The Glorious, Doomed Dirigible Shenandoah

New Yorkers had watched balloonists for more than a century by 1931. On Sept. 9, 1830, 30,000 people looked on as Charles Durant cast off from Battery Park in a hot air balloon. New Yorkers were fond of these stunts, and stunts are all they were, because hot air balloonists remained at the mercy of the uncharted winds and unpredictable weather. In 1899, Ferdinand, Count Zeppelin devised the first dirigible. Although blimps are safe and reliable within their limits, those include a length no greater than 360 feet, which restricts their payload and endurance: a gasbag any larger flexes under stress and becomes ungovernable. The dirigible, being a cluster of individual gasbags, or cells, enclosed within a cigar-shaped framework, covered with doped cotton fabric, has no flex problem. The airship can be much bigger, with more engines and a greater payload.

In 1919, when the experimental airship program of the U.S. Navy began, American industry had never built a dirigible. Therefore, the Navy ordered one from the British government. Cmdr. C.I.R. Campbell, who designed and constructed the ZR-2 (it did not last long enough to be named), was a naval architect without aeronautical experience. Later, an American investigator, after reviewing Campbell's notebooks, realized Campbell had not known how to calculate aerodynamic stresses?the loads imposed by the pressure of air when an airship is driven by its engines, which increase as the square of the speed?and had simply guessed it. This had an unhappy result. On Aug. 24, 1921, the ZR-2 was over Hull, England, on her fourth test flight when, according to the court of inquiry, her commander ordered the helmsman to turn the helm from mid-left to hard right. Before thousands of eyewitnesses, the airship buckled from the stress of turning under its own power on a calm day and fell burning into the River Humber.

In May 1919, the Navy established its first airship base at Lakehurst and began building the first American-made airship. Slender, cigar-shaped, her duraluminum framework covered with aluminum-painted doped cotton fabric, ZR-1 was 680 feet long?say, a little over two midtown blocks. Her range was 5000 miles. Six Packard 300-horsepower engines propelled her at 65 knots. Unlike ZR-2 and the German zeppelins, ZR-1 remained aloft with helium rather than flammable hydrogen. The ship's bridge crew worked in a control car suspended forward below the hull; the single keel, roughly 15 feet wide, was the ship's main street, containing galleys, water closets, the officers' and crew's berths, and fuel, water and ballast tanks.

On Sept. 7, 1923, three days after her first flight, a ground crew of 320 sailors and Marines walked ZR-1 out of Hangar No. 1 at Lakehurst. Her executive officer, having completed the checklist, turned to her commanding officer, Cmdr. Frank McCrary, USN, to formally request permission to take her up. "Permission granted," McCrary replied. The XO, his head and shoulders framed by the port window, leaned out and roared the command, "Up ship!" The ground crews released the lines, and ZR-1 began rising. At about 1000 feet, her motors kicked in, with "a distinct mellow boom comparable to the whistle of a large steamer." She climbed to 7000 feet to test her automatic gas valves (helium expands as the ship gains altitude; automatic valves blew off gas at an altitude of 6000 feet to prevent the gas cells from rupturing) and her control surfaces?the stabilizers, elevators and rudder.

Around 10 a.m., she set off for New York. McCrary had promised she would be over New York at 11:30 a.m. Around 11:20 a.m., she sailed over Todt Hill, Staten Island, and, engines thundering, the Stars and Stripes snapping in the wind, ZR-1 charged up the bay at 1600 feet, passing the Statue of Liberty and Governor's Island, dwarfing the three Army de Havilland biplanes sent up to greet her. Steamers sounded their whistles in welcome; coastal batteries boomed out salutes; the silvery airship returned down the East River. Tens of thousands filled the streets to see her. The flyby was a sensation, even a triumph: no one had ever seen anything like her outside the newsreels, and even The New York Times covered it.

ZR-1 was innately dramatic: she was huge, then the largest aircraft to fly over Manhattan. She was also loud: an eyewitness later wrote of the "deep, muttering vibration of air," of "sound unlike any other: sound I could feel; it poured from the sky, wave after wave...the deep throbbing grew louder and louder... It grew and grew...swelling and roaring with incredible power as it came on and on..." All that remained was to give her a name. On Oct. 10, 1923, Marion Thurber Denby, wife of Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby, walked into Hangar No. 1 at Lakehurst. ZR-1 floated lightly above her cradle?quiescent, but fully alive. Mrs. Denby christened her Shenandoah, which, she said, means "Daughter of the Stars."

In February 1924, Lt. Cmdr. Zachary Lansdowne relieved McCrary as commanding officer. Having trained in British airships during World War I, Lansdowne had more flight time than did any other naval officer; he was also a skillful shiphandler and a fine leader, who inspired loyalty and devotion among his subordinates. Under Lansdowne, she was thought a lucky ship.

