akron was buffeted about like a castanet in an enormous invisible hand. In his bunk, Deal looked up at the rubberized cotton hull overhead. Its flexible fabric was bulging in and out like a gasping fish. It reminded him of a respirator in an operating room. Sensing trouble, he rolled out of bed. As soon as his feet hit the floor, there was a loud crack and a sudden lurch, like the ship had been hit by something.

Deal stepped onto the gangway outside his cabin and saw the cause: Two subgirders—numbers seven and eight, attached to the enormous main girder that ran the length of the Akron—had snapped in two.

Erwin stumbled out of his bunk at almost the same time as Deal. The two stared up at the ship’s broken skeleton. “All hands forward!” a crewman yelled. Deal and Erwin, both shoeless, raced for the ship’s bow.

In the control room, Wiley sensed that a moment of real danger had arrived. Amazingly, given the history of airships, there was no alarm system on the Akron, nor any order its crew were trained to recognize in an emergency. So Wiley blasted five long signals to the 18 telephones positioned throughout the ship, the code for “landing stations.” He must have hoped that everyone aboard knew what that meant—that they weren’t landing but going down. The crew should prepare for impact.

The sea was racing through holes in the stern, and the airship was sinking from the weight.

Again the Akron began to fall. This time its nose was pointing up, but McCord failed to realize it. He assumed that the ship was nose-heavy again and ordered the elevators to correct. As a result, the Akron’s stern dropped farther down, putting the ship on a tilt of between 12 and 25 degrees. It was now plummeting toward the water tail-first.

When the officers realized that the ship was at an untenable angle, they raced to correct it—only to have the cable to the ship’s lower rudder ripped away by what felt like a huge gust of wind. This was followed by strange bumping and jerking. Without the lower rudder, the crew’s ability to control the Akron was reduced drastically.

“Can you work with just the upper rudder?” Wiley asked the elevator operator.

“No response there either!” the man said.

Suddenly, the ship pitched up sharply, to an angle of nearly 45 degrees. Wiley grabbed on to a girder overhead. Several officers spilled onto the deck. Wiley mistakenly suspected that the ship had broken in two and was now plunging toward the ocean. In fact, the Akron’s tail was already submerged. The weird bumping the men had felt was the ocean hammering the dirigible. The sea was racing through holes in the stern, and the airship was sinking from the weight.

Deep inside there was no question: The Akron was coming apart. As Deal ran for the bow, the incline became so severe that he was forced to climb the gangway like a ladder, hand over hand. Erwin was about 30 feet behind him. They both looked up to see a helium tank break away from its mooring. As the 120-gallon cylinder came crashing down, Erwin ducked; it missed him by inches. Deal was spared, too.

It occurred to Deal, who had not been near a window for an hour, that he had no idea if they were over land or water. He didn’t know which would be worse, not realizing that there were no life preservers on the ship.

Six other crew members were near Deal and Erwin, hanging on to girders as wires snapped and the ship’s interior frame shattered. No one screamed. No one said a word, perhaps because there was nothing they could do.

“Full speed!” McCord bellowed in the control cabin. The ship’s engines whined with the entirety of their 4,480 combined horsepower, but nothing could pull the stern out of the water.

“Why won’t the ship respond?” McCord asked no one and everyone.

“Altitude?” Wiley shouted.

“Three hundred feet!” came the reply, just as the control car dropped and pierced the night fog, revealing the Atlantic, which was much closer than 300 feet.

“Stand by to crash!” Wiley screamed.

Within seconds, the rest of the Akron had followed the stern into the sea.

Four

The ship was flooding from back to front. The second Moody Erwin saw the ocean rip a tear in the hull, he leaped through it into the water. The ship’s immense bulk was rolling toward him; if he didn’t move fast, it would crush him. His progress was impeded by his heavy flight jacket, so he shrugged it off, then continued swimming.

Deal and several other men were trapped in the Akron by a tangle of torn wires, cables, and metal pipes. Icy water poured over Deal’s bare feet, rising fast. Soon he was submerged. With the strength of the doomed, he thrashed around and managed to work himself free of his bonds. He then shot through a gap in the ripped hull and burst to the water’s surface.

Water surged into the control car. As the ship listed to the right, a current swept Wiley out the window and beneath the waves. He was the only one in the control car to make it out. He swam until his lungs ached, then surfaced with a gasp. He’d managed to clear the ship. He saw the extent of the damage now: The Akron’s bow was tilted upward, and a portion of the stern was sticking out of the water as well.

