Aeronautics: Akron Aftermath

• Share

(2 of 3)

Just a year before that, another workman had been charged with sabotage. Few people took that very seriously. But the McDonald-Underwood story caused Navy-heckling Representative James V. McClintic of Oklahoma to demand, and get, an investigation by the Naval Affairs Committee. The Committee heard Goodyear-Zeppelin officials and Navy inspectors call the charges absurd. As a final gesture, the Committee set put to take a ride in the Akron. While the ship was being walked out of the dock before the Congressmen's eyes, a perverse wind dashed the Akron's tail against the ground, disabling her for weeks. Nevertheless, the Committee gave the ship a clean bill of health, but not without minority utterances by Representatives McClintic and Patrick J. Boland who said: "When I see girders that snap off like pretzels. I know something is wrong." Last week on motion of Congressman McClintic, no longer a committeeman. the Akron quiz was taken away from Naval Affairs and given to a joint Senate-&-House committee "that won't whitewash the Navy."

When dovetailed with Bos'n's Mate Deal's story, the report of Lieut.-Commander Herbert Vincent Wiley was illuminating. Commander Wiley read his statement to the Committee in a detached, hesitant manner, as if the story were a new and strange one which he had never heard before. Bringing the now familiar events up to the fateful "00:30 [12:30 a. m.] 4, April," he read: "A very sharp gust struck the ship. It seemed to be much more severe than any I have ever experienced in that it was exerted so suddenly ... a maximum force in two or three seconds. 1 noted immediately that the lower rudder-control rope had carried away." Then the upper control rope went. Then the man at the elevator controls calling out laconically "800 feet . . . 300 feet." ... I sighted the waves through the window and gave the order 'Stand by for a crash.' There was no further conversation in the control car after this order. . . . We hit the water . . . much harder than I expected. The water surged in my [starboard] window and must have carried me out the port window."

Naval Court. Wheeling gloomily between two wide oil slicks off Barnegat Lightship—tombstone of the Akron—patrol boats picked up the bodies of Admiral Moffett, Captain McCord (the Akron's master), Commander Berry (last skipper of the Los Angeles). Lieut.-Commander MacLellan and Col. Alfred Masury, Army reserve officer and vice president of Mack Trucks Inc. Also they found the water-soaked logbook of Lieut. Hammond J. Dugan, which was immediately put on an airplane and flown to Lakehurst where sat a Naval Court of Inquiry into the disaster.

The inquiry room was formed by hanging large curtains of green "ground cloth" at one end of the barren gas-cell shop. White airship fabric draped the dais, where sat Rear Admiral Henry Varnum Butler, commandant of the Washington Navy Yard, president of the court.

Large among questions before the court were: Did weather conditions justify the Akron's takeoff? (Commercial passenger planes were grounded that day.) Were proper efforts made to avoid the storm centre? Should life belts have been carried? (Because of their weight they were not part of regular equipment.)