Feasibility of airships in ww2?
- Thread starter Just Schmidt
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A great post but I think the Germans may have fooled themselves as to the Chain Home capabilities. The best information was obtained from the side lobes of the towers, flying up the east coast this may not have been obvious. In the south east the towers were very close together in terms of their spread and synchronised on the wave form of the electricity supply, so basically on the SE coast all areas were covered by the front throw of the transmitters but also most areas were also covered by the side lobes, which gave much better resolution and direction information, all of which was combined in a "plot".
Those are great pictures, it must have been a helluva thing to see, like Star Trek.
Star Trek's boring. Too much talking, not enough "pew pew pew!"
swampyankee
Chief Master Sergeant
- 3,986
- Jun 25, 2013
Thank you. This definitively answers the OP's question: airships in WW2 were feasible, as they were actually used in quantity.
The USN operated non-rigid airships into the late 1950s, in the maritime patrol and AEW roles. In one instance, the airships were operating in weather that grounded many of the fixed-wing aircraft of the era.
Somehow, Blimp and Speed just never seem to go together.
ThomasP
Senior Master Sergeant
I participated in a land/sea/air war-game campaign a number of years ago. Iit was a 2 sided game, but with multiple nations on each side. We were allowed to purchase equipment from our sponsor nations (think cold war in 1941) and some of the players got quite creative. One of the US sponsored nations purchased 4x Akron/Macon type airships. He removed the aircraft carrying/maintenance equipment and reworked part of the resulting available volume/weight for long range communications relay and elint, and the rest for transport of troops and supplies. When the referees and knowledgable players (ie engineers and ex-military of which there were several on each side) looked at the effective carrying capacity they decided that there were about 9 tons available for use in the troop transport/resupply role.
It took almost 3 months game time before the referees told me that one of my ground units (think armed squad sized coast watcher unit) spotted one of them (they only did supply runs in the dead of night) as it ambled past on a supply run, and another 3 weeks for one of my GR Halifax to find one and shoot it down. Given that the average weight of supply for a ground soldier in combat in WWII was about 15 lbs/day, 9 tons (9 x 2240 = 20160 lbs) was enough to keep a ~company sized line unit in supply for a week. He also used them for troop drops in the first week of the campaign, carrying the equivalent of 80 fully equipped paratroops, but never dropped them by parachute, only by rappelling.
It took almost 3 months game time before the referees told me that one of my ground units (think armed squad sized coast watcher unit) spotted one of them (they only did supply runs in the dead of night) as it ambled past on a supply run, and another 3 weeks for one of my GR Halifax to find one and shoot it down. Given that the average weight of supply for a ground soldier in combat in WWII was about 15 lbs/day, 9 tons (9 x 2240 = 20160 lbs) was enough to keep a ~company sized line unit in supply for a week. He also used them for troop drops in the first week of the campaign, carrying the equivalent of 80 fully equipped paratroops, but never dropped them by parachute, only by rappelling.
Loving these pics and clips. Some oldies but goodies...
An airship shed at night in 1918, with R.29 and two North Sea Class ships inside, NS.7 and NS.8.
EFshed at night s
Another of the same shed, with maintenance being done on R.29's gas cells, with her outer covering removed. Note the fireman's ladders; these were an essential part of an airship hangar's fitout. Crews would test their mettle by erecting the ladders vertically inside the hangar without support and dare each other to climb to the top. Not for the squeemish...
R29shed
NS.7 and NS.8 getting airborne on 21 November 1918, the day of Operation ZZ, the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in the Firth of Forth. The two ships flew escort to the German line as it sailed into the Forth Estuary...
NS 7 NS 8 sm
...Enabling terrific aerial shots of warships, such as this one of SMS Seydlitz passing May Island.
Seydlitz May Island
And this one of the battlecruiser Derfflinger.
Derfflinger
A view from the surface with one of either NS.7 or NS.8 just visible in the distant sky. Seydlitz is being escorted by the light cruiser HMS Cardiff.
High Seas Fleet in Forth
Here's one of the seaplane tender HMS Campania taken from an airship (taken at a different time as by the time the High Seas Fleet slid into Scotland, Campania had sunk at her moorings). Note the Fairey Campanias aft of the stacks and a smaller type on the flying-off deck.