The Akron had crashed somewhere between Atlantic City and the Barnegat Inlet, though the crew didn’t know where they were. Still, Erwin correctly guessed that he was close to the Jersey coast. Rescue would surely be close at hand. But he’d been afraid of sharks since he was a little boy, and these were the same waters where four people had been attacked and killed over a 12-day period in 1916, a bloodletting that was a huge national story. Erwin kicked his feet frantically, hoping to keep any predators at bay.

Chancing a look back at the sinking dirigible, Erwin noticed flames licking at a portion of the ship. He remembered the phosphorous flares kept in a locker in the navigator’s room. If they came free, the fire might ignite them, allowing a rescue ship to see the wreck.

But oil was also leaking from the ship, most likely from the planes the Akron was carrying. It skimmed across the ocean’s surface. Erwin could taste the thick fluid and worried that it would carry the flames to him. If sharks didn’t eat him and he didn’t drown, he might still be burned alive.

Then, providence. A helium tank, bobbing like a cork, floated into sight about twenty yards away—the same kind that had come crashing toward him and Deal in the ship. Now it might save him. With renewed energy, Erwin worked through the lurching sea to reach the tank. After several minutes, he latched onto it and discovered two other men doing the same: Copeland, the radio operator, and Lucius Rutan, mechanic second class.

Erwin held the tank with one hand and worked his way out of his pants and work shirt. Down to his underwear, Erwin could move more freely in the water—but he also began to shiver in the cold sea. By now the Akron’s stern had disappeared. The portion of the bow that remained above the water looked to Erwin like an inverted ice cream cone.

He heard cries. They were muted by the storm and the waves, but unmistakably the sound of desperate men. A flash of lightning revealed an awful sight: Dozens of the Akron’s crew were flailing in the sea. Those who could tread water did so, but unless they’d shucked their flight gear, as Erwin had, they were pulled beneath the surface.

One of the men struggling near the wreckage was Deal, but he was too tired to cry out. He’d been swimming for close to twenty minutes amid storm-whipped waves. It was all he could do to keep his head above water. The air was choked with fumes from the wrecked ship, so breathing was difficult, too.

A bolt of lightning illuminated the white-flecked swells, and in that brief moment Deal saw a helium tank float past. He swam all out for the barrel. Up a mighty swell and down the other side. He was only a few yards away, but his arms felt like cement. He let them drift up in surrender and began to sink. Then a hand grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to the tank.

“Who’s here?” Deal croaked.

“Erwin.” That’s who had saved him. “And Rutan,” Erwin added.

“This is Copeland.”

For the first time since the Akron fell from the sky, Deal felt hopeful. It was good, at least, to have company while battling to survive.

Nearby, Wiley was also swimming for his life. His hands were frozen and his legs numb, but he had some fight left. When a three-foot-wide piece of driftwood floated past, Wiley clamped onto it—only to lose his grip when a wave tore at his frigid fingers. He heard a voice cry out and swam toward the sound. He never heard it again.

Back at the helium tank, the four men were having trouble hanging on. The waves banged in from all directions, sometimes knocking one of them off. They managed to make it back each time, but how long would their luck last?

Deal tried to reassure them. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said. “Somebody’ll find us.” No one responded. In fact, Erwin was starting to drift off. He felt warm now, almost comfortable—he was succumbing to hypothermia. As his eyes drooped, his hold on the tank loosened.

“Erwin!” Deal shouted.

Groggily, the metalsmith opened his eyes. He shook his head, then dunked it quickly in the sea to revive himself. He gave Deal a nod—of reassurance and thanks. Now the two men had saved each other.

Deal reached both arms across the tank, beckoning to Erwin. The other crewman grokked his meaning. Soon each pair had locked arms. The tank bucked between them, but they held on. After a few minutes, Deal looked past Erwin. “There’s a ship!” he cried. Erwin turned. A ghostly outline was visible in the distance.

Then a huge wave pounded the tank and sent it hurtling across the ocean’s surface. Deal and Erwin managed to hang on. Copeland was thrust by the wave’s force against the metal, keeping him in place and perhaps saving his life. Rutan was thrown into the water. He thrashed for a moment, then sank.

