The men aboard the German motor ship Phoebus thought they had seen an airplane go down.

It was shortly after midnight on April 4, 1933. The weather off New Jersey was miserable, and through it the crew saw lights descending toward the Atlantic. Phoebus changed course to investigate. About half an hour later they found a man in the water and hauled him aboard unconscious.

He was Lieutenant Commander Henry V. Wiley.

A boat from Phoebus picked up three more men: Robert Copeland, Richard Deal and Moody Ervin. Copeland never regained consciousness despite attempts to revive him. Only after Wiley came around did the Germans understand what they had sailed into.

They had found what was left of the United States Navy airship Akron.

The name tends to undersell the object. Akron was 785 feet long. Her gas cells held about 6.5 million cubic feet, and the ship was lifted by helium rather than the hydrogen associated with later disasters such as the Hindenburg. Inside the lower portion of the airship was something considerably stranger: a hangar for airplanes.

The Navy had built a flying aircraft carrier.

Then the ship went into the ocean at night, and the men coming out of it did not have life jackets.

An aircraft carrier with no deck

The photographs of Akron make its size difficult to judge because there is usually nothing sensible to compare it with. Put it over Manhattan and it looks misplaced, as though a piece of infrastructure has detached itself from the ground.

On March 15, 1933, less than three weeks before the crash, Akron was photographed over the Panama Canal Zone with an N2Y-1 trainer hanging from the trapeze beneath its internal hangar. The image shows the flying-aircraft-carrier idea in working form rather than as a drawing or proposal.

The Navy was not merely using Akron as an enormous observation balloon. Small aircraft could descend from an internal hangar, detach from a trapeze, scout beyond the airship’s own visual range and then return while both aircraft were still flying. A hook above the airplane’s upper wing caught the trapeze; the engine stopped; the airplane was hauled back inside.

The system was operational, not hypothetical. Akron and Macon launched and recovered aircraft in flight, and the Sparrowhawks were intended to extend the airships’ scouting range beyond what their crews could see from the ship itself.

Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawks became the specialized aircraft for the job. Smithsonian records describe Akron and her sister Macon as the first flying aircraft carriers and note that the system had genuine military potential as a scouting tool.

The rigid-airship program was experimental, but its reconnaissance problem was real. The Navy wanted a platform that could search a much wider area than a surface ship, and embarked aircraft increased that reach. Akron’s loss ended one airship; it did not make the scouting problem imaginary.

April 3

On the evening of April 3, Akron left Naval Air Station Lakehurst for what was not supposed to be a particularly historic flight. The mission involved assisting with calibration of radio direction-finding stations along the Atlantic coast. Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, Chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics and one of the strongest advocates of rigid airships, was aboard. So was Akron’s commanding officer, Commander Frank McCord.

The Sparrowhawks stayed behind.

Weather deteriorated as the ship moved along the coast. By late evening Akron was encountering severe conditions around Barnegat Light. After midnight, violent gusts drove the airship downward. The Navy’s ship history describes her striking the Atlantic tail-first and then sinking.

There was no Hindenburg-style fireball. Akron’s helium did not burn. The danger was an enormous lightweight structure meeting a stormy ocean in darkness, followed by men suddenly trying to survive in cold water.

The ship lost electrical power when it struck. The lights went out. Men trying to leave the wreckage had to find a way through its fabric skin and framework in the dark. Naval History and Heritage Command’s aviation chronology is unusually blunt about what happened once they succeeded: the men who emerged faced the Atlantic without life vests.

Four men in the water

Phoebus reached Wiley first. The German crew did not yet know that somewhere beneath them was one of the largest aircraft ever built. They knew only that something had gone into the water and that there were people in it.

Wiley was unconscious when recovered at about 12:55 a.m. Deal, Ervin and Copeland were brought aboard separately. Sailors on Phoebus saw several other men in the sea but could not reach them. The ship remained in the area searching.

Copeland died aboard the German vessel. Wiley survived. So did Deal. So did Ervin.

They were the only three.

