A Capital Ship

XLIII

Although the keel is not very visible along the bottom of the ship, the latitudinal rings and the longitudinal girders that form this new airship’s skeleton are very evident. Inside the skeleton went gas cells, machinery and, in later dirigibles, decks

While passenger zeppelins had only one passenger class --- First --- that was the equivalent of a posh hotel or at least the best accommodations on the Century Limited or the Orient Express, the crews of the big dirigibles lived in conditions that were at worst primitive and at best spartan.

A view of the bewilderingly complex but typical structure of the U.S.S. Macon

Even on the Graf Zeppelin the officers and the crew lived in the keel. The keel of an airship was a box girder structure at the bottom of the ship from which the rings were built up.

Fuel tank, U.S.S. Akron

The box girder of the keel was subdivided into a number of compartments. Some of the compartments contained machinery, some oil or fuel or ballast tanks, some cargo, some passengers' luggage, some mail, and some the ships' stores. And spaced along the keel from fore to aft were crew compartments.

On the earliest airships the crew compartments were tiny spaces that had hammocks, or later, double tiers of camp beds and small personal lockers bolted to the supports of the box girder facing each other across a narrow walkway. These accommodations were often enclosed by canvas sheeting on the sides, meant more to restrain a man from falling off his rack in rough weather than for any kind of privacy. They were not otherwise enclosed, and a man lying on the top bunk went to sleep with the sight of the ship's girder structure and the gas cells imprinted on his eyes.

Crew accommodations, U.S.S. Akron

Crew accommodations, U.S.S. Macon

It was an environment filled with decibels. Throughout the flight automatic valves opened and closed without warning, ballast pipes flushed, pumps banged away repetitiously at their various tasks, gas cells hissed, and men at work called to each other from various points within the hull, shouting to be heard over the noise. The outer envelope rattled nonstop in the hurricane speed winds caused by the ship's passing, and rain, when it came, thundered on the doped fabric like a torrent on a circus tent, echoing dully throughout the hull space. Real thunder could shake a man's bones in a storm, and lightning could cast its sudden flashes right through the hull covering. Tears in the hull were not all that uncommon, and the sight of real daylight would send men into a scurrying frenzy to save the ship. There was no ventilation system and the hull stank of fetid air, oil, gas and the ozone smells of busy electrical equipment. And it could be freezing cold given the season or the altitude.

Inside the engine gondola of a German airship

It was a rare --- and prized --- man who could harden himself to crew in such conditions, and most airshipmen either were former sailors or from seagoing families. There was a very good reason that the responsibility of the American airship fleet rested with the U.S. Navy. The men who crewed the Shenandoah, the Los Angeles, the Akron and the Macon were sky sailors, not aviators.

The Officers’ quarters on the Hindenburg

Though the crew accommodations improved as airships improved (on the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg the crew spaces were enclosed by pasteboard walls that at least spared a man from looking up at gas cell netting all night), the crew space never became more than functional. The senior officers shared a compartment and the Captain was granted the relative luxury of a solo cabin not much larger than a lavatory. It was not much. But it was something, especially if, like Dr. Eckener and Ernst Lehmann, a man had crewed the small  Viktoria Luise or the smaller Bodensee or had flown the strictly utilitarian War Zeppelins.