Airships as ships and not craft

> At 9:36 AM -0400 5/14/02, laserlight@quixnet.net wrote:

Well, when they were used in US Navy war games the Macon didn't do so hot,
however the crew was building doctrine as they went because they were the
first crew to be to be doing it (many were Akron veterans). The first Airship
carrier had been the Akron in 1932 before she was lost in a storm. In one of
the exercises with the fleet the Macon was "shot down" nine times. The
Captain, Lt Cmdr Herbert Wiley, took the Macon on an unexpected trip.

"...[FDR] was vacationing on a trip from Panama to Hawaii aboard the Heavy
Cruiser Houston, escorted by a second heavy cruiser, the New Orleans. With
nothing more than newspaper reports to go on, the Macon's captain calculated
the presidents probably route and speed, then plotted an intercept course. He
would prove in dramatic fashion the value of the big airship as a long
distance scout. On the morning of July 18, 1934, the Macon departed from
Moffett Field and headed southwest. Soon she was far out over the Pacific,
navigating by dead reckoning and sun sightings. Just after 10:00 AM the next
day, Wiley ordered two Sparrowhawks lowered and launched, one after the other.
If he'd calculated correctly, the president's small flotilla should now be in
range. Sure enough, not long before noon, the two fighters found the two heavy
cruisers. The last thing anyone on board expected was to see airplanes in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean, especially given the fact that all of the navy's
aircraft carriers were known to be in the Atlantaic. On the Houston's bridge,
where the two aircraft were spotted just as the watch was about to change,
astonishment turned briefly to consternation: the planes appeared to be
carrying fat bombs beneath their fuselages. But more knowledgeable eyes
quickly pointed out the telltale skyhooks jutting above the upper wings. The
"Bombs" were actually auxiliary fuel tanks installed in place of unneeded
landing gear, a method of increasing the planes' range. "

        Wiley's superiors were non-plussed, but FDR was delighted
about the whole incident and ended up defending him for his initiative.
Durring the summer and fall of '34, the Macon spent 404 hours in the air
training it's crew in air operations with its sparrow hawks. During that time
a rudimentary homing system was added that allowed the Macon to change course
to avoid weather and still allow the scout planes to find her.

Further exercises had the Macon locating "enemy" ships with out herself being
sighted. Due to a design problem with one of the aft structural rings that
supported the tail surfaces, she crashed in a storm in 1935, all but two crew
were saved out of 83. After this third incident of an airship crash the navy
washed it's hands of rigid airships. Their best use would have been as
strategic scouts in the days before radar and with radar, before satellites
due to their great range and speed.