The Worst Air Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of
September 04, 2025 at 03:30PM
Robert Weintraub | The Atavist Magazine | August 2025 | 2,613 words (9 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 166, “American Hindenburg.”
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.
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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.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/04/zeppelin-navy-aircraft-disaster/
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