REVIVAL OF ZEPPLINS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 71, Issue 35, 21 November 1950, Page 6

REVIVAL OF ZEPPLINS

RECOMMENDATION BY E.S. After several years’ retirement, Vice-Admiral Charles Rosendahl, America’s leading Zeppelin expert, has returned to the limelight with a demand that the nation revive the use of dirigibles for both peace and war, states the New York correspondent of the Sydney “Sunday Herald.” Commercially, he said, airships could fill the gap between comfortable but slow steamships and fast but relatively uncomfortable trans-ocqanic aeroplanes. Militarily, Zeppelins could be used for transport behind the lines where enemy aeroplanes were not operating, as radar sentinels around the country, as atomic experimental plants for aviation work, hnd as launching platforms for guided missiles and combat aeroplanes. Almost simultaneously, the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation in Akron, Ohio, announced that it planned to build the world’s largest blimp for the United States Navy. It would approach the Zeppelin’s of the Great War in size, and cost about 5,000,000 dollars.

Three other airships the same size would probably be built. Their task would be to combat Russia’s longrange Snorkel submarines. Admiral Rosendahl, who is 58, feels that the United States could have made great progress in building craft lighter than air, but for the series of disasters which began 25 years ago. For he has emphasised that dirigible losses were no heavier than . those which accompanied the development of aeroplanes. Admiral Rosendahl himself was nearly the victim of America’s first big disaster—the loss of the experimental dirigible Shenandoah m 1925. He was second in command of the airship when a storm struck it, hurled it 2000 feet up, and broke it in two. One section crashed, killing 13 officers and men. In the other section, Admiral Rosendahl and his men were taken for a fantastic ride. The nose of the section stood up like a cone and began spinning over farm houses, coalmines and villages in a 10-mue circle until the anchor lines caught in some trees. All aboard were i escued. , “To-day, 25 years later, we have little to show for such early sacrifices,” he says. I America built two other dirigibles. The Akron crashed off New Jersey in a storm in 1933 with the loss of 73 lives. In 1935 the sister ship, the Macon, suffered a structure failure and sank into the Pacific, off California, with the loss of 81 lives.