A portable mast was also developed for the Navy blimps, with a special car to haul it around. This mast could be sent to Parris Island or some point in New England, ahead of time, set up and used as a temporary base for radio calibrating or other missions.
Navy ships basing at Lakehurst have operated for weeks at a time along the coast as far north as Bath, Maine, and as far south as the Carolinas, with a portable mast as headquarters.
Utilization of the mast principle by non-rigid airships not only greatly increased their radius of operation, and cut down landing crews, but increased the number of operating days per month.
Pilots of early airplanes used to go out on the airport, hold up a handkerchief, and if it fluttered, conclude it was too windy to fly. So early airship pilots, with anemometers on the roof of the hangar and at points over the field, judged it too risky to take the ships out if the wind was higher than four or five miles an hour, and then only if it was down-hangar in direction.
Modern airships lose few flying days because it is too windy to go out. Under war conditions, when risks must be taken, which need not be taken for passenger or training flights, very few days would be wasted if there is military necessity for it.
Navy non-rigids miss few rendezvous with the fleet in exercises out of Lakehurst, regardless of the weather outside.
If the portable mast revolutionized airship operations over land, experiments started by the Navy in 1938-39, largely under the direction of Lt. C. S. Rounds, promise to be just as important in over-water operations. These showed that the airship could pick up ballast from the ocean, could get fuel from a passing ship, could change crews at sea.
Ballast is important to a vehicle which growing continuously lighter as it uses up fuel, must still be kept in equilibrium. Transoceanic Zeppelins, using hydrogen, had to fly high enough to “blow off” the surplus gas once or twice during a trip to compensate for the ship growing lighter. But hydrogen was cheap, and could be manufactured as needed. American ships could not afford to waste helium, which was a natural resource. Army and Navy engineers had worked on this, and equipment developed for the Akron and Macon to condense the gases from the burned fuel was able to recover more than 100 pounds of water ballast for every 100 pounds of fuel used.
The blimps didn’t use these since they ordinarily would not be out for more than a day at a time, still a ready source of ballast would make it unnecessary to valve helium on long flights.
Ironically enough a whole ocean full of ballast lay below seagoing airships, but no practical method had been devised to take the sea water aboard until the Navy tackled the problem in 1938.