WRECK OF THE MACON

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 86, 11 April 1935, Page 26

WRECK OF THE MACON

THE GRAF ZEPPELIN

The second of the United States expensive naval airships has been lost at sea fortunately with small loss of life and surviving examples of the large dirigible are now to be found only in Germany. Speculation on the cause qf the Macon's loss has little on which to work. It seems likely, states the "Manchester Guardian" in an editorial, that one or more ■ stern girders gave, way, possibly weakened by the stresses of a previous storm; that two gas chambers were then'deflated in rapid succession, allowing the ship to fall tail first into the sea. Yet not much buoyancy seems to have been lost;- there was no catastrophic crash, as with the Akron, -the sister ship. Probably it was exactly to this slow rate of the airship's descent, together with the calmness of the sea at the time, that many of the crew owe their lives. But it is probable that after this second disaster the United States will build no more giant naval airships. Many people must be wondering by what mysterious influence lighter-than-air vessels seem to have failed everywhere except in the land of their birth. The enduring success of the Graf Zeppelin has sometimes been attributed to something called "luck." This theory is unsupported by the facts. The Graf Zeppelin is now seven years old. She has crossed the Atlantic not once or twice as a "stunt" but exactly seventy-one times—that is to say, oftener than many ocean liners with years of service. She has flown altogether more than 600,000 miles. And she has made her voyages with steamship regularity, keeping to her published times of departure and arrival whatever the-.weather. She has flown a dozen times in storms of a velocity up to eighty miles an hour, often when all aeroplane and some sea services were suspended. The rest of the world can only look with envy and admiration at such a record.