Happy Saturday. Recently on the show, we talked about the balloons of World War Two, and while there were also airships in use during this period of time that we were covering, we did not really talk about them because airships could be steered and they could move under their own propulsions. They were sort of a whole different thing from the unpiloted balloons that we were focused on. We said that we would play an airship episode as an upcoming Saturday classic, and here it is. It is about the uss Akron, which was a US Navy airship during the nineteen thirties and the disaster that destroyed it in nineteen thirty three. And Joy, Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Willson In Tracy, did you know that the loss of the uss Akron was the biggest single tragedy in aviation history at the time that had happened. I did not know that level of detail. Yeah, because unless you're an aviation or a US Navy history buff, you might not know much about it. It's one of those things that kind of doesn't get a whole lot of attention. I think we might have mentioned it just as an aside in that episode that we did about the Hindenburg, but even so we did not get into any detail. Yeah, and even the Hindenburg disaster, which happened four years after the Akron was lost, resulted in far fewer lives lost, but probably because we have terrifying dramatic footage of the Hindenburg burning, that very tragic incident is far more commonly recalled in the public consciousness. So today we are going to talk about the USS Akron, one of two large rigid airships that were part of the US Navy's five year aircraft program, which was authorized in nineteen twenty six. And also just for clarity, a doubt would come up, but just in case, this is not to be confused with a much smaller, privately owned airship, also called the Akron. That airship, which was owned by adventurer and photographer Chester Melvin Vanaman, exploded off the coast of New Jersey in nineteen twelve, killing its owner. But that is a totally different thing. So for the one that we are talking about, and the fall of nineteen twenty nine, construction began on the ZRs four in Akron, Ohio that was eventually renamed for the city where it was built. The Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation had signed a contract with the Bureau of Aeronautics in nineteen twenty eight to build this ship, which was designed by doctor Carl Arnstein to be an airborne aircraft carrier. In a week into the build, there was an official ceremony to markets beginning. So sometimes if you're looking at the historical record, there are a couple different dates that are listed as the beginning of construction, and that's why there was some preliminary work done, and then a week after it they had this official ceremony, and during that serimony, the chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, drove a golden rivet into the main ring of the ship. By the spring of nineteen thirty one, the hull was well underway and the name for the ship, which was the Acron, like we said, was announced by Ernest Lee Jankie, who was the Navy's Assistant secretary. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, in cooperation with the city of Akron Ohio actually produced a short silent film about the Acron's construction. It runs about twenty minutes and it showcases all the features and innovations of the dirigible. It features the quote huge building from which the giant airship was hatched, as well as showing all of the construction phases of this massive airship. In it, you can also see workers raising the first ring into position, a massive gas cell being placed in the frame for an inflation and buoyancy test, the nose and tail of the craft being moved into position, and the sheets that comprised its outer covering being applied to the exterior of the frame, along with a number of other milestones in the Akrone's construction. Yeah, they show some cool footage of like them doping that exterior, which is when they coat it with its protective coating, and it just looks like dude's spray painting. It's kind of fun to watch. And the film also mentions the water ballast that was used to keep the zeppelin steady, which was supplied by exhaust vapors that were then condensed, so it was pretty smartly designed as well. On August eighth, nineteen thirty one, first Lady Missus lew Henry Hoover christened the airship as it was launched, meaning that it was floating above the hangar floor, but it was still contained there in the build bay. And when the dirigible was completed, it was seven hundred and eighty feet that's two hundred and thirty nine meters long, one hundred and thirty two point five feet or forty meters wide, and one hundred and fifty two point two feet or forty six point five meters tall. When fully inflated, its volume was six point five million cubic feet and it had been built with a sturdy, deep mainframe, and this design was actually a departure from the ringed design of prior dridgibles. It was inflated with helium, and it featured eight Mayback VL two engines, which were reversible and thus offered a really high degree of maneuverability for something this size. The Akron's design included a third of the interior space dedicated to a hangar which could accommodate five aircraft. We're going to talk about how those planes were launched and retrieved in just a bit. There were also two sections allocated to crew quarters which featured a galley, mess and washroom in addition to the sleeping areas. The water that passed through the airship's engines to cool them was then used to heat the crew quarters. Yeah That hot water they took away from the engines then got a second life as a heating implement. A month and a half after the christening, on September twenty third, the Akron had her first flight, which was conducted over Cleveland, Ohio, and before the dirigible was officially commissioned as a Navy vessel, an additional eight test flights were conducted, taking the ship farther and farther each time and testing all of the various mechanisms aboard, just shy of two years before the anniversary of the startup construction. On October twenty seventh, nineteen thirty one, the USS Akron was commissioned after having been delivered to the Lakehurst, New Jersey, Naval Air Station, with Lieutenant Commander Charles E. Rosendahl named as the commanding officer of the new vessel. The Akron had its first official Navy voyage on November second, nineteen thirty one, on a course that took it down the east coast of the United States to Washington, d C. And from that moment on it saw plenty of airtime, more than three hundred hours