Up Ship!

(See front cover)

The ribald advice of brother officers flew about the head of lean, lugubrious Lieut.-Commander Zeno W. Wicks, U. S. N. resigned, as he contemplated the habits of pigeons in Akron last week. The birds were to be used this week in the christening ceremonies of the Navy's huge new dirigible Akron, of which Commander Wicks is construction superintendent. It was his hope that the pigeons would flutter gaily out through the orange-peel doors of the dock and streak for home when Mrs. Herbert Hoover set them free. Hence the suggestions of the Akron's officers: "The thing to do is starve the pigeons first. . . . Get only males that haven't had shore leave for a month. . . ."

A solemn test flight was conducted, with the expert counsel of General Superintendent William H. Collins, who became pigeon-conscious when launching ships for Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corp. Two dozen racing homers from the coops of Tire-Builder Frank Eisentrout were released in the dock. They flapped gladly, promptly homeward. So impressive was the demonstration that the number of christening pigeons was raised to 48.

Other features of the christening were less problematical. When the hour came, the silver ship, largest ever built, outwardly completed, would have about 5,500,000 cu. ft. of helium in her twelve gas cells (capacity 6,500,000 cu. ft.), more than enough to make her buoyant. Handling-lines manned by workmen would hold her fast to the concrete deck of the dock. Under the ship's blunt nose, with its shiny metal tip projecting 75 ft. overhead, was to be a flag-draped wooden platform, festooned with microphones, crowded with bigwigs of the Navy and of Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp. There would sit Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ernest Lee Jahncke. Assistant Secretary for Aeronautics David Sinton Ingalls and goldbraided Rear Admiral William Adger Moffett, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics; and big-framed, white-haired Paul Weeks Litchfield, president of Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp., looking down on his two bald-headed vice presidents Dr. Karl Arnstein, builder of 70 Zeppelins for Germany, and Commander Jerome Clark Hunsaker, U. S. N., retired, and his well-thatched vice president Fred M. Harpham. Front & centre Mrs. Hoover's place would be marked by the end of a red-white-&-blue ribbon leading upward to a small closed hatch in the underside of the dirigible's snout.

Alongside the control car, an envied company of eight white-uniformed officers & 51 enlisted men, nucleus of the Akron's personnel, were to stand rigidly abreast of their skipper, Lieut.-Commander Charles Emery Rosendahl. An orchestra of 500 high-school pupils was to render "The Star Spangled Banner" and, as the last note whispered through the cavernous dock, Mrs. Hoover would yank the ribbon, opening the little hatch, tumbling out Frank Eisentrout's 48 astonished pigeons. Then it would be Zeno Wicks's moment to give the signal "up ship!" The workmen would slack off the mooring tackle and up would go the Akron about five feet clear of her metal supports, to hover for a few moments until another signal brought her down again.

After her first upping, a hundred-&-one details of internal construction will be completed and the Akron may be hauled out by her mobile mooring mast for a first test flight late this month. Yet to be finished are such equipment as the controls of the steering and elevating surfaces; the radio, designed to transmit over a 6,000-mi. range; the telephone system of 18 instruments; the system for electric power control throughout the whole ship by a switchboard weighing only 200 lb.; the crew's quarters within the envelope. These items, like all others that went into the Akron, must be passed by Lieutenant Thomas G. W. ("Tex") Settle, Navy inspector on the job, before the ship is taken out for tests. Test flights warranting, the Akron may fly to the National Air Races at Cleveland sometime between Aug. 29 and Sept. 7, thence to Lakehurst for formal commissioning in the service of the Navy.

Moored side by side, the Akron will dwarf the Los Angeles. She will make the Graf look slender; only 9 ft. longer, the Akron is 32.9 ft. bigger in diameter and fatter throughout than the pencil-shaped Graf. Another difference between the two old ships and the new one will be the projection of eight propellers, four from each of the Akron's flanks, instead of the five large "eggs" (gondolas), each of which houses an engine on the Los Angeles and the Graf. Because her cells are filled with helium, the Akron's Maybach motors can be and are carried within the envelope, for accessibility, streamlining, speed. Each propeller--two-bladed, wooden, mounted at the end of an outrigger shaft--can be turned down to whirl in a horizontal plane (helicopter-like) as an aid to taking off and landing. (The whirling direction is reversible, too.)

At a quick glance the observer is struck by four broad stripes of horizontal aluminum piping which follow the skin of the envelope from above each propeller, well up toward the top on each side. These are the condensers which recover water from the gasoline burned by the engines, and return it as ballast. Theoretically, 135 lb. of water may be recovered from every 100 lb. of gasoline (taking additional moisture from the air). In practice, the Akron's engineers expect to get back at least enough to compensate for the lightened fuel load.

Also noticeable is the smallness of the Akron's control car compared to the passenger gondola of the Graf Zeppelin. Not built for sightseers, the car accommodates only the officers and crew actually directing and navigating the ship. Inside the envelope are the captain's quarters, the radio room, the photographic laboratory.

Not visible to the outsider are countless other details which make the Akron unique. The keels, for instance: instead of just one along the bottom, from nose to tail, the Akron has three--one under the top of the envelope, the two others along the sides, about a quarter of the way up from the bottom. Through each keel frame runs a triangular catwalk, the upper one giving access to the safety release valves above the helium bags. The lower ones serve as corridors to the engine rooms, airplane hangar, crew quarters, galley, messrooms; leading forward to the mooring apparatus and aft to an emergency control car inside the lower fin.

