Akron Goes Down

At sundown one day last week the U. S. S. Akron cast off from her stub mast at the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, N. J., floated silently and moodily into a cheerless sky. One after another the eight engines were started. Then Commander Frank C. McCord bent a course eastward to sea; the 70 officers and crew settled down to one more of the Akron's routine training flights. This one was to be most casual--a two-day cruise off the New England coast for calibration of the ship's radio compass; a trifling job compared to the 81-hr. Canal Zone flight from which the Akron had last month returned. Only distinction was the presence aboard of seven guest officers, most notably Rear Admiral William Adger Moffett, chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, hard-bitten champion of the Navy lighter-than-air program. He it was who fought and won the airship cause, against a stone wall of official opposition raised by the crash of the Shenandoah in 1925. Other guest officers were Commander Fred T. Berry, last skipper of the decommissioned Los Angeles; Lieut.-Colonel Alfred F. Masury of the Army Ordnance Reserve, vice president of Mack Trucks Inc.

At 8 p. m. the Lakehurst radio station heard the Akron's "all well." Communication was difficult. A Northeaster was whipping the Jersey coast; the crackle of lightning drowned the whine of radio's dots & dashes. At 10 p.m. the airship again reported her position. That was the last message heard from the U. S. S. Akron.

When midnight came and the Akron remained mute behind a curtain of wind, rain and thunder, Lakehurst tried not to worry. The Akron had ridden worse storms than this one appeared to be. Besides, she was at sea, where an airship belongs; not overland, to be twisted apart by line squalls as was the Shenandoah, or beaten into a hillside, as was Britain's R-101. As for her radio, that could easily go wrong with the atmosphere supercharged with electricity. Not until next day did Lakehurst, and the rest of the world, know what good cause it had to worry. . . .

At 8:45 p.m., little more than an hour after taking off, the Akron was nosing above a cloud of fog northeast near Philadelphia. From 30 miles to the south lightning split the sky. In another hour it was crashing on all sides of the Akron, but she continued to ride steadily. By 11 p.m., the lashing of wind and rain became severe. When the executive officer,

Lieut.-Commander Herbert V.Wiley, came on duty at midnight he changed the course to west. A half hour later the great ship plunged from its 1,600 ft. altitude. The commander reached for a row of pullcords overhead, yanked at them to release water ballast. Slowly, painfully, the shuddering Akron shouldered her way aloft again. An "all hands on" brought the off-watch from their bunks. Officers, bos'ns' mates, riggers, firemen groped their way along narrow catwalks to their stations.

Again the storm dashed the great ship downward, and this time clawed away a section of her belly fabric and part of her rudder. Again ballast was dumped; but the ship did not rise. Down, down she went--CRASH--upon the surface of the writhing sea. For a brief moment the 110-ton hulk floated while its buoyant helium hissed away into the gale. Then the pounding waves wrenched it to bits. Here and there, by the occasional brilliance of the lightning flashes, a witness could have discerned men of the Akron flailing about in the water. . . .

And there was a witness. On the bridge of the German tanker Phoebus, butting the storm under ballast, stood Capt. Dalldorf, taking a turn himself on the second mate's midnight watch. Gazing upward at the ugly sky, he saw, to his astonishment, the flashing red & green lights of an airship.

"Shortly afterward I saw lights flash on the water. I changed my course to approach the light and soon heard men hailing me from the water. I stopped the ship, turned on all lights, lowered boats and put life boats over the sides. I saw mattresses and wreckage and pulled one mat over the side of the boat. We got four men. I saw some men sink before we could get to them. After this no more men were found."

And no more men ever were found, alive. The Phoebus's first awful flash of the accident was picked up by a German-speaking operator of Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co. in Manhattan at 1:46 a.m. It simply reported the crash, and the rescue of four men. Immediately the Coast Guard sent cutters dashing to the position, 20 miles off Barnegat Lightship. The cruiser U. S. S. Portland steamed for the scene. Weatherbound, airplane pilots chafed and champed until dawn. Within a few hours a fleet of rescue ships were circling by sea and air around the Phoebus. They found nothing but small bits of wreckage. The Coast Guard destroyer Tucker took from the Phoebus the four men it had rescued, steamed with them to Brooklyn Navy Yard. They were Lieut.-Commander Wiley, veteran of the Shenandoah, who looks remarkably like Herbert Hoover; Bos'n's Mate R. E. Deal, a survivor of the Shenandoah crash; Machinist's Mate M. E. Erwin and Radioman Robert E. Copeland. When the Tucker had them aboard its flag came down to half mast. Radioman Copeland had died of injuries or submersion.

Of the 73 others--nothing, except two dead bodies, as yet unidentified. Search was continued for hours, but without hope of finding another man alive. (In course of the search the Navy blimp J-3 crashed into the ocean off the New Jersey coast. Of her crew of seven, Lieut.-Commander David E. Cummins and two others were killed.) Down with the Akron evidently, had gone the 71; among them Lieut. Robert W. Larson, the airplane pilot who only last month flew from the Akron to shore in the Canal Zone to visit his wife; among them Lieut. Wilfred Bushnell, co-winner of last year's International Balloon Races in Switzerland, and youthful Lieut. George C. Calnan who took the Olympic oath for all U. S. entrants in last year's Olympic Games; among them Rear Admiral Moffett, the vigorous, 63-year-old seadog who commanded the U. S. S. Chester during the U. S. occupation of Veracruz in 1914, and who later became the virtual custodian of the Navy's airship program.

Grief-stunned Lakehurst wondered if its yawning airship-dock would ever again be filled. For the loss of the $5,000,000 Akron and its wealth of man-power--worst air accident in history--revived in Washington all the old suspicion on the part of airship opponents that the ship was unairworthy (TIME, May 2, 1932 et ante), that dirigibles in general were a futile business.

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