in flight over the course of just a few weeks. Following that, forty six of those three hundred hours were logged on a single mission that took the Akron on a round trip to Mobile, Alabama. And the Akron really proved itself repeatedly. You will see a lot of discussions of it as being plagued by problems, and it had problems, to talk about those in a minute, but it also did some pretty impressive things. On January ninth of nineteen thirty two, the Zeppelin took part in a search exercise that showed its endurance and its capabilities as a search vessel. The goal was for the Akron to locate a group of destroyers that were en route to Guantanamo Bay and then follow observe, and report their activities. Due to the inclement weather on January tenth, the crew of the Akron wasn't able to sight the destroyers initially, although the destroyers did report spotting the dirigible, but the airship kept looking for the destroyers and eventually was able to spot and report on two groups of ships on the eleventh, which made the scouting mission a success. Yeah, this was to be clear when we say it's an exercise, this is like a planned thing. There were no enemies that they were siting. This was all sort of training. And coming up, we're going to talk about an accident that the Akron had in nineteen thirty one, But first we were going to pause, have a little sponsor break. So the following month after where we left off, on February twenty second, nineteen thirty one, the Acron was damaged in an accident. It was being moved out of its hangar when a wind gust blew the tail off its moorings and the back end of the airship was then thrust downward and it impacted on the ground. Repairs to the damage, which was mostly concentrated around the lower fin, took two months. After this restoration was complete, its first voyage took place on April twenty eighth, nineteen thirty one, and this was a smooth nine hour flight, and soon after there was this really unique technology tested. The Acron tested what they called a spy basket on its next flight, and this spy basket was just as it sounds, this small addition that hung from the bottom of the airship with space for a man to sit in and observe the ground below, and the intent was that the ship itself could stay within cloud cover for the most part, while the basket could hang just below the clouds. This test did not go well. It really really did not go well, and it's kind of it's not surprising to me that it did not go well. The spy basket swung back and forth really wildly, and it was considered to be way too unstable for practical use. Fortunately, though, the test was conducted with a sandbag in the spy seat and not an actual person, so no one was harmed or just traumatized by the test. No additional work was done to try to make it viable either. They were like, this is not going to work, and they abandoned it immediately. Yeah, we're about to talk about an interesting mechanism that kind of ties into this, and I will explain. So we mentioned earlier that the Akron was intended to be an aircraft carrier, and the first time that function was tested was on May third of nineteen thirty two, and in that flight, which was conducted on the eastern seaboard along the New Jersey Coastline, pilots used the akron so called trapeze installation, which was a method for docking aircraft the dirigible in flight, and this kind of followed up on that spy basket idea because planes that were hooked on were still hanging under the airship initially, and those guys could also cite the ground, so that kind of replaced that whole idea. There's actually some footage of some of these types of connections and they give a sense of just how precise and skilled the pilots of the planes had to be. There was a rod assembly on the lower side of the akron that was the trapeeze that had another rod across the bottom with a very slight downward band in the middle, and so for a plane to dock, it had to have what looked like an inverted basket of rods also affixed to the top of it. So imagine on top of the cockpit there's this whole other little assembly, and at the apex of that inverted metal basket was a hook, So the pilot would have to carefully align his plane so that that hook would catch on to that trapeeze mechanism. Once the plane had hooked onto the trap and settled to the bottom of the bend, mechanisms would drop into place to keep the plane's hooks centered there, and then the plane and the pilot could be drawn up into the akron's internal hangar. This has been described in some writings as like better than any amusement ride on Earth. To me, it seems slightly terrifying, but your mind would be very well And I'm wondering. I'm wondering what all signaling and whatnot. They had to make connections just because earlier this year I toured the Midway and listened to pilots talk about landing on an aircraft carrier on the ocean. Yeah, which is also kind of a white knuckle experience. But like, there are definitely things that you have in your field division to align with in instruments, so I'm very curious. Yeah, since that was usually sort of centered underneath the airship, like they could align a little bit just by centering. But I mean it looks so sort of casual and relaxed. When you watch the footage, they just seem like they zip up. They're very it's smooth and they just latch on. But I can't imagine that there weren't some clunkers some way. But these were also incredibly well trained pilots. And the two pilots that performed that maneuver in the May third test were Lieutenant Daniel W. Harrigan and Lieutenant Howard L. Young. They first did the demonstration with an end to Y DASH one biplane trainer and then with a Curtis XF nine c DASH one sparrowhawk, and these tests went really well, and they actually performed them again the next day for members of the House Committee for Naval Affairs who watched all of these proceedings and how well this whole thing worked from a vantage point as passengers on the Akron. On May eighth, the Akron took flight again, this time traveling down the East Coast to Georgia and then cutting west to California. The ultimate destination for the Akron was Sunnyvale, California. The stop was planned at Camp Kearney in San Diego County, and this stop was a tricky undertaking. The crew at Camp Kearney had not brought in a dirigible like the Akron before, and the specialized moorings that were used at the Navy base in Lakehurst, New Jersey, were not on hand, and to further complicate the landing, the craft was lighter than normal because it had burned so much fuel on this cross country trip, and because the heat from the sun had