100 years ago this month. Drawing of the USS Shenandoah (ZR-1) from the January 1925 issue of The National Geographic Magazine. With a 25-man crew, the airship was designed to carry a half-dozen .30 caliber Lewis machine guns and eight 500-pound bombs.
The first rigid airship to be designed and built by the United States Navy, Shenandoah was designed by the Bureau of Aeronautics; fabricated at the Naval Aircraft Factory, in Philadelphia, and assembled at the Naval Air Station, Lakehurst, the latter famous for being the site of the “Oh the Humanity,” Hindenburg disaster in 1937.
While not filled with flammable hydrogen, the 680-foot-long Shenandoah suffered a disaster all her own just 23 months into her career as a floating battleship of the air.
Via DANFS:
On 2 September 1925, Shenandoah departed Lakehurst on a flight to the Middle West for training and to test a new mooring mast at Dearborn, Michigan. While passing through an area of thunderstorms and turbulence over Ohio early in the morning of the 3rd, the airship was torn apart and crashed near Marietta. Shenandoah’s commanding officer, Cmdr. Zachary Lansdowne, and 13 other officers and men were killed. Twenty-nine survivors succeeded in riding three sections of the airship to Earth.