Officers' living quarters are on the starboard side, crew's on the port. Each room is about 8 by 10 ft., fitted with two pairs of double-decked, canvas-bottomed bunks and locker space. Ordinarily two watches of men will be carried, two men sharing a bunk in turn to save weight. (Normal flight crew of the Akron: eleven officers & 8 men plus pilots of planes carried aboard.) An innovation on dirigibles: each room has a floor register to admit hot air from the engine rooms.

Despite the space-economy that dictates bunk-sharing, there are three separate messrooms, for officers, chief petty officers, crew. Chairs and tables are made of aluminum. In the galley is a cookstove weighing only 110 lb., burning propane gas. Also in the galley (as in the toilets) is a capacious sanitary garbage reservoir to hold refuse until it can be dropped harmlessly.

Other invisible features:

P: The gelatin-latex treated cotton fabric, developed by Goodyear-Zeppelin for gas cells to take the place of goldbeater's skin (intestine of cattle) heretofore used in dirigibles. (To supply the Akron, the intestines of 1,500,000 cattle would have been required.)

P: The cellophane coating on every duralumin* girder of the Akron's framework, wherever it is touched by the envelope. Purpose: to protect the metal against the acid in the "dope" with which the envelope is varnished.

P: The holes punched in every duralumin girder to lighten it until it looks like a piece of metal lace (yet the girder is made stronger than before by flanging the edges of the holes).

What went into the Akron:

10,000,000 parts

6,500,000 rivets

35,000 sq. yd. envelope fabric

55,000 sq. yd. gas cell fabric

1,000 mi. of seam thread

1,500 mi. piano wire

21 mo. labor

$5,250,000/- (approximately)

What the Akron is:

7,400,000 cu. ft.

785 ft. long

132.9 ft. diam.

240,000 lb. empty

What the Akron should do:

Lift 162,000 lb. in addition to herself.

Fly 84 m.p.h. top speed.

Fly 10,580 mi. at 50 m.p.h. without refuelling.

Climb (rate of climb 4,000 ft. per min.)

Of all personages who were to attend the christening, four were most acutely concerned: quiet, young Commander Rosendahl, about to receive the Akron as his command, a veteran of 3,333 hr. dirigible flight; Dr. Arnstein, gentle-mannered, owlish, designer of the ship, who deprecated the celebration as "boasting before the baby actually walks"; hardbitten Admiral Moffett who won the $8,000,000 authorization for the Akron and her sister (ZRS-5) in the face of terrific opposition aroused by the Shenandoah disaster; and Goodyear-Zeppelin's President Paul Weeks Litchfield.

President Litchfield ("Litch," "P. W.," "the Old Man"--but not to his face) is a shipbuilder by heritage. Among his ancestors were George Soule, Mayflower passenger; also Alexander Standish and Sarah Alden, kin of famed Miles and famed John. His immediate forebears, notably the ship-owning and sailing Robinsons of Bath, Maine (on his mother's side) were engaged in the shipping industry of New England. He spent much of his boyhood on the waterfront of Boston, where he was born, and Bath where his family summered. When he accepted President Frank A. Seiberling's offer of a job with Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in 1900, it was with misgiving. Akron was so far inland.

In Akron, Mr. Litchfield enjoys saying, his dislike of a landsman's life "forced him up in the air." He made his first balloon flight in 1911 and as superintendent spurred his company into the business of making balloons. Yet he never lost his love of salt water. He makes an ocean voyage at least once a year, keeps a summer home at Plymouth, Mass. His spacious estate in Akron's smart West Hill section is named "Anchorage." The gate is flanked by two great anchors; the rooms are filled with many a marine trophy. But the weathervane on his flagpole and the firescreen in his living room are in the form of Zeppelins. Conversely, most of the Goodyear blimps were named for a yacht which has defended the America's Cup (Puritan, Volunteer, Mayflower, Defender, Vigilant). President Litchfield frequently rides in the blimps, which sometimes land on his grounds, once picked him from the deck of a liner, once took him from trainside in the mountains of California. But he has never flown in a Zeppelin.

At 56 (his birthday fell last fortnight) "P. W." is big, erect, a typical Yankee shipbuilder only using duralumin for oak, Maybachs for mainsails, the sky for the sea. He does not drink; close associates can recall perhaps a dozen times when they have seen him smoke a cigaret in recent years. He drives one of several automobiles to and from his air-conditioned office. He exercises in his own gymnasium at home, riding an electric horse, heaving a medicine ball, does not chum with Akron's other leading citizens, Firestones and Seiberlings. He does not invite his Goodyear "cabinet" to exercise with him, but he does summon them to lengthy breakfasts about once each month.

"P. W.'s" outstanding hobby is his interest in boys. He has no sons of his own, save two legal wards but his plant is aswarm with likely lads from engineering colleges, many from his own Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Proud as he was about this week's milestone in his company's affairs, President Litchfield was frank in saying that, to him, the new Navy ship was but a means to an end: the building of commercial air liners, as big as the Akron and bigger, to ply regular routes across Atlantic and Pacific. It was to this end that International Zeppelin Transport Corp. and Pacific Zeppelin Transport Corp. were founded (TIME, Nov. 4, 1929); to this end Commander Hunsaker and his aides have been working for months in a Manhattan office building, making imaginary daily sailings of Zeppelins on weather charts covering 40 years of Atlantic weather. Nothing can be done before the Government guarantees mail subsidies, but when the time comes, Goodyear-Zeppelin can set to work with equipment, talent and experience gained from the Navy contract.

*Preferred pronunciation: dur-al'-u-min. /-A 10,000-ton cruiser costs $13,000,000. A battleship: $27,000,000.

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