warmed it, the gases inside had expanded to be less dense, so it just wasn't as easy to control as it normally would be. Those two factors led to a loss of control of the ship, and to prevent it from hitting the ground nose first, the mooring cable had to be cut. This did prevent a crash, but it also resulted in a tragedy. Four of the men who were holding lines to the ship didn't let go, and one of them fell from a height of fifteen feet which is four point six meters, and broken arm. Three others held on. Initially, Apprentice seamen CM Cowart was able to cling to the line and not lose his grip, and after a wild ride of about an hour, he was pulled onto the akron. Yeah, there was allegedly an attempt or a thought for a while that they were going to land just him on the ground, but then they realized they were not confident that they could do it without slamming him into the ground, so he ended up being pulled aboard. Two other men were not so lucky. Aviation Carpenter's mate, third Class Robert H. Edzel, and Apprentice Seaman Nigel M. Henton both died after they lost their grips on the lines that they held and they fell to their deaths, and when interviewed a few days later, Cowart, who was the man who had survived, said quote, I just hung on. I saw the other fellows fall and it didn't make me feel any too good, but there was nothing I could do about it except to hang on tighter. The Acron continued its missions. Though it stayed on the West coast for several weeks, it traveled north to the Canadian border and participated in scouting fleet exercises similar to the one that we mentioned earlier, when it searched for destroyers that were headed to Guantanamo Bay. The Akron once again performed admirably in these exercises. In June, the airship left California to head back to Lakehurst, and that journey took four days from June eleventh to June fifteenth, nineteen thirty two before the Akron was able to get home, and that was in part because it encountered several incidents of just really bad weather along the way, and when the Akron finally docked in New Jersey, the seventy nine main crew was exhausted from the journey. When they're described as coming down the gang plant, they just all sound like they were completely depleted. And the next several weeks brought a welcome respite from flights as the airship underwent maintenance and repairs. In July, the Akron was once again air ready and assisted in a rescue mission when the yacht Curlew went missing. This had been part of a six hundred and twenty eight mile which is one thousand and eleven kilometer race from Montauk to Bermuda. When the boat and the six people on it were lost during some bad weather. All the other twenty five yachts made it through, but contact with the Curlew had been lost. The Akron was ordered to fly in circles along the course from the Curlew's last known location and to try to report results back to naval operations. It was eventually found off the coast of Nantucket. Yeah, but that yacht search had caused a little bit of a pause in the Akron's training missions, But we're going to get right back into that after we first take a quick break to hear from one of the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. So the focus of the Akron's efforts at that point rescue missions for yacht's aside, was continued experimentation and development of the trapeze system. They really wanted to primarily just drill the pilots so that they would be extremely good at this. And the man in charge of these ongoing trapeze experiments, as appointed by Rear Admiral Moffatt, was Commander Alger Herman Dressel, and under Dressel's leadership, the Akron continued to advance its trapeze work, eventually achieving the ability to manage a full load of Curtis F nine C two Sparrowhawks on August twenty second, nineteen thirty two. There was a new problem, though, due to a timing accident and the relay of orders because the command was given to early the dirigibles. Finn hit a beam in the hangar as it was being taken off at moorings. This put a stop to the trapeze training that had been underway while the Finn had to be repaired, but the last quarter of nineteen thirty two still yielded eight successful flights for the Akron, so that a little accident had happened in August and they were able to repair it pretty quickly. Training continued for the trapeze system as well as training for the gun and lookout cruise, and they also worked with a formation scouting setup to test that where two planes flanked the Akron as they performed search exercises. In early nineteen thirty three, the Akron had a leadership change. Commander Dressel was moved to the akron sister ship, the USS, making His replacement was Commander Frank McCord. This personnel change took place on January third, nineteen thirty three, and almost immediately McCord was underway on a flight with his new command and the Akron. On this first flight under McCord traveled down the East coast to Florida, stopping in Miami Dade County at Opalaca, Florida, to refuel. This is not to be confused with the very very familiar sounding Opalaika, which is a city in Alabama. After the refuel at the Naval Reserve Aviation Base in Opalaca, the Akron proceeded to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This mission was to inspect bases, and the crew performing those inspections was actually taxied from the Akron in flight to the bases via an into Y one biplane. Once the inspection rounds were completed, Commander McCord and his crew took the Akron back to New Jersey. Inclement weather kept the Akron grounded for several weeks at Lakehurst, but it wasn't long before the trapeze training continued. And as we mentioned when describing the trapeze mechanism, it really did require an incredibly deft hand on the part of a pilot to hook onto the airship. So it really if it seems like we're just saying over and over that they were doing a lot of training in this particular area, it's because they were. It was needed to get those pilots just so proficient that they could do it almost without having to think. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was morn in as the thirty second President of the United States on March fourth, nineteen thirty three, the Akron was overhead, but just a week later, on March eleventh, the Akron once again left its northeast home of Lakehurst. This time, the mission took the airship to Panama, stopping once again at Opalaca, Florida en route, and after that the dirigible and its crew were on course for the Naval station at Balboa in the Panama Canal zone, which sits just at the south end of the canal if you're looking at it, and that's the entrance from the Pacific Ocean. And as with the Akron's mission to Cuba, the objective in this case was an inspection, this time of a possible site for an air base. Once the inspection was concluded, the Akron headed back to Opalaka. This time, additional drills were conducted at the Florida base. The gun crews got target practice using the N twoy ones as targets. As March nineteen thirty three came to a close, the Akron headed back to New Jersey from Florida, but the airship wasn't moored for long. On April third, another mission began, and this time it was intended to help calibrate radio direction finding stations along the New England coast which were used for radio triangulation, but the voyage wasn't smooth. When the Akron passed over Barnegot Light in Ocean County in New Jersey at ten pm on April third, the airship was already dealing with severe weather. Two and a half hours later, at twelve thirty am on April fourth, the Akron was whipped by a particularly powerful gust and dropped tail first into the sea. There had been a witness to the Akron struggle with the wind, and that was amanship called Phoebus that had seen lights in the air dropping down toward the Atlantic, and the crew aboard the Phoebus actually thought they were witnessing a plane crash. So Phoebus altered course to investigate, and about a half hour after the incident they pulled the first person from the water, and that was Lieutenant Commander Henry V. Wiley, who was unconscious at the time. At this point, the crew of the Phoebus still thought they were finding the results of a plane crash. They had no idea that the Akron had been in the area. Phoebus also sent out its boat to widen the search for victims, the boat crew fished Bosun's mate, second Class Richard E. Deal, Aviation Metalsmith's second Class Moody E. Irvin, and Chief Radioman Robert W. Copeland out of the turbulent water. Copeland died after being transferred to the Phoebus, despite efforts to revive him. As the rescue effort continued, Lieutenant Commander Wiley regained consciousness and communicated to the crew of the German vessel that it had been the Akron and not a plane they saw descend into the sea. For more than five hours, Phoebus continued to search for survivors, but their efforts were for naught. Two more men actually died in the search effort when another blimp, the non rigid J three, which also served out of the base at Lakehurst, went on a mission to search for survivors. Five men survived the unsuccessful forced landing of the J three, but there were two killed. Five and a half hours after the Akron went down, the Coastguard destroyer Tucker arrived on the scene. The Phoebus transferred the body of Chief radium In Copeland and the surviving crew of the Akron over to the Tucker. In the search for any additional survivors, the destroyer Tucker was joined by the Portland, a heavy cruiser, destroyers Cole McDougall and Hunt, the cutter Mojave, and two Coastguard planes, but no additional members of the crew of the Akron were found. This loss was particularly noteworthy because of the leadership staff that was on board when this accident happen. So in addition to the regular staff, Commander McCord, Rear Admiral Moffett, his aid, Commander Henry B. Cecil, the commander of the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, and several additional guests were also on the Akron when it went down. In total, seventy three men lost their lives when the Akron was destroyed. So for comparison, we mentioned the Hindenburg at the beginning of the show, and the death toll in the Hindenburg disaster was thirty six, one of whom was a man who had been on the ground. Sixty two of the people aboard the Hindenburg survived, which is a far greater proportion than the three who survived the Akron. Not long after the disaster, Wiley, Richard Deal and Moody Irvin appeared together before the public, and Wiley described to the events of April fourth. This way, we were rescued by the German tanker Phoebus and are the sole survivors. Just before the accident to the Akron, I was in the control tower on the left side of the control tower. Our first indication of being near the center of the storm was when ship shuddered violently, and per Wiley's account, the crew did not realize how closely they had gotten to the ocean until they had sudden visibility that they were only about three hundred feet from the water, and he continued quote, the order was given to stand by for a crash. The ship hit the water within thirty seconds of that order, and most of us, I believe, were catapulted into the water. We were in the water about forty five minutes, and we are now ready for duty in airships or wherever we may be assigned. Incidentally, Herbert Wiley had been passed over for command of the Acron when both Dressel and McCord were appointed. Wiley had notified McCord of the weather conditions that could include potentially hazardous storms before the ACRONA had left for the mission, but McCord had determined that they should proceed as planned. A storm that developed in their path was one of the most powerful in a decade. Yeah Even though there had been indications that there was going to be inclement, whether there was no sense of how bad and how violent this storm was going to be. Wiley was commanding officer aboard the Akron's sister ship, the USS make In, when it went down in a storm off the California coast just a year later. Wiley also survived that incident. While portions of the Akron were salvaged from the sea weeks after it sank, in two thousand and two, additional debris was explored by the Navy. Portions of the ship's rigid ribs were observed still sticking out of the sediment on the ocean floor. The Akron's pennant is now part of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum's collection. In twenty fourteen, a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to the University of Akron's archival services enabled the Library division to preserve several films of the Akron, and several of them were referenced in this episode. We will link to them in the show notes. Yeah, it's just four, but they're really interesting. Particularly that one that shows them training to hook onto the trepeze is really spectacular. It seems very slow and relaxed, but when you realize what's happening, it seems almost discordant in how calm it seems, because I would be completely in a state of nerve wreck. So that is the Akron. We may eventually also do an episode on the sister ship the USS make in, but for the moment, that's the Akron. