Goodyear airships made some contribution during the 16 years of fleet operations, to flight and ground handling technique. They also contributed to men’s knowledge about weather. For wherever it is flying, an airship, by the very nature of the craft, is continually registering the effects at that point of certain components of weather. And the ships covered a considerable part of the country fairly thoroughly.
The nature and movements of air currents can be studied only incompletely from the ground, for conditions there are merely the result of forces aloft. Only two vehicles leave the ground and use the air as highways. Of these the airship is vastly more responsive to changes in temperatures and barometric pressure than the airplane, because of the lifting gas in its envelope, and somewhat more responsive to changes in wind directions and velocities, because of its greater displacement of air.
Goodyear airships have traveled widely, have seen at first-hand the effects of rain and snow, fog and sleet, wind and whirlwind, thunderhead and lightning storm. More important they have been spectators at the unseen battle waged endlessly between cold fronts and warm ones across the great central plains, continued with renewed vindictiveness through mountain ranges and valleys.
The information brought by these voyagers has not been without value to the men in the airport control towers, who are studying weather phenomena in the effort to make flying safe.
A whole new science of weather interpretation has come in with air transport, and the U. S. Weather Bureau has other duties than advising farmers about planting and harvesting crops. It may be merely coincidence that when a new chief had to be selected for the Weather Bureau a few years ago an airship pilot was selected—Commander F. W. Reichelderfer of the Navy, who had long studied the movement of air masses and their effect on flight.
Army and Navy ships put in more actual flying days per month than Goodyear ships, when on coastal patrol, because once out at sea the service ships were out for all day—and an airship, by picking its time, and using its mast, can always get out and get back.
Goodyear pilots had a different sort of job. They were operating over land, flying 100 passengers a day, at 10 to 15 minute intervals, in one town after another. They might suspend operations when ceilings were low, or winds high, or gusty, not because they couldn’t fly under those circumstances, but because flights would be less agreeable, and might be hazardous for their passengers. However, the ships themselves, having no shelter at hand, had to stay out and take it. Their job was to interest the people of America in lighter-than-air, and they had to go wherever people were, regardless of what flying weather might intervene.
So between Navy, Army and Goodyear airships operating over a period of years, it was fairly well demonstrated that there is very little unflyable weather for lighter-than-air craft. That is a conclusion of no small importance.
Winds of gale force may make it prudent for the airship to stay in the hangar or on the mast, and conditions of zero ceiling, zero visibility, which ground other aircraft, would make operations hazardous, especially over mountainous country, but even the most adverse weather conditions would hardly keep the airship at home if an enemy was at large. Any time submarines are operating the airship can be available to seek them out.
Another result emerging from the fact of fleet operations was that flying men and construction men, working together, became a closely knit group. Engineers learned to fly ships, and flyers took their turn in the shops. In building airships for the Navy, at the speed demanded by war conditions, the control cars were built in the shop and the envelopes cut out and fitted and cemented together in the balloon room. But operating men, flyers and ground crew men, mechanics and riggers and maintenance men took over from there, put the ships together—assembled them, tested them out, delivered them to the Navy.