Campania
The only known photograph of the Coastal Class C.24.
Coastal 24
An airship shed at night in 1918, with R.29 and two North Sea Class ships inside, NS.7 and NS.8.
Another of the same shed, with maintenance being done on R.29's gas cells, with her outer covering removed. Note the fireman's ladders; these were an essential part of an airship hangar's fitout. Crews would test their mettle by erecting the ladders vertically inside the hangar without support and dare each other to climb to the top. Not for the squeemish...
NS.7 and NS.8 getting airborne on 21 November 1918, the day of Operation ZZ, the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in the Firth of Forth. The two ships flew escort to the German line as it sailed into the Forth Estuary...
...Enabling terrific aerial shots of warships, such as this one of SMS Seydlitz passing May Island.
And this one of the battlecruiser Derfflinger.
A view from the surface with one of either NS.7 or NS.8 just visible in the distant sky. Seydlitz is being escorted by the light cruiser HMS Cardiff.
Here's one of the seaplane tender HMS Campania taken from an airship (taken at a different time as by the time the High Seas Fleet slid into Scotland, Campania had sunk at her moorings). Note the Fairey Campanias aft of the stacks and a smaller type on the flying-off deck.
The only known photograph of the Coastal Class C.24.
A few details of note from the picture below for those of you into the techie stuff like me, on the non rigid in the foreground, note the safety valves along the side of the envelope, like I described earlier in the thread. Also note the fabric tubes running along the underside of the envelope. Visible to the aft of the propellers are retractable ducts that fed forced air into those tubes, which would enter the lower half of the envelope below the hydrogen, providing air pressure to enable the envelope to maintain its shape. Note also that the non-rigids are resting on pontoons, enabling them to alight on water as well as soft ground. There's one visible in the picture above of Seydlitz passing May Island.
Note R.29's propellers on stalks, these were able to be swivelled to enable it to manoeuvre easier. To give an indication of the size of these ships, R.29's propellers had a diameter of about 17 feet. Also note at bottom right the rolled up hose in the hangar floor. This supplied hydrogen to the ships inside the hangar, which was ducted from the big tanks outside. A steam engine driven pump located in a building near the hangar enabled this to happen. This can always be identified in photos of airship stations chuffing out smoke near the hangars. Hangar doors also could be opened using this machinery via cables - initially they were opened using a massive capstan that everyone was roped into having to operate. I can just hear the moaning from the mess as the call to go open shed doors was made over the tannoy! Cable runs along the hangar floor and square buckets of sand hanging from the ship keep the airships from floating away indoors...
R29shed
Note R.29's propellers on stalks, these were able to be swivelled to enable it to manoeuvre easier. To give an indication of the size of these ships, R.29's propellers had a diameter of about 17 feet. Also note at bottom right the rolled up hose in the hangar floor. This supplied hydrogen to the ships inside the hangar, which was ducted from the big tanks outside. A steam engine driven pump located in a building near the hangar enabled this to happen. This can always be identified in photos of airship stations chuffing out smoke near the hangars. Hangar doors also could be opened using this machinery via cables - initially they were opened using a massive capstan that everyone was roped into having to operate. I can just hear the moaning from the mess as the call to go open shed doors was made over the tannoy! Cable runs along the hangar floor and square buckets of sand hanging from the ship keep the airships from floating away indoors...
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The best account of WW2 US lighter-than-air (LTA) activity is Forgotten Weapon by William Althoff. Primarily about the USN and its ASW work but gives a good insight into many aspects of LTAs. Picking up some of the comments above.
Transport - inefficient.
Vulnerability in any combat situation - awful.
Maritime patrol - good at extended patrols as regards time in the air. But not far out to sea - limited to coastal operations. Slow speed means that with a headwind they might not get home.
ASW - used to spot U-boats and follow them if on the surface while staying out of gunnery range. Direct surface escorts or ASW aircraft to the U-boat or its diving position. Later LTAs were equipped with expendable sonobuoys. These could be dropped around a diving point and in calmer seas could track a fast moving U-boat to some degree. Overall useful as part of a hunt to exhaustion. Magnetic anomaly detectors (MAD) had a similar role to sonobuoys.