On Sept. 2, 1925, the Shenandoah set off on a tour of the Middle West. She was aloft at 2:52 p.m., over Philadelphia by 4 p.m. and over Wheeling by 1:45 a.m. on Sept. 3. Around 2:30 a.m., the navigating watch officer, Lt. Lewis Hancock, observing lightning flashing to the north and west, called Lansdowne to the bridge. Shenandoah was then over Cambridge, OH, heading west by southwest.

At 4 a.m. Hancock was relieved by Lt. Charles Rosendahl; concerned by the weather, Hancock remained on the bridge to aid the captain. At 4:20, Rosendahl noted, she was making 38-40 knots at about 1700 feet. Then, at 4:23, she entered an updraft and began rising at 200 feet per minute. No one in the ship's company had experienced this before; indeed, as Rosendahl would later learn, no one in the world had. Lansdowne ordered her elevators put down and engines set to full power. Her ascent remained unchecked for six minutes. When she leveled off at 3100 feet at 4:30, she could not descend, and pitched and rolled in the turbulent air. Engine No. 2 overheated and failed at 4:34.

Then she entered another updraft, moving at 2100 feet per minute. As she rose past 6000 feet, the automatic valves began releasing helium. Lansdowne, knowing she was rising faster than the valves could safely release the expanding helium, ordered her main valves opened. Even so, she continued rising. Engine No. 1 failed at 4:46. She rose to 6060 feet before hitting a cold air mass at 4:47, and she began descending at 1500 feet per minute.

Now Lansdowne had to drop ballast to slow her fall. At 4:48, she struck yet another updraft and began rising yet again. Through all this, Lansdowne remained perfectly calm and the bridge crew continued working as calmly and efficiently as in normal flight. The commanding officer, knowing Shenandoah had lost nearly 10,000 pounds of lift with the released helium, having only 2500 pounds of ballast left, ordered the keel watch to stand by to drop fuel tanks as the only way to save the ship in another descent. He ordered Rosendahl up into the ship to see they were ready to drop fuel. Later, Rosendahl remembered, "the ship took a very sudden upward inclination." A violent gust of wind struck the underside of the bow, forcing it violently upward. It was as if she were being twisted in two directions at once. She rolled to port. Engine No. 4 broke from its attachments and swung down beneath the hull. At 4:52, over Caldwell, OH, her frame gave way and she broke in two.

For about 90 seconds, the rudder and elevator cables held the two halves of the ship together. Then the tail began sinking, pulling the control car aft by the cables. The strain snapped the car's suspension wires, one by one. Then the end links of the chains holding it to the hull opened and the control car fell away, throwing Lansdowne and his bridge crew into the sky.

The altimeter readings have been charted, showing the ship being tossed up and down as Lansdowne fought for her survival, until a sudden break records where Shenandoah was overcome. At the end of the chart is a long, jagged, downward line, recording the altimeter's final plummet through the Ohio night. Yet 29 men survived. The tail section fell slowly, the remaining gasbags easing its descent, and came safely to Earth with some 20 men. The other fragment, some 210 feet long, first soared to 10,000 feet. Rosendahl, clinging to the wreckage, realized they had a chance. There was 1600 pounds of ballast and the fuel tanks Lansdowne had ordered jettisoned, and the valves on the surviving gas cells still worked. He could maneuver the fragment.

Rosendahl assigned men to ballast bags and valves. He ordered the trail ropes?the lines held by ground crews to restrain the ship?dropped. Then he crawled to the open end of the nose, where the ship had torn apart, to see where he was going, and began giving orders. Around 5:45 a.m., while passing over farmland near Sharon, OH, Rosendahl saw Ernest Nichols, a farmer, already at work. Apparently, Nicholas had not noticed a 210-foot-long flying object dragging ropes through his fields. Rosendahl shouted, "Grab the ropes." Nichols looked up in astonishment, and then, to his credit, he grabbed a trail rope and snubbed it around two tree stumps. Then the crewmen jumped down.

By 7 a.m., Rosendahl, the senior officer, had listed the dead, injured and survivors. Fourteen crushed bodies had been recovered. Then he telegraphed Lakehurst, while the dead were embalmed and placed in coffins marked "not to be opened." Caldwell, the nearest town, was having a county fair. The yokels descended on the crash site, "providing in the hot, dusty sunlight a Roman holiday atmosphere the survivors long remembered with loathing." They stripped the tail section of most of its fabric, equipment, logbooks and instruments. They even broke into the dead crewmen's lockers for souvenirs. Nearly 80 years later, the crash of Shenandoah is the greatest event that ever happened in Noble County, Ohio. The locals have even set up a picnic ground where the ship's bow came down, on a farm east of highway I-77. To this day, framed pieces of Shenandoah's envelope and other memorabilia, including, one assumes, the personal property of her dead crewmen, are treasured at regional farm auctions and flea markets.

When the zeppelin Hindenburg burst into flame, crashed and burned within minutes while mooring at Lakehurst on May 6, 1937, the dirigible era ended. By coincidence, among the ships involved in recovering TWA Flight 800 was a Navy destroyer tender, USS Shenandoah.