CHAPTER III American Airships in Two Wars
Compared to British and French airships, American dirigibles made a less impressive record during the first war.
This for the reasons that there were few enemy activities in our waters until the very end, and that there were few American airships to oppose them. Virtually the entire airship organization had to be created after we got into the war.
Naval attachés abroad had been watching blimp operations over the English channel, and on the basis of rather meager information which they furnished, Navy designers were working on plans, when the Secretary of the Navy, in February 1917, 60 days before the declaration of war, ordered 16 blimps started at once.
Nine of these were to be built by Goodyear which had at least given some study to the principles, had built a few balloons, one of which, flown by its engineers out of Paris, had won the James Gordon Bennett Cup Race.
No one in this country, however, knew much about building airships, and less about flying them after they were built. Operating bases would have to be built and the very construction plants as well. The first Goodyear airship under the Navy order was completed before the airship dock (hangar) at Wingfoot Lake was ready, and the ship had to be erected in Chicago and flown in.
The engineers who built it, Upson and Preston, made their first airship flight in delivering the ship to Akron, using theoretical principles applied in the international balloon race the year before, to make up for their lack of practical experience.
Those first ships were small, slow, lacked range, uncovered many shortcomings. Flight training was done under adverse circumstances. Men had to teach themselves to fly airships, then teach others to fly them.
The pilots were chiefly engineering students from the colleges, with a sprinkling of Navy officers. They had to take their advanced training abroad at British and French bases, because there were no facilities here, and in fact did most of their flying abroad. By the end of the war American pilots were manning three British airship bases and had taken over practically all the French operations, including the large base at Paimboeuf, across the Loire from St. Nazaire, on the French coast.