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Femis In History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Recently on the show, we talked about the balloons of World War Two, and while there were also airships in use during this period of time that we were covering, we did not really talk about them because airships could be steered and they could move under their own propulsions. They were sort of a whole different thing from the unpiloted balloons that we were focused on. We said that we would play an airship episode as an upcoming Saturday classic, and here it is. It is about the uss Akron, which was a US Navy airship during the nineteen thirties and the disaster that destroyed it in nineteen thirty three. And Joy, Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Willson In Tracy, did you know that the loss of the uss Akron was the biggest single tragedy in aviation history at the time that had happened. I did not know that level of detail. Yeah, because unless you're an aviation or a US Navy history buff, you might not know much about it. It's one of those things that kind of doesn't get a whole lot of attention. I think we might have mentioned it just as an aside in that episode that we did about the Hindenburg, but even so we did not get into any detail. Yeah, and even the Hindenburg disaster, which happened four years after the Akron was lost, resulted in far fewer lives lost, but probably because we have terrifying dramatic footage of the Hindenburg burning, that very tragic incident is far more commonly recalled in the public consciousness. So today we are going to talk about the USS Akron, one of two large rigid airships that were part of the US Navy's five year aircraft program, which was authorized in nineteen twenty six. And also just for clarity, a doubt would come up, but just in case, this is not to be confused with a much smaller, privately owned airship, also called the Akron. That airship, which was owned by adventurer and photographer Chester Melvin Vanaman, exploded off the coast of New Jersey in nineteen twelve, killing its owner. But that is a totally different thing. So for the one that we are talking about, and the fall of nineteen twenty nine, construction began on the ZRs four in Akron, Ohio that was eventually renamed for the city where it was built. The Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation had signed a contract with the Bureau of Aeronautics in nineteen twenty eight to build this ship, which was designed by doctor Carl Arnstein to be an airborne aircraft carrier. In a week into the build, there was an official ceremony to markets beginning. So sometimes if you're looking at the historical record, there are a couple different dates that are listed as the beginning of construction, and that's why there was some preliminary work done, and then a week after it they had this official ceremony, and during that serimony, the chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, drove a golden rivet into the main ring of the ship. By the spring of nineteen thirty one, the hull was well underway and the name for the ship, which was the Acron, like we said, was announced by Ernest Lee Jankie, who was the Navy's Assistant secretary. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, in cooperation with the city of Akron Ohio actually produced a short silent film about the Acron's construction. It runs about twenty minutes and it showcases all the features and innovations of the dirigible. It features the quote huge building from which the giant airship was hatched, as well as showing all of the construction phases of this massive airship. In it, you can also see workers raising the first ring into position, a massive gas cell being placed in the frame for an inflation and buoyancy test, the nose and tail of the craft being moved into position, and the sheets that comprised its outer covering being applied to the exterior of the frame, along with a number of other milestones in the Akrone's construction. Yeah, they show some cool footage of like them doping that exterior, which is when they coat it with its protective coating, and it just looks like dude's spray painting. It's kind of fun to watch. And the film also mentions the water ballast that was used to keep the zeppelin steady, which was supplied by exhaust vapors that were then condensed, so it was pretty smartly designed as well. On August eighth, nineteen thirty one, first Lady Missus lew Henry Hoover christened the airship as it was launched, meaning that it was floating above the hangar floor, but it was still contained there in the build bay. And when the dirigible was completed, it was seven hundred and eighty feet that's two hundred and thirty nine meters long, one hundred and thirty two point five feet or forty meters wide, and one hundred and fifty two point two feet or forty six point five meters tall. When fully inflated, its volume was six point five million cubic feet and it had been built with a sturdy, deep mainframe, and this design was actually a departure from the ringed design of prior dridgibles. It was inflated with helium, and it featured eight Mayback VL two engines, which were reversible and thus offered a really high degree of maneuverability for something this size. The Akron's design included a third of the interior space dedicated to a hangar which could accommodate five aircraft. We're going to talk about how those planes were launched and retrieved in just a bit. There were also two sections allocated to crew quarters which featured a galley, mess and washroom in addition to the sleeping areas. The water that passed through the airship's engines to cool them was then used to heat the crew quarters. Yeah That hot water they took away from the engines then got a second life as a heating implement. A month and a half after the christening, on September twenty third, the Akron had her first flight, which was conducted over Cleveland, Ohio, and before the dirigible was officially commissioned as a Navy vessel, an additional eight test flights were conducted, taking the ship farther and farther each time and testing all of the various mechanisms aboard, just shy of two years before the anniversary of the startup construction. On October twenty seventh, nineteen thirty one, the USS Akron was commissioned after having been delivered to the Lakehurst, New Jersey, Naval Air Station, with Lieutenant Commander Charles E. Rosendahl named as the commanding officer of the new vessel. The Akron had its first official Navy voyage on November second, nineteen thirty one, on a course that took it down the east coast of the United States to Washington, d C. And from that moment on it saw plenty of airtime, more