One instrument developed illustrates how the airship men were able to utilize past experience in a new project.
Mounted alongside the winch on the ground, it gave exact information, as often as was wanted, as to what the barrage balloon was doing, a mile or three miles up.
This assembly included a moving picture camera, which continuously, or at fixed intervals, or at any instant desired, by means of radio control, would photograph recording dials and show these things: wind velocity at the balloon, tension on cable, gas pressure inside the balloon, temperature of confined gas, temperature and humidity of the air surrounding the balloon, angle of attack at which the balloon faced the wind, both fore and aft and from side to side, also a clock, which showed the time the readings were recorded.
These pictures, when developed gave the engineers the data from which they could modify designs and arrive at a type of balloon which would ride most easily aloft, avoid undue tugging and surging on the cable--incidentally permitting smaller gauge and weight cable to be used for a given height with ample safety margin.
Perhaps the largest single result, however, growing out of the fleet operations was that it had created manufacturing facilities, ships and personnel on which the Navy could draw, as fully as it wanted, in emergency, and with little more delay than the time it took for a man to change his uniform.
Boettner, Sewell, Blair, Hobensack and Hill followed the others into the service. Hobensack's ground crew in California signed up with him in a body, and men from other ground crews, expert in rigging, in motors, radio, in mooring out and maintenance joined up. In the end only Fickes and Crum were left at Akron to build the new ships, and Sheppard, Crosier and Massic to test-fly them, then ferry them to their destinations.
The student pilots at Wingfoot Lake had finished their training just in time. About half of them went immediately into the Navy, were commissioned and sent to the various bases, the others remained at Akron as replacements to the other pilots, in testing and delivery flights, or on key posts in airship construction.
The experience accumulated by the blimp pilots under varying weather conditions over the country proved useful to the Navy, particularly in the expeditionary operations which coastal patrol would demand. It was useful as well in helping train navy aviation cadets for the growing airship fleet. Five of the pilots, Sewell, Boettner, Rieker, Stacy and Smith had reached the rank of lieutenant commander by the end of 1942, and Lange, full commander, had become commanding officer of a new Navy station on the west coast. Two of the public relations men, Lieutenants Petrie and Schetter, old airship troupers, followed the fliers into uniform.