Historic Airship Pictures (the Shenandoah, the Los Angeles, the Akron and the Macon as well as the Zeppelins and many more

© U.S. Naval Historical Center

The web is a big place and there are many hidden gems, websites that have been put together that contain a wealth of information but see only a few visitors. This post today was inspired by two pictures that I found online. Jim Ford had linked to them on his Delicious account One of the pictures was the homepage of George Starcher called Georges World he has a small section on Airships and some really nice pictures of the USS Los Angeles.
The second picture that Jim had linked to brought me through the Wikipedia to the Naval Historical Center I had bookmarked the website before but got lost in it's vastness. The best thing to navigate that website is the Search function. With this and a bit of knowledge about the Navy Airships you can get to the pages of the:

• USS Shenandoah (ZR-1), Airship 1923-1925
• USS Los Angeles (ZR-3), Airship 1924-1939
• USS Akron (ZRS-4), Airship 1931-1933
• USS Macon (ZRS-5), Airship 1933-1935

But you can also find pictures of the mast ship USS Patoka even with airships nearby or moored to the mast the resolution of all those pictures is not huge but good enough it makes a very interesting browse.

If the big Navy rigids aren't you favorites, how about some German Zeppelins? While continuing my search for great historic airship sites I stumbled accross this page called "Luftschiff Zeppelin" I had never seen this page before but was so much more surprised what a wealth of information and content the site had to offer. It contains information about all historic Zeppelins from LZ1 all the way to LZ131 either by serial number or name. So have a look at the Luftschiff Database you have to select either serial number (Baunummer) or name (Bezeichnung). But the page does not stop at the information it contains lot of pictures of airships (Luftschiffe) hangars and people from the industry (Luftschiffer). It contains a database of people and hangars with additional information. Eventhough the page is in german it's a real hidden gem. And if your German is rusty the auto-translated English page is also available here

But those aren't the only good historic resources with pictures. The Homepage of Ford U.Ross featuring pictures of Navy Blimps is a great page. Also a wealth of information can be found at Pilot und Luftschiff unfortunately also a German page but you can find information about Airships check out a lot of galleries find out about different airship types and much more. For the English translation follow this link. There are many more interesting historical websites for example DJ's Zeppelin Page or the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society that contain more historical images and information.

We have shown you only a few of those great websites that you should bookmark because they are gems and not easy to be found. We save everything we find and write about in our delicious account currently 520 bookmarks to pages, pictures, videos and other airship related resources on the web. You can take a look at all our bookmarks by going to delicious. Do you know some hidden gems? A site that you think is a fantastic airship related website that we should mention but maybe haven't yet? Is there a link that we have not in our bookmarks? Let us and everyone else know by posting your favorite airship website in the comments section.

The Snow Bird a record breaking Airship

Today we want to look at a very special airship that made history. The Navy Blimp ZPG-2, No 141561 called the Snow Bird. That went out to challenge the long distance record that was once set by the Graf Zeppelin on it's non-stop flight from Friedrichshafen, Germany to Tokyo, Japan. The two places where the Zeppelin is flying again today. Silver Donald Cameron brought the famous blimp back into our awareness with his column "Another way to fly: blimps" in the Chronicle Herald. The Snow Bird flew from South Weymouth, Mass to Europe, Africa and back across the Atlantic to Key West, Florida marking it the the longest unrefuelled flight ever made by an airship both in distance and time covering 9448 miles (15205 km) in 11 days. So when did that happen one might ask, it happened over 50 years ago and ever since no airship has ever come even remotely close to this record.

To learn more about the flight of the Snow Bird you might want to check out a few more great resources. The Naval Historical Center released a publication called Kite Balloons to Airships...the Navy's Lighter-than-Air Experience outlining the 75 years of history in LTA (Lighter-Than-Air) at the Navy. Chapter "XVI. LTA Records Set in the 1950s"(PDF) outlines the story on the Snowbird in great detail with many pictures. But the whole publication is worth a read. It's a free PDF download.

The Naval Airship Association also had a great article with pictures in their official newsletter The Noon Balloon(PDF) around page 18. Click here to get the Noon Balloon Number 73.

