CHAPTER VII
Adventures of the Goodyear Fleet
One of the lesser romances at least of aeronautics is the story of the Goodyear airship fleet.
There is thrill and adventure in the narrative, daring and resourcefulness, hazards faced by men who believed in their craft—chances which were usually won. So this chapter might well be dedicated to Airship Captain Charles Brannigan and Balloon Pilot Walter Morton.
Morton was an old timer, who had flown balloons with Tom Baldwin, in the far corners of the country. Between times he worked in the Goodyear balloon room, a practical mechanic who could always make things work, the salt-of-the-earth workman whom every foreman swore by, the aide every pilot wanted alongside. Steady, self-effacing, courageous, with an instinct for the right thing to do in emergency, Morton feared but one thing. That was lightning.
He had flown many times through lightning storms prior to the helium era, beneath a bag filled with inflammable gas, but he didn’t like it. He knew its swift striking power.
“I could almost see the Old Fellow standing there throwing those darts at us,” said Morton one afternoon in 1928, as he scanned the skies before taking off in a balloon race out of Pittsburgh. “One would flash past and miss, and he would say ‘I’ll get you next time,’ and there would come another. And you can’t dodge in a balloon.”
The Old Fellow scored a direct hit that afternoon. Morton was flying with Van Orman, Gordon Bennett Cup winner. The uncertain weather of the afternoon had resolved itself less than an hour after the take-off, and eight balloons were being tossed as a juggler tosses weights, a thousand feet high, 10,000 feet, caught and tossed aloft again just before they touched the ground. Morton’s balloon was hit at 12,000 feet, caught fire, alternatively fell like a plumb bob or parachuted in the net, landed without too much of a shock. Van Orman, unconscious, sustained a broken ankle. Morton had been instantly killed.
But aerologists learned things that afternoon about the force of vertical movements of the air. The balloons gave a perfect track of what went on. One balloon was falling so fast that sacks of ballast thrown overboard lagged behind it, while a hundred yards away another balloon was shooting upward at similar speed.
We still know less than we should about the movements of the air, this new world into which the Aeronautic Age is moving. The Pittsburgh tragedy may save many lives, avoid other tragedies.