The Rise And Fall of The Daughter of The Stars

XXVI

The Daughter of The Stars" : U.S.S. Shenandoah

Despite the disastrous end of the U.S. Army's airship program with the ill-fated Roma, the Navy, claiming far more experience with large vessels, undertook to build several rigid airships in the 1920s. The first one to be completed was U.S.S. Shenandoah (ZR-1). Her name means "Daughter of The Stars."

Shenandoah was 680 feet long and just under 79 feet in diameter. She carried almost 2.25 million cubic feet of helium, and could lift 54,000 pounds. Helium was so rare and expensive at the time that Shenandoah was rarely fully inflated. Its gas had to be shared with other U.S. airships.

Although the Navy was overseeing the contemporaneous construction of the U.S.S. Los Angeles (LZ-126 / ZR-3) in Germany, none of the Los Angeles' technical advancements were incorporated into Shenandoah. The Daughter of The Stars was a larger, helium-filled copy of the sausage-like German War Zeppelins of 1917. Unlike Los Angeles, designed as a passenger Zeppelin, Shenandoah was particularly spartan.

The sausage shape was less aerodynamic than the oblate shape, but the Navy calculated that the lighter Duralumin framework would counterbalance both the hull shape and helium's lesser lifting power. What they failed to account for was the increased tendency of the elongated hull to twist in flight.

 

U.S.S. Shenandoah moored to her tender, the U.S.S. Patoka

Shenandoah's stated purpose was to carry out reconnaissance missions, though she was also considered for such other service as Arctic exploration. She pioneered the use of mooring masts. She also completed the first transcontinental air flight across the United States.

As with Zeppelins in Germany, airships proved popular with the public, and Shenandoah made several public relations tours. She made 56 round-trip flights without incident. However, when The Daughter of The Stars was tasked with an extended tour of Midwestern State and County Fairs in the summer of 1925, her skipper, Lieutenant Commander Zachary Lansdowne balked. Lansdowne, a native Ohioan, knowing since birth the quick-changing, often cyclonic weather conditions over the summer heartland, pressed for the tour to be delayed until the late fall.

The Navy delayed the tour only until September, which filled Lansdowne with gloom, as it would any plainsman; and indeed his fears were borne out. On September 3, 1925, Shenandoah, pressed to keep to schedule, attempted to navigate a squall line over Lansdowne's home State.

Caught in a vicious updraft, the lighter-than-air-craft was pushed beyond her ceiling, and vented large amounts of helium; she dropped like a rock, only to be caught in a crosswind that torqued and twisted her hull. After negotiating a series of updrafts and downdrafts and being yawed violently, the hull structure failed, and the ship broke into three parts. The gondola struck the earth, killing Lansdowne and the command crew; the nose, still holding gas cells, dropped more gently, and the tail, with its fins, glided to earth. Fourteen of the 25 crewmen were killed.

One piece of the Shenandoah wreck. Within hours of the crash, the site had been picked clean by souvenir hunters who stole everything from uniform buttons to metal struts, and turned the wreck site into a macabre carnival. The public also, incidentally, made a mess of the Inquest since so much evidence was missing

The Navy's eventual inquest whitewashed any errors that Lansdowne may have made, but it also whitewashed its own role in the disaster; General Billy Mitchell, an advocate of air power, profoundly criticized the Navy's mishandling of the Shenandoah and was court-martialed as a result.

The Inquest ultimately held that a commanding officer had to take account of prevailing weather conditions in his operational area (a ruling which required no action but common sense), and suggested that the government establish a system of meteorological stations nationwide. Although these sound like sound bytes from a sidebar in the first chapter of a book entitled Airships For Idiots, they really point up the extraordinarily primitive state of air travel in those years. The meteorological network remained a paper dream until instituted by Pan American Airways in the 1930s.