than three hundred hours in flight over the course of just a few weeks. Following that, forty six of those three hundred hours were logged on a single mission that took the Akron on a round trip to Mobile, Alabama. And the Akron really proved itself repeatedly. You will see a lot of discussions of it as being plagued by problems, and it had problems, to talk about those in a minute, but it also did some pretty impressive things. On January ninth of nineteen thirty two, the Zeppelin took part in a search exercise that showed its endurance and its capabilities as a search vessel. The goal was for the Akron to locate a group of destroyers that were en route to Guantanamo Bay and then follow observe, and report their activities. Due to the inclement weather on January tenth, the crew of the Akron wasn't able to sight the destroyers initially, although the destroyers did report spotting the dirigible, but the airship kept looking for the destroyers and eventually was able to spot and report on two groups of ships on the eleventh, which made the scouting mission a success. Yeah, this was to be clear when we say it's an exercise, this is like a planned thing. There were no enemies that they were siting. This was all sort of training. And coming up, we're going to talk about an accident that the Akron had in nineteen thirty one, But first we were going to pause, have a little sponsor break. So the following month after where we left off, on February twenty second, nineteen thirty one, the Acron was damaged in an accident. It was being moved out of its hangar when a wind gust blew the tail off its moorings and the back end of the airship was then thrust downward and it impacted on the ground. Repairs to the damage, which was mostly concentrated around the lower fin, took two months. After this restoration was complete, its first voyage took place on April twenty eighth, nineteen thirty one, and this was a smooth nine hour flight, and soon after there was this really unique technology tested. The Acron tested what they called a spy basket on its next flight, and this spy basket was just as it sounds, this small addition that hung from the bottom of the airship with space for a man to sit in and observe the ground below, and the intent was that the ship itself could stay within cloud cover for the most part, while the basket could hang just below the clouds. This test did not go well. It really really did not go well, and it's kind of it's not surprising to me that it did not go well. The spy basket swung back and forth really wildly, and it was considered to be way too unstable for practical use. Fortunately, though, the test was conducted with a sandbag in the spy seat and not an actual person, so no one was harmed or just traumatized by the test. No additional work was done to try to make it viable either. They were like, this is not going to work, and they abandoned it immediately. Yeah, we're about to talk about an interesting mechanism that kind of ties into this, and I will explain. So we mentioned earlier that the Akron was intended to be an aircraft carrier, and the first time that function was tested was on May third of nineteen thirty two, and in that flight, which was conducted on the eastern seaboard along the New Jersey Coastline, pilots used the akron so called trapeze installation, which was a method for docking aircraft the dirigible in flight, and this kind of followed up on that spy basket idea because planes that were hooked on were still hanging under the airship initially, and those guys could also cite the ground, so that kind of replaced that whole idea. There's actually some footage of some of these types of connections and they give a sense of just how precise and skilled the pilots of the planes had to be. There was a rod assembly on the lower side of the akron that was the trapeeze that had another rod across the bottom with a very slight downward band in the middle, and so for a plane to dock, it had to have what looked like an inverted basket of rods also affixed to the top of it. So imagine on top of the cockpit there's this whole other little assembly, and at the apex of that inverted metal basket was a hook, So the pilot would have to carefully align his plane so that that hook would catch on to that trapeeze mechanism. Once the plane had hooked onto the trap and settled to the bottom of the bend, mechanisms would drop into place to keep the plane's hooks centered there, and then the plane and the pilot could be drawn up into the akron's internal hangar. This has been described in some writings as like better than any amusement ride on Earth. To me, it seems slightly terrifying, but your mind would be very well And I'm wondering. I'm wondering what all signaling and whatnot. They had to make connections just because earlier this year I toured the Midway and listened to pilots talk about landing on an aircraft carrier on the ocean. Yeah, which is also kind of a white knuckle experience. But like, there are definitely things that you have in your field division to align with in instruments, so I'm very curious. Yeah, since that was usually sort of centered underneath the airship, like they could align a little bit just by centering. But I mean it looks so sort of casual and relaxed. When you watch the footage, they just seem like they zip up. They're very it's smooth and they just latch on. But I can't imagine that there weren't some clunkers some way. But these were also incredibly well trained pilots. And the two pilots that performed that maneuver in the May third test were Lieutenant Daniel W. Harrigan and Lieutenant Howard L. Young. They first did the demonstration with an end to Y DASH one biplane trainer and then with a Curtis XF nine c DASH one sparrowhawk, and these tests went really well, and they actually performed them again the next day for members of the House Committee for Naval Affairs who watched all of these proceedings and how well this whole thing worked from a vantage point as passengers on the Akron. On May eighth, the Akron took flight again, this time traveling down the East Coast to Georgia and then cutting west to California. The ultimate destination for the Akron was Sunnyvale, California. The stop was planned at Camp Kearney in San Diego County, and this stop was a tricky undertaking. The crew at Camp Kearney had not brought in a dirigible like the Akron before, and the specialized moorings that were used at the Navy base in Lakehurst, New Jersey, were not on hand, and to further complicate the landing, the craft was lighter than normal because it had burned so much fuel on this cross country trip, and because