Dirigible Dreams: September 1, 1931
The U.S.S. Akron was a marvel, a 785-foot-long heliumpowered dirigible that could travel 10,580 nautical miles without refueling. The Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp. and its president, Paul W. Litchfield, built the Akron for the U.S. Navy—it cost some $84 million in current dollars— but it was easy to envision using similar aircraft to ferry both passengers and mail “with perfect safety and dispatch.” Sure, past airships had “been destroyed by . . . fire or structural failure,” but by fall 1931, it appeared that both problems had “been minimized to the disappearing point.”
That titanic bravado was dashed in the waves of the Atlantic Ocean less than two years later when a squall off the New Jersey coast brought down the Akron, killing all but 3 members of its 76-person crew. The world’s fascination with zeppelins would collapse four years later, when the Hindenburg—filled with hydrogen after U.S. trade restrictions sapped Nazi Germany’s helium supply—concluded its 63rd flight in a famous inferno that destroyed the balloon and killed 36 people.