The first of the massive new airships would be the Akron, and it would be built by Goodyear. In 1923, the company had formed a partnership with Germany’s zeppelin industry, which relocated to America after World War I. Goodyear was eager to refine the technology for commercial air transport, and was one of the few companies able to take on such a colossal project: building the enormous hangar, recruiting and training hundreds of personnel, and hiring a multitude of engineers. “Goodyear was obliged, in one leap, to create an industrial plant of a magnitude which the airplane industry required almost a quarter of a century to develop,” wrote Richard Smith in his book The Airships Akron and Macon, published in 1965 by the Naval Institute Press. It took less than three years to accomplish—an extraordinary feat by the nascent military-industrial complex.
The new ship was more than 100 feet longer than the Shenandoah and much stronger: Its armored rib cage had three keels (previous dirigibles had only one) and a series of reinforced rings engineered from a new metal alloy called duralumin. The Akron’s eight Maybach engines were capable of accelerating to nearly 80 miles per hour, faster than any ship in the interwar years. Each motor attached to a massive, tilting propeller, providing horizontal and vertical thrust on command. For defense, the Akron was mounted with seven machine guns.
Most impressive of all, the vessel was designed to carry a flotilla of Sparrowhawk scout planes; a trapeze system would lower the planes from the ship’s belly and pull them in upon their return. This feature made the Akron the first flying aircraft carrier in history, and was intended to vastly increase its search area during reconnaissance. It would have required four cruisers—among the fastest oceangoing ships in the Navy’s fleet—to patrol the same square mileage that the Akron could, at least in theory, cover in a single flight. The notion of building a whole fleet of dirigibles using the Akron as a prototype, then sending the ships’ scout planes sweeping over the Pacific to report signs of enemy maneuvers, made the prospect of war with Japan less fearsome. Dirigibles promised the Navy omniscience, dispelling the fog of war with blasts of helium fuel.
Remarkably, a half dozen survivors of the Shenandoah crash signed up for duty on the Akron. Lieutenant Commander Charles Rosendahl, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery aboard the doomed dirigible, was named first commander. Lieutenant Commander Herbert Wiley would be Rosendahl’s executive officer. He’d served on the Shenandoah’s ground crew and was a veteran of the Los Angeles, the only airship in the U.S. fleet that had not crashed.
But if the Akron was a ship of dreams and redemption, it was also troubled from the start. The International Association of Machinists claimed that whistleblowers at Goodyear felt the ship was unsafe. One said he had “fear in his mind that the construction of the Akron was simply the building up of another situation that would end as the Shenandoah had.” Others claimed that the ship was overweight, though Moffett held that it would not affect the ship’s performance.