the heat from the sun had warmed it, the gases inside had expanded to be less dense, so it just wasn't as easy to control as it normally would be. Those two factors led to a loss of control of the ship, and to prevent it from hitting the ground nose first, the mooring cable had to be cut. This did prevent a crash, but it also resulted in a tragedy. Four of the men who were holding lines to the ship didn't let go, and one of them fell from a height of fifteen feet which is four point six meters, and broken arm. Three others held on. Initially, Apprentice seamen CM Cowart was able to cling to the line and not lose his grip, and after a wild ride of about an hour, he was pulled onto the akron. Yeah, there was allegedly an attempt or a thought for a while that they were going to land just him on the ground, but then they realized they were not confident that they could do it without slamming him into the ground, so he ended up being pulled aboard. Two other men were not so lucky. Aviation Carpenter's mate, third Class Robert H. Edzel, and Apprentice Seaman Nigel M. Henton both died after they lost their grips on the lines that they held and they fell to their deaths, and when interviewed a few days later, Cowart, who was the man who had survived, said quote, I just hung on. I saw the other fellows fall and it didn't make me feel any too good, but there was nothing I could do about it except to hang on tighter. The Acron continued its missions. Though it stayed on the West coast for several weeks, it traveled north to the Canadian border and participated in scouting fleet exercises similar to the one that we mentioned earlier, when it searched for destroyers that were headed to Guantanamo Bay. The Akron once again performed admirably in these exercises. In June, the airship left California to head back to Lakehurst, and that journey took four days from June eleventh to June fifteenth, nineteen thirty two before the Akron was able to get home, and that was in part because it encountered several incidents of just really bad weather along the way, and when the Akron finally docked in New Jersey, the seventy nine main crew was exhausted from the journey. When they're described as coming down the gang plant, they just all sound like they were completely depleted. And the next several weeks brought a welcome respite from flights as the airship underwent maintenance and repairs. In July, the Akron was once again air ready and assisted in a rescue mission when the yacht Curlew went missing. This had been part of a six hundred and twenty eight mile which is one thousand and eleven kilometer race from Montauk to Bermuda. When the boat and the six people on it were lost during some bad weather. All the other twenty five yachts made it through, but contact with the Curlew had been lost. The Akron was ordered to fly in circles along the course from the Curlew's last known location and to try to report results back to naval operations. It was eventually found off the coast of Nantucket. Yeah, but that yacht search had caused a little bit of a pause in the Akron's training missions, But we're going to get right back into that after we first take a quick break to hear from one of the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. So the focus of the Akron's efforts at that point rescue missions for yacht's aside, was continued experimentation and development of the trapeze system. They really wanted to primarily just drill the pilots so that they would be extremely good at this. And the man in charge of these ongoing trapeze experiments, as appointed by Rear Admiral Moffatt, was Commander Alger Herman Dressel, and under Dressel's leadership, the Akron continued to advance its trapeze work, eventually achieving the ability to manage a full load of Curtis F nine C two Sparrowhawks on August twenty second, nineteen thirty two. There was a new problem, though, due to a timing accident and the relay of orders because the command was given to early the dirigibles. Finn hit a beam in the hangar as it was being taken off at moorings. This put a stop to the trapeze training that had been underway while the Finn had to be repaired, but the last quarter of nineteen thirty two still yielded eight successful flights for the Akron, so that a little accident had happened in August and they were able to repair it pretty quickly. Training continued for the trapeze system as well as training for the gun and lookout cruise, and they also worked with a formation scouting setup to test that where two planes flanked the Akron as they performed search exercises. In early nineteen thirty three, the Akron had a leadership change. Commander Dressel was moved to the akron sister ship, the USS, making His replacement was Commander Frank McCord. This personnel change took place on January third, nineteen thirty three, and almost immediately McCord was underway on a flight with his new command and the Akron. On this first flight under McCord traveled down the East coast to Florida, stopping in Miami Dade County at Opalaca, Florida, to refuel. This is not to be confused with the very very familiar sounding Opalaika, which is a city in Alabama. After the refuel at the Naval Reserve Aviation Base in Opalaca, the Akron proceeded to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This mission was to inspect bases, and the crew performing those inspections was actually taxied from the Akron in flight to the bases via an into Y one biplane. Once the inspection rounds were completed, Commander McCord and his crew took the Akron back to New Jersey. Inclement weather kept the Akron grounded for several weeks at Lakehurst, but it wasn't long before the trapeze training continued. And as we mentioned when describing the trapeze mechanism, it really did require an incredibly deft hand on the part of a pilot to hook onto the airship. So it really if it seems like we're just saying over and over that they were doing a lot of training in this particular area, it's because they were. It was needed to get those pilots just so proficient that they could do it almost without having to think. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was morn in as the thirty second President of the United States on March fourth, nineteen thirty three, the Akron was overhead, but just a week later, on March eleventh, the Akron once again left its northeast home of Lakehurst. This time, the mission took the airship to Panama, stopping once again at Opalaca, Florida en route, and after that the dirigible and its crew were on course for the Naval station at Balboa in the Panama Canal zone, which sits just at the south end of the canal if you're looking at it, and that's the entrance from the Pacific Ocean. And as with the Akron's mission to Cuba, the objective in this case was an inspection, this time of a possible site for an air base. Once the inspection was concluded, the Akron headed back to Opalaka. This time, additional drills were conducted at the Florida base. The gun crews got target practice using the N twoy ones as targets. As March nineteen thirty three came to a close, the Akron headed back to New Jersey from Florida, but the airship wasn't moored for long. On April third, another mission began, and this time it was intended to help calibrate radio direction finding stations along the New England coast which were used for radio triangulation, but the voyage wasn't smooth. When the Akron passed over Barnegot Light in Ocean County in New Jersey at ten pm on April third, the airship was already dealing with severe weather. Two and a half hours later, at twelve thirty am on April fourth, the Akron was whipped by a particularly powerful gust and dropped tail first into the sea. There had been a witness to the Akron struggle with the wind, and that was amanship called Phoebus that had seen lights in the air dropping down toward the Atlantic, and the crew aboard the Phoebus actually thought they were witnessing a plane crash. So Phoebus altered course to investigate, and about a half hour after the incident they pulled the first person from the water, and that was Lieutenant Commander Henry V. Wiley, who was unconscious at the time. At this point, the crew of the Phoebus still thought they were finding the results of a plane crash. They had no idea that the Akron had been in the area. Phoebus also sent out its boat to widen the search for victims, the boat crew fished Bosun's mate, second Class Richard E. Deal, Aviation Metalsmith's second Class Moody E. Irvin, and Chief Radioman Robert W. Copeland out of the turbulent water. Copeland died after being transferred to the Phoebus, despite efforts to revive him. As the rescue effort continued, Lieutenant Commander Wiley regained consciousness and communicated to the crew of the German vessel that it had been the Akron and not a plane they saw descend into the sea. For more than five hours, Phoebus continued to search for survivors, but their efforts were for naught. Two more men actually died in the search effort when another blimp, the non rigid J three, which also served out of the base at Lakehurst, went on a mission to search for survivors. Five men survived the unsuccessful forced landing of the J three, but there were two killed. Five and a half hours after the Akron went down, the Coastguard destroyer Tucker arrived on the scene. The Phoebus transferred the body of Chief radium In Copeland and the surviving crew of the Akron over to the Tucker. In the search for any additional survivors, the destroyer Tucker was joined by the Portland, a heavy cruiser, destroyers Cole McDougall and Hunt, the cutter Mojave, and two Coastguard planes, but no additional members of the crew of the Akron were found. This loss was particularly noteworthy because of the leadership staff that was on board when this accident happen. So in addition to the regular staff, Commander McCord, Rear Admiral Moffett, his aid, Commander Henry B. Cecil, the commander of the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, and several additional guests were also on the Akron when it went down. In total, seventy three men lost their lives when the Akron was destroyed. So for comparison, we mentioned the Hindenburg at the beginning of the show, and the death toll in the Hindenburg disaster was thirty six, one of whom was a man who had been on the ground. Sixty two of the people aboard the Hindenburg survived, which is a far greater proportion than the three who survived the Akron. Not long after the disaster, Wiley, Richard Deal and Moody Irvin appeared together before the public, and Wiley described to the events of April fourth. This way, we were rescued by the German tanker Phoebus and are the sole survivors. Just before the accident to the Akron, I was in the control tower on the left side of the control tower. Our first indication of being near the center of the storm was when ship shuddered violently, and per Wiley's account, the crew did not realize how closely they had gotten to the ocean until they had sudden visibility that they were only about three hundred feet from the water, and he continued quote, the order was given to stand by for a crash. The ship hit the water within thirty seconds of that order, and most of us, I believe, were catapulted into the water. We were in the water about forty five minutes, and we are now ready for duty in airships or wherever we may be assigned. Incidentally, Herbert Wiley had been passed over for command of the Acron when both Dressel and McCord were appointed. Wiley had notified McCord of the weather conditions that could include potentially hazardous storms before the ACRONA had left for the mission, but McCord had determined that they should proceed as planned. A storm that developed in their path was one of the most powerful in a decade. Yeah Even though there had been indications that there was going to be inclement, whether there was no sense of how bad and how violent this storm was going to be. Wiley was commanding officer aboard the Akron's sister ship, the USS make In, when it went down in a storm off the California coast just a year later. Wiley also survived that incident. While portions of the Akron were salvaged from the sea weeks after it sank, in two thousand and two, additional debris was explored by the Navy. Portions of the ship's rigid ribs were observed still sticking out of the sediment on the ocean floor. The Akron's pennant is now part of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum's collection. In twenty fourteen, a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to the University of Akron's archival services enabled the Library division to preserve several films of the Akron, and several of them were referenced in this episode. We will link to them in the show notes. Yeah, it's just four, but they're really interesting. Particularly that one that shows them training to hook onto the trepeze is really spectacular. It seems very slow and relaxed, but when you realize what's happening, it seems almost discordant in how calm it seems, because I would be completely in a state of nerve wreck. So that is the Akron. We may eventually also do an episode on the sister ship the USS make in, but for the moment, that's the Akron. 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