AERONAUTICS: RS-1

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R51

What happened to the RS-1, largest semirigid dirigible in the world (TIME, Jan. 18), on her third trial flight?

The flight was made in January over Scott Field (Belleville, Ill.). Newspaper reporters, having attended the uneventful christening party the fortnight before, took no notice when Lieutenant O. B. Anderson piloted the ship from her hangar and pointed her nose aloft. They did not hear how, warned by radio of approaching high winds, the RS-1 interrupted a flight of four hours and made for home; how, when she settled earthward and was being dragged indoors with ropes, the northwest wind so increased that she was buffeted about like a dory in breakers, until Lieutenant Anderson ordered the engines started, the ropes cast off, and took the ship aloft to fight for her life with her own strength.

The story came to light last week and the teller made a fearsome tale of it. He was Charles P. Burgess, an associate professor of aeronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was assigned a place in the RS-1's crew of 13 as technical observer. He had also been aboard the late Shenandoah that night in 1924 when she broke loose from her mooring mast at Lakehurst, N. J. (TIME, Jan. 28, 1924), and he described the forced flight of the RS-1 as "far more violent."