The ship Deal had spotted was coming closer. It was the Phoebus, a German oil tanker that had just left New York Harbor bound for Mexico. Captain Karl Dalldorf had seen the airship’s flashing lights and immediately ordered the Phoebus to change course to look for survivors. Now, as it drew close to the wreck of the Akron, a lookout shouted, “Mann über bord!”

Dalldorf ordered the engines slowed and the deck lights on. Someone blew a whistle. The first man spotted was Wiley, who’d managed to ride the waves toward the ship. Someone threw a life buoy to him, and Wiley was hauled up.

Soon another buoy arced through the rain and fog. To Erwin, slipping deeper into hypothermia, it seemed to move in slow motion. When it flopped down ten yards from him, he eyed it with detached curiosity. He wished he could go to sleep. Rest up a bit, he told himself. The buoy will still be there. But no—he had to move. And he did. Soon he’d worked his right arm through the ring, then he slipped into unconsciousness.

Erwin was pulled aboard the Phoebus at precisely 2 a.m., roughly an hour and a half after the Akron went down. His eyes were clenched shut and he was bleeding from the thorax, where he’d dug in his fingernails while clinging to the life buoy.

Deal refused to leave the relative safety of the helium tank, even when he saw another buoy hit the water. The wind seemed to grow stronger. Deal could make out dim figures on the Phoebus lowering a smaller ship into the water. Soon it was heading his way.

Just then a large craft floated past. Deal recognized it from the Akron. The ship’s lone life raft had been stowed with the airplanes. There were 14 seats. All were empty.

The world blurred around Deal. When he saw Copeland being pulled into a small boat, he thought he was dreaming. But that couldn’t be, Deal thought. Copeland is here with me. He noticed water dripping from his body. He was being lifted into the air. Then he passed out.

Five

Just four men—Wiley, Deal, Erwin, and Copeland—were rescued from the Atlantic by the crew of the Phoebus. Small boats launched from the German tanker and crisscrossed the wreckage of the Akron for hours, but no one else was found alive. In the end there were just three survivors: Copeland died of shock and exposure aboard the Phoebus.

Deal returned to consciousness in a stateroom. He was naked, and whiskey bottles filled with hot water were pressed around his body. German crewmen rubbed him vigorously, trying to get his blood flowing. He shivered so violently, he couldn’t speak through chattering teeth. When he saw that one of the bottles still contained liquor, he grabbed it and took a long gulp. The crewmen encouraged him to keep drinking, and Deal polished off the entire fifth.

The booze got his tongue moving. “What ship are we on?” he managed to ask. A German crewman told him. Then Wiley entered the stateroom. Deal noticed dark hollows under his eyes, but otherwise he seemed in remarkably good condition.

“How do you feel?” Wiley asked Deal.

“OK. How many survivors are there, sir?”

Wiley hesitated. “Not many, Deal.”

Erwin was in an adjoining cabin. As soon as he opened his eyes, the German at his side sat Erwin upright and poured some whiskey down his throat. Erwin, thinking he was still in the ocean and had just taken in seawater, slapped away the tumbler and went berserk. He tore at everything within reach and got ahold of the crewman’s hat, which he ripped to shreds before passing out.

Sometime later, Erwin opened his eyes again. This time he was alone. He tried to piece together what had happened but had no memory of the wreck. He assumed there’d been an accident—perhaps his car? He saw a bottle of Hennessy across the room. He was now lucid enough to want a drink. But when he swung his legs down from his bunk, they wouldn’t work. He tumbled to the floor and lay there until he was discovered.

The night’s tragedies weren’t over. When the Navy got word of the crash, it sent out a small blimp, crewed by seven men, to search for survivors. The weather was still vicious and the blimp went down, killing two of the crew and raising the death toll of the Akron disaster to 75.

The following day, banner headlines announced the news. The New York Times splashed “Dirigible Akron Crashes During Lightning Storm at Sea” across eight columns. “All Traces of Akron and Crew Vanish,” the Los Angeles Times declared.

It was the worst disaster by far in aviation’s brief history. The death toll exceeded that of the Shenandoah by a factor of five, and 23 more men died than in the worst air crash to date—the French airship Dixmude. Even the Hindenburg crash, still four years away and destined to become the more infamous calamity, would be less deadly by half than the Akron disaster.

