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“One of the interesting things about airships,” says Tom Crouch, a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum, who gave a lecture on the subject this week as part of the Museum’s Ask an Expert series, is that they were “transitional technology. They were capable of doing a great many things before airplanes were. They didn’t carry passengers as well as airplanes do, they couldn’t go to war as well as airplanes do, but they could carry significant loads over significant distances, long before airplanes did.”

The U.S. Navy ZRS-4 "Akron," June 13, 1932. Photograph courtesy NASM.

Take the story of the Akron and Macon. Both were rigid American airships, built by the Goodyear Zeppelin Company in Akron, Ohio. “The problem the Navy faced between the wars, was, what are you going to do with these things?” says Crouch. “Are you going to use them as scouts? This thing is almost 900 feet long, painted silver, it can’t fly very high, and it can’t go very fast. So the enemy is going to see it coming. So what they did is really kind of a Hail Mary pass…. They decided that the Akron and Macon would become flying aircraft carriers.”

A Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk hooked on to the trapeze and hoist arrangement of the USS Macon. Photograph courtesy NASM.

The two airships were supposed to fly ahead of the fleet, looking for the enemy. When they found them, the airships would launch fighters—the Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk—from inside the airship. (The Museum has the only Sparrowhawk left above water.) There was a hangar deck inside the ship’s belly, and the Akron and Macon could carry five fighters each. A trapeze bar would descend from the belly to release the airplanes.

When the Macon went down off the coast of California on February 12, 1935, she took four of the aircraft with her. “She’s 17,000 feet down,” says Crouch, “at the bottom of the Pacific, and when you look at the submersible pictures of the Macon, you can still see the top wing of four of these airplanes sticking up out of the silt.” )

Airships, Crouch says, “were the work of a little band of true believers.” The greatest of them all, Admiral William Moffett, was on board the Akron when it was lost off the New Jersey coast on April 4, 1933. Seventy-three of the 76 passengers and crew on board were killed.

Moffett, although not a pilot, was chosen in 1921 to head the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. In a somewhat harsh assessment, the Maxwell Air Force Base Web site describes the admiral as having “an unfortunate affection for airships, a technological dead end that squandered millions of dollars.”

On September 1, 1933, Naval Air Station Sunnyvale was renamed Moffett Field in the admiral’s honor.

Rear Admiral William Moffett, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and Henry Ford, standing in front of a Naval Aircraft Factory UO-2 at the National Airplane Races in Detroit. Photograph courtesy NASM.

The rear half of the Hindenburg engulfed in flames. Image courtesy NASM.

When the Hindenburg flew toward the the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey on May 6, 1937, it was the airship’s eleventh voyage to the United States. The nearly 804-foot-long ship, the pride of Nazi Germany, had been carrying passengers on excursion flights since 1910 without a single injury.

A recent Smithsonian Channel film, Hindenburg: The Untold Story, recounts the investigation that followed in the days after the tragedy.

Hindenburg disaster, May 6, 1937. Image courtesy NASM.

Although the airship burned in seconds, 62 passengers and crew survived (35 died). The two remaining survivors were interviewed for this film. Werner Doehner, traveling as a passenger with his family, was 8 years old at the time of the disaster. “I don’t remember having flown out,” he recalls in the film, “I don’t remember being in the air, but I remember lying in the sand.” (How did Doehner survive? During the 34 seconds it took for everything to be destroyed, his mother dragged him and his brother to a broken window and threw them out—a fall of 50 feet.)

The other survivor, Werner Franz, was a 14-year-old cabin boy in 1937. He recalls: “The worst was the sea of flames. It carried on burning for a long time. Some parts of the wreckage burned til the morning after.” He remembers his awe upon seeing the zeppelin for the first time: “When I first walked into the hangar, I couldn’t see the airship. It had filled the hangar entirely. I stood in front of what I thought was a gray wall. It took a while before I realized that I was standing in front of the ship.”

Hindenburg: The Untold Story will be shown on April 18 and 19, and is also available from the Smithsonian Channel upon demand. Check your local cable listings. Watch a sneak peek, below.

What looks like Ronaldo’s nightmare is in fact the world’s largest soccer ball airship, built by E-Green Technologies of Kellyton, Alabama. Why, you ask? It seems everyone’s crazy about airships these days, for everything from military surveillance to tourism. E-Green just signed a deal with NASA’s Ames Research Center to hangar their giant Bullet Class 580 airship at the center’s research park in Moffett Field, California.

Look for a feature story on next-generation zeppelins in the February/March 2011 issue of Air & Space.