Another Flight for Lee Payne’s Airship History

Veteran Orange County newspaper photographer Lee Payne has been interested in lighter-than-air flight since 1961 when the last U.S. Navy blimp visited the Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin on its way to the scrap heap.

It was his first blimp ride, and Payne was impressed. As he wryly recalls: “It seemed to me since that blimp was 340 feet long and floated in the air that if the engine stopped, ‘Hey, no problem: This thing would just keep floating in the air.’

“It seemed like a very rational way to fly.”

His interest thus piqued, Payne tried to find out more about airships only to discover that “most libraries have more books on flying saucers than they do on aviation.”

A year later, Payne set out to write his own book on the subject, and in 1977, after years of on-and-off research, it was finally published. For aviation buffs it was worth the wait. “Lighter Than Air: An Illustrated History of the Airship” has been described by no less an authority than the Lighter Than Air Society, based in Akron, Ohio, as “probably the best book yet written covering the entire history of the airship.”

Payne’s book is still considered the best of its kind, but it has been out of print for years. Until now.

Orion Books has just released a revised edition of “Lighter Than Air” ($35), which spans the history of lighter-than-air flight--from the 110-foot balloon built by two French paper manufacturers in 1783 to today’s Goodyear blimp. The revised edition includes two new chapters--one on the history of ballooning and the other on the future of airships--along with 40 new photographs.

In chronicling the history of lighter-than-air flight, Payne makes extensive use of direct quotes from the people involved, such as Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the creator of the giant rigid airships that bore his name. He even quotes Benjamin Franklin, then the American ambassador to France, who witnessed the first manned balloon flight in 1783: “It appears, as you observe, to be a discovery of great importance, and what may possibly give a new turn to human affairs.”

Payne, a longtime photographer at the Daily Pilot in Costa Mesa, said the hardest part of doing his book was assembling the more than 300 rare and historic photographs and illustrations. Although the Army, Navy and Air Force have large libraries of material, he turned up three little-known major collections of airship material in Southern California.

He also tapped the collection at the San Diego Aerospace Museum. Ironically, after he made copies of the museum’s best airship photos, the museum burned down about the time the book came out, “so I donated the pictures back to them.”

“Lighter Than Air” is full of fascinating stories such as the Air Force test pilot, Capt. Joseph Kittinger, who leaped from a balloon 102,800 above the earth to test a parachute for the Air Force in 1960. During his 6 1/2-minute free-fall through the stratosphere, he reached nine-tenths the speed of sound. It’s no wonder, as Payne writes, Kittinger’s words as he stepped from the gondola were, “Lord, take care of me now.” Kittinger survived and is, Payne said, a major balloonist today.

Readers also learn that one of the first modern hot-air balloon races was from Catalina to the mainland in 1964 and that a woman balloonist, Barbara Keith, died after she outran her chase boat and landed in the sea off San Clemente.

That, Payne said, illustrates a point he makes in the book, “Ballooning is pretty and fun, but it’s still a blood sport.”

For Payne, who has taken several rides on the Goodyear blimp over the years, there is nothing like the golden age of airships during the ‘20s and ‘30s, a time when they rivaled ocean liners in luxury.

The great airships, Payne said, flew “nice and low, the windows were open and passengers could lean out and look down, like the people in the Hindenburg flying over Europe in the middle of the night on their way to America. Suddenly the cathedral at Cologne (Germany) appeared beneath them in a blaze of light and they could look right down on it.

“It had to be an extraordinary way to fly. They were eating off linen and walking about listening to the grand piano and smoking cigars.”

The Hindenburg, of course, was involved in one of the worst disasters in aviation history. Tapping firsthand accounts of survivors from vintage newspaper and magazine articles, Payne provides a detailed look at the Hindenburg’s final flight in 1937 in which 22 crewmen and 13 passengers were killed.

Naturally, he includes the famous pictures of the Hindenburg blowing up and falling to the ground. They are, Payne said, probably the most famous photographs of the 20th Century.

“People have this terrible image, but in fact airships are probably one of the safest forms of commercial transportation,” he said. “The 13 passengers who died aboard the Hindenburg were the first passenger fatalities in the history of airship transportation, which began back in 1900.”

As Payne says in his slide lectures: “These images will forever obscure the thousand airships that flew before the Hindenburg and the hundreds of air ships that have flown since then.” (The Hindenburg, he notes, “was full of hydrogen. They don’t fill air ships with hydrogen any more; they fill them with helium, which doesn’t burn.”)

Payne said the last three Zeppelin airships were dismantled in 1940, “but throughout the war well over 100 U.S. Navy blimps would be launched. When the war was over there might have been a chance to restart transatlantic passenger service by airship, but the jet airliner came along and was able to take over the routes more profitability.”

As for the future of airships, Payne and others believe they still have a role to fill. The Coast Guard, he said, could use them for air and rescue missions and drug interdiction. And they could play a major role in the logging industry by picking up trees on inaccessible mountainsides.

Reinstating passenger service isn’t even out of the realm of possibility.

Noting the boom in popularity of traveling on cruise ships, Payne mused: “How would it be just cruising in an airship up the Amazon River?”