These where the Specifications of the ZPG-2 also called N Class Blimp :
General characteristics

• Crew: 21
• Length: 343 ft 0 in (104.57 m)
• Diameter: 76 ft 0 in (23.17 m)
• Height: 107 ft 0 in (32.62 m)
• Volume: 1,011,000 ft³ (23,648 m³)
• Powerplant: 2 × Wright R-1300-2 radials,, 800 hp (600 kW) each

Performance

• Maximum speed: 80 mph (128 km/h)
• Endurance: over 200 hours

How much would it cost to build and operate such a ship today? Would it not be a lot cheaper than 50years ago, wouldn't an airship build with new composite materials perform much better than this 50 years old ship? There is a future for airships, if it was possible to build something like that 50 years ago it's an easy task to build it today. Just take the old design, replace the envelope material with a better one and the engines, too and start from there. A proven airworthy design which could be optimized in future iterations.

So I can only agree to Silver Donald Cameron that airships have a great future ahead. They can provide alternative ways of travel with less fuel consumption than any modern air plane. Sure they are slower but there are lot's of applications where time is not so much an issue. Check out Mr Camerons Blogs Sailing Away from Winter and Silver Donald on Sunday for more columns and bits by him.

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Russian Air Force testing airships and the Navy MZ3A

According to an Interfax AVN Article posted by Jim Smith onto the Airship-list:

The Russian Air Force is exploring the ways of using airships for military purposes.

Unfortunately we do not have access to the Interfax source, so we refere to an article available on the Russia Info Center which is publicly available. According to the article the Aeronautial testing center hosts and operates the airships "Aerostatika-01" and "Aerostatika-02" and has trained over 10 pilots already. So it looks like Russia is actually investing in airships where as the Navy just took the MZ3A almost out of service. It could be seen at the Fleet Week at the end of May but that was already one of the last scheduled flights. Currently the MZ3A is still stationed in Lakehurst. It was supposed to go out of the official service by June 1st 2007 and remain under "pressure watch". Mid July the Airship still awaited it's deflation, until rumours surfaced that flight activities will be resumed in the late summer and early fall. So the hope remains that this is not the end of the Navy Airship programm. These informations come from Rick Zitarosa who continues to write great articles as emails to the Colorado Airship-list unfortunately he did not give us any permission to publish his articles, since there is no archive available those emails are lost in the Email Boxes of the subscribers, never found by Google or anyone researching airships. If you want to catch some of Ricks amazing articles, please sign up to the Colorado Airship-list one of the longest running Mailing lists, about and around Airships and LTA Technology. In parallel we try to contact John Dziadecki, and try to get an archive for the list up and running, so that we can link to the great articles and content available on the list, which should be preserved and not lost.

Links:

• Russian Air Force Never Forgot About Airships
• Interfax AVN (search for Airship) [password required to read articles

Navy MZ3A Airship #167811 continues operations amidst "tight" funding. [by Rick Zitarosa]

Navy MZ3A airship #167811 was up all day Saturday, providing a surprise visit to crowds on the boardwalks and "early bird" sunbathers at nearby beaches who were enjoying the first real "hot" day of Spring.

About ready to mark one full year since the first flight, the airship is undergoing mandatory Annual Maintenance Revue this week and is expected to return to the air early next week.

Meanwhile, funding for the airship to continue operating beyond June is a mounting concern. As little as the MZ3A project costs (about $5million per year for the entire operation) there is very little money to go around.

With $250million a day being spent on Iraq, every nook and cranny of the armed forces is being stripped of anything beyond bare funding. The MZ3A's role as a test, training and proof-of-concept vehicle for various promising airborne systems and operations notwithstanding, it remains to be seen whether the proponents of LTA can win continued funding.

One thing the airship has got going for it is a good operating record, the fact that it is already established inventory and the fact that from scratch the Navy people have created the only operational, fully-compliant current-military-standard LTA operation anywhere in the world with everything from tool/hardware inventory to Operational Risk Matrix appropriately documented, codified, quantified, etc.

The next few months should be interesting.

Rick

Thanks to Rick Zitarosa for this news item from the colorado Airship-list