Plane-Carrying Dirigible Found in Sea After 55 Years

The undersea wreckage of a 785-foot-long dirigible that served as a flying aircraft carrier for Navy reconnaissance planes has been found off the coast of Northern California, ending more than half a century of efforts to find the remains of one of the world’s most unusual airships.

The craft, called the Macon, was discovered Sunday in about 500 feet of water off Point Sur by the Navy’s deep-diving submersible, the Sea Cliff, said John Sanders, spokesman for the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey. Also found were two of the four planes the Macon was carrying when it crashed, and they appear to be in good condition, Sanders said.

Sanders, who announced the discovery Monday, said the Sea Cliff succeeded where other efforts had failed because Navy oceanographer Steve Ramp figured out that deep currents would have carried the huge craft north instead of south, as previous searchers believed.

The discovery is particularly important because it includes two of the small biplanes, called Sparrowhawks, that used the Macon as a flying airport.

The crash on Feb. 12, 1935, ended the Navy’s love affair with lighter-than-air flying machines.

Retired Rear Adm. Henry B. Miller, commander of the Macon’s small squadron of single-engine planes, said he and his colleagues “landed” on the Macon by snagging a hook on the top of a plane onto a trapeze suspended beneath the airship.

When taking off, he said, “you would reach up with your left arm and pull a trigger, and that would release the hook and you would just fall off into space.”

“It was a great deal of fun.”

The only other Sparrowhawk in existence is in the Smithsonian Institution, and it was put together out of spare parts, so the eventual recovery of the small planes will be of particular interest to aviation historians.

However, Sanders said it will be some time before a recovery effort is mounted because scientists will want to study a few small bits of debris retrieved by the Sea Cliff to determine the condition of the dirigible and the planes.

The Macon plunged into the sea after one of its tail fins, which apparently had been damaged in an earlier storm, broke loose and punctured the skin of the airship, rupturing three helium cells. All but two of the 83 men on board survived the crash and were picked up from lifeboats by Navy vessels. The incident came just two years after a sister ship, the Akron, carried 77 men to their deaths during a storm off the East Coast. The loss of the two ships forced the Navy to end one of the most unusual efforts in the history of aviation.

And the end came not a bit too soon, Miller said during a telephone interview Monday from his home in Shawnee Mission, Kan.

“A very simple weapon would have knocked the hell out of it,” he said.

Miller, then a 31-year-old lieutenant, was not injured in the crash, but the hopes of many who wanted to see the Navy build a huge fleet of dirigibles suffered a fatal blow. The impracticality was obvious to the critics, who saw the giant airships as easy prey during time of war, yet it was a period Miller clearly enjoyed remembering when told Monday that the wreckage had been found.

“I loved it,” he said of the days when he commanded “a heavier-than-air squadron assigned to a lighter-than-air” vessel.

On the morning of Feb. 12, the four planes under Miller’s command flew from Sunnyvale to the Monterey coast to join the Macon for a major exercise, Miller said.

“I was the last one to go aboard,” he recalled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have,” he added, recalling the rapid series of events that sent the Macon to a damp grave.

He said landing aboard the Macon was an interesting experience. As each plane pulled up underneath the dirigible, it snagged the trapeze and then was hauled up to a hanger inside the air ship. Once inside, the wheels were removed to increase the aeronautical performance of the small planes on subsequent flights.

That meant that whenever the pilots went out, they had to return to the airship or try a wheel-less landing on the ground.

That system may not sound as though it was designed to allow young pilots to become old pilots, but Miller remembered the time and the Sparrowhawks with affection.

“They were tiny little airplanes,” he said, “but they were beautiful little things.”

It all came to an end early one foggy morning off the coast of Monterey. The giant airship was visible from land and the lighthouse keeper at Point Sur was watching through binoculars when the troubles began.

When the tail fin broke loose, the crew apparently overreacted, according to a board of inquiry.

“The crew started to jettison fuel” and other supplies, causing the ship to rise dramatically, Sanders said.

The Macon, which was designed to remain below 2,800 feet, rose quickly to nearly a mile above the Pacific, and automatic pressure valves on helium-filled cells opened, allowing the gas to escape into the atmosphere. The craft dropped quickly and settled gently onto the ocean, allowing the survivors to escape into lifeboats.

Since the crash could be seen from the shore, there was no doubt about where the wreckage should have ended up. Ocean currents near the surface travel north to south, so for decades searchers concentrated their efforts south of Point Sur.

But oceanographer Ramp took another look at the data. He concluded that the ship would have been caught in deep undercurrents rather than shallow ones and carried north.

Finally, the San Diego-based Sea Cliff, a three-man submersible that can operate at ocean depths of 20,000 feet, deeper than any other manned submersible in the world, went down to take a look.

The submersible is based at San Diego’s 32nd Street Naval Station, and operates from a civilian vessel leased by the Navy, the Laney Chouest.