The Navy’s casualty record lists 73 killed and three survivors from Akron. Rear Admiral Moffett and Commander McCord were among the dead.

Some disasters leave behind a large survivor population whose recollections can be compared, contradicted and pieced together. Akron left three men. That drastically narrowed what could ever be known about the last minutes aboard the ship.

Then a rescue airship crashed

The weather did not become cooperative simply because Akron was gone. Ships and aircraft converged on the area. The Coast Guard destroyer Tucker arrived around six in the morning and took aboard the three survivors and Copeland’s body.

The Navy also sent the blimp J-3 into the search. It crashed during the rescue effort, killing two more men. The second airship accident compounded a search already being conducted in dangerous weather off the New Jersey coast.

The missing equipment

The obvious question is why a Navy airship operating over the ocean could put its occupants into the water without basic flotation equipment.

The surviving Navy record is clear about the absence of flotation equipment and much less clear about the decision that produced it. Akron’s men entered the Atlantic without life vests. After the disaster, Macon carried life jackets and liferafts. That sequence establishes the safety change without requiring a rationale the record does not preserve. The contrast remains striking: Akron could launch and recover airplanes through an internal hangar, yet its crew did not have basic flotation when the airship came down at sea.

The sister ship

The Navy did not abandon the idea after Akron. Macon was already under construction. Rear Admiral Moffett’s widow christened her only weeks before her husband died. The ship entered service later in 1933 and continued the experiment with Sparrowhawk aircraft from a new base at Moffett Field in California.

So did the safety changes. Life jackets and liferafts went aboard Macon.

On February 12, 1935, Macon encountered severe weather off Point Sur, California. Damage to an upper fin led to gas loss and loss of control. Like Akron, she eventually settled into the sea.

This time, eighty-one of the eighty-three people aboard survived.

Naval History and Heritage Command does not merely put those two facts next to one another. Its preserved Macon liferaft artifact states that the high survival rate was due in part to the life jackets and liferafts installed in response to Akron.

“In part” is the right language. The two crashes were not controlled experiments. Weather, rate of descent, structural damage, daylight, location and other circumstances differed. Nobody can responsibly claim that flotation equipment alone explains the difference between three survivors and eighty-one.

But it mattered. The Navy says it mattered.

An orange piece of fabric

There is still a piece of one of Macon’s liferafts in the Naval History and Heritage Command artifact collection. It is not impressive in the way Akron was impressive. It is a strip of orange canvas roughly twenty-three inches long. The survivors signed it.

I think that might be the right object to end this story with. The giant airships have a habit of stealing attention from the people inside them. Their photographs are difficult to ignore. A 785-foot aircraft floating over Washington does not need help being interesting.

The liferaft fragment is almost offensively ordinary by comparison. Canvas. Flotation. Something to hold onto when the machine is gone.

Six years after Akron, another Navy disaster would turn a specialized rescue technology into the difference between life and death when the submarine Squalus sank off New England—the story behind Final Vestige’s The Rescue Machine Nobody Had Ever Needed.

In one, the Navy possessed an astonishing machine but had neglected an ordinary survival problem. In the other, somebody had already built the rescue machine before the emergency arrived.

The detail from Akron that stays with me is still Wiley in the water. He had been aboard a ship large enough to carry airplanes inside itself. A German merchant vessel pulled him unconscious from the Atlantic.

There were no life jackets.

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Sources & Further Reading

• Naval History and Heritage Command, DANFS: “Akron (ZRS-4)”. The principal Navy history of the ship, final flight, crash and rescue.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, “U.S. Naval Aviation, 1930–1939”. Important for the description of survivors entering the Atlantic without life vests.
• NHHC, “Liferaft Fragment from USS Macon (ZRS-5)”. The key institutional evidence connecting post-Akron flotation equipment to Macon’s much higher survival rate.
• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk. Authoritative treatment of the aircraft-trapeze system and flying-aircraft-carrier concept.
• NHHC USS Akron photographic collection. Official Navy and Army Air Corps visual record.