The loss was keenly felt in the city of Akron, where construction on the dirigible’s sister ship, the USS Macon, continued. One lost crew member, Tony Swidarsky, was himself from Akron, and Moffett had spent a great deal of time in the Rubber City. “The sun was shining this morning but as long as people are alive to tell the story of the disaster of the U.S.S. Akron, this day will be called ‘Black Tuesday,’ ” wrote the Akron Beacon-Journal.

Crewmen training to fly the Macon were crushed by the news. One of them lamented, “The whole gang, they’re lost, they’re lost.”

Epilogue

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the Akron’s crash on the country. One historian referred to it as a “psychological knockout punch” sustained by a Depression-savaged public. President Roosevelt called it a “national tragedy.”

Of course, the crash was only the latest in a long line of airship disasters. Representative Carl Vinson of Georgia, the powerful chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs, put it bluntly: “There won’t be any more big airships built. We have built three and lost two.” The Chicago Daily News ran a cartoon showing Uncle Sam being lectured to by a wizened professor pointing to the names of crashed airships, including the Akron. A caption read, “Will He Learn His Lesson?”

Not everyone agreed that the program should come to an end. The Times editorialized, “To abandon the building of more vessels of the same type would be hard to reconcile with the spirit of scientific inquiry. If the rigid airship was of use before this disaster, it cannot be argued now that the disaster has destroyed it.” The Akron Beacon-Journal noted that America “does not scrap railroad service because wrecks occur.”

For the Navy, who the dead men were mattered as much as the number of lives lost: The Akron took with it the cream of the U.S. airship corps, starting with Admiral Moffett. “Ships can be replaced,” Roosevelt said in the aftermath, “but the nation can ill afford to lose such men as Rear Admiral William A. Moffett and his shipmates who died with him, upholding to the end the finest traditions of the United States Navy.” The loss of institutional knowledge about a technology some considered the future of warfare was enormous.

Now the fate of the airship program hung in the balance. A Naval Court of Inquiry convened to investigate the Akron disaster, but in the words of Time, it “satisfied no one.” The court found that the Akron had been in “excellent structural condition” when it took off, that its officers and crew were skilled and competent, and that weather forecasts justified the flight. McCord had “committed an error in judgment” in not striking a course that would have kept the ship out of the heart of the storm, but the court stopped short of blaming him for the crash. “An erroneous decision does not, in the opinion of the court, justify a condemnation without more information of the considerations upon which the plan of action was based,” it said. “This information was lost with the ship.”

America had no more airships to fly, and this time the desire to build more was wanting.

A congressional committee also explored the crash, with testimony from airship enthusiasts and detractors—what Richard Smith, in his history of the Akron and the Macon, called “publicity seekers and axe grinders”—as well as aviation luminaries such as Charles Lindbergh. In June 1933, the committee gave the airship a clean bill of health.

The most telling voice came from the man in the Oval Office. Roosevelt remained an airship enthusiast. The future of the dirigible program was ultimately a military matter, but it seemed clear that the popular president wanted it to continue. To his mind, the good men aboard the Akron should not have died for nothing.

So Admiral Moffett’s dream lived on past his death, but it wouldn’t be for long. Less than two years later, the Macon crashed too, on February 12, 1935. The cause was eerily similar to what had destroyed the Akron: A massive, storm-driven wind forced the airship into the ocean, this time in the Pacific, near Big Sur, California. At the helm was none other than Herbert Wiley. One might imagine that Wiley would never so much as look at another airship after surviving the Akron, but when he was offered command of the Macon, duty and honor demanded that he accept.

Fortunately, some lessons had been learned from the loss of the Akron. Life jackets hung from posts all over the Macon, and there were plenty of rafts available. Of the 81 men on board, only two perished. Wiley earned a pair of medals for risking his life to save one of his crew. (Wiley went on to fight the Japanese in World War II, and died in 1954. Deal passed in 1970, and Erwin in 1989.)

After the Macon went into the sea, America had no more airships to fly, and this time the desire to build more was wanting. The New York Times conceded the “twilight of the Zeppelins.” Admiral William Standley, chief of naval operations, summed up the new dogma: “This should be a solemn warning to this country with respect to the use of lighter-than-air craft.… I am more than ever convinced of their unsuitability for military and naval purposes.”

By the time the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg burst into flames, the U.S. Navy was done with dirigibles. Funding went to airplanes and to carriers that floated rather than flew. The scores of men who perished slipped from memory. The masses turned their gaze earthward once more.

America’s airship age was over.

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