Probably not cost-effective but worth trying given the pressure to rapidly increase the ASW capability in 1942.
Transport - inefficient.
Vulnerability in any combat situation - awful.
Maritime patrol - good at extended patrols as regards time in the air. But not far out to sea - limited to coastal operations. Slow speed means that with a headwind they might not get home.
ASW - used to spot U-boats and follow them if on the surface while staying out of gunnery range. Direct surface escorts or ASW aircraft to the U-boat or its diving position. Later LTAs were equipped with expendable sonobuoys. These could be dropped around a diving point and in calmer seas could track a fast moving U-boat to some degree. Overall useful as part of a hunt to exhaustion. Magnetic anomaly detectors (MAD) had a similar role to sonobuoys.
Probably not cost-effective but worth trying given the pressure to rapidly increase the ASW capability in 1942.
unkated
Airman
Well, it was built as a zeppelin mooring station. When they tried to actually use it with the Graf Zeppelin, the winds above New York made that too difficult and impractical. So the Zeppelin company contracted with the US Navy for the use of NAS Lakehurst in nearby New Jersey.
Generally, LTA aircraft were less efficient for transportation than available ground transportation, and slower than winged air transportation. Rigid LTAs (zeppelins) had a better see an lifting capacity than blimps - but they were much larger, and more expensive to build and operate. LTA does have a better ability to linger over a target - days rather than hours, which allowed blimps to keep watch over convoys, where a patrol aircraft had a more limited stay.
At one point in the 1980s, I started studying LTA to fuel my fantasy of running a small airline of zeppelins, stopping at temporary terminals set up in rented fields or mall parking lots. (The RNAS tested rigid airship ability to withstand weather by leaving one out of a hangar for a year with no ill effects.) A convoy of trucks shows up an hour before the flight i due, sets up a ticketing office, sets up a temporary mooring mast, zeppelin shows up, passengers, baggage and cargo off, passengers, baggage and cargo on, refuel and maintenance check during the exchange, zeppelin goes off to next location, temporary terminal dismantled.
A note on airship hangars - Hangar One at Moffet Field, is 1133 ft x 308 ft (345 m x 94 m), covering some 8 acres, could house a zeppelin, as could similar structure at NAS Lakehurst, NJ and at Goodyears facility in Ohio. The show Mythbusters occasionally uses the hangar for some of its projects.
I live near Cardington in Bedfordshire in the UK which has two enormous hangars at an airfield with a long history of airship construction.
Cardington Airfield - Wikipedia
Cardington Airfield - Wikipedia
SaparotRob
Unter Gemeine Geschwader Murmeltier XIII
Like wow man, I had very similar daydreams.
My "air fleet" were named after clipper ships. The Flying Cloud was flagship. I also drew many "lifting body" airships in class instead wasting my time with school work.
GrauGeist
Generalfeldmarschall zur Luftschiff Abteilung
With modern technology and materials, a dirigible might have a chance to succeed where the older ones couldn't.
I was looking into the feasibility of an airship for a certain task a few years back - I won't go into detail because it's still something I need to spend time on, but the point is, airships aren't completely extinct.
SaparotRob
Unter Gemeine Geschwader Murmeltier XIII
I like the idea of LTA as heavy lift vehicles. Use them to lift large loads into remote areas above difficult terrain. This was in an article I read long ago They can hover over the construction site and act as a mobile crane. The article pointed out commercial uses other than passenger. I read that at around the same time I bought Janes All The World's Airships. That had to be at least forty years ago.
Airships were used to patrol the west coast during WWII. Two blimp hangers still exist near Tustin, CA (near LA)(one is in use), and two are still at Moffett Field (one is in use), south of San Francisco. Another is at Tillamook, Oregon, that is an Air Museum now. Several years ago a modern Zeplin was based in one of the Moffett Field blimp hangars, mostly for tourist tours of the San Francisco Bay area. They did offer an intro flight to rated pilots a few years back which I was able to take. The most unique entry in my log books is that half hour at the wheel of a Zepplin.
