Forgotten Airship SHENANDOAH

By Feliks Banel, KSL Podcasts

When the US Navy airship SHENANDOAH visited the Pacific Northwest in October 1924, it was secured to a mooring mast at what’s now Joint-Base Lewis McChord (JBLM). (Photo courtesy Lee Corbin)

To hear author Ian Ross tell it, when the U.S. Navy airship Shenandoah crashed in September 1925, it was unlike any aviation tragedy before or since.

“It hit extreme turbulence over Ohio and broke into basically three pieces,” Ross said. “And the control car, with most of the officers, dropped away and fell to earth and killed everybody [inside].”

“The upper section broke into two pieces, and both of those pieces floated to earth,” Ross continued. “The rear section floated down and dragged across, and most of the people that were in that section survived.”

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Navy explored and experimented with so-called “lighter-than-air” aviation through balloons as well as rigid-framed airships filled with helium, including the Shenandoah and three other craft.

“In order to test this theory of long-distance flight for a dirigible, they set up a planned trip to come up here [from Lakehurst, New Jersey] to Seattle by way of Fort Worth and San Diego,” aviation historian Lee Corbin said.

Airships require specific infrastructure much different from what fixed-wing, heavier-than-air craft (that is, airplanes) need, Corbin explained.

The airship mooring mast and maintenance building at JBLM stood for a decade, from the late 1920s to the late 1930s; it was used only once. (Photo courtesy Lee Corbin)

“So they built three different mooring masts,” Corbin continued, explaining that a mooring mast is a tall column designed to secure the nose of the airship and to supply things like water, electricity and fuel.

The Navy built “one down in Fort Worth, which I think now is a parking lot for a warehouse down there,” he said. “And they built one at what’s now called North Island Naval Air Station [near San Diego].”

“I’m pretty sure that one is gone because of all the construction [from] when they were building the airfields,” Corbin said.

“But interestingly enough, the one that was built at [what was then known as] Camp Lewis is now on a portion of McChord Air Force Base,” Corbin continued. “And it’s out in an area that was left undeveloped all these years.”

Corbin was able to investigate what remains of the mooring mast. “There’s actually still a foundation down there,” Corbin said, and “if you know where to look you can find it.”

Lee Corbin (LEFT) and Shawn Murphy examine the concrete remnants of the airship mooring mast at JBLM. (Photo by Feliks Banel)

Photos that Corbin took show the concrete footings of the mast and guy wires, as well as remains of the foundation of the shed built to service airships. LiDAR images that Corbin tracked down in public online databases show the remains of a track built in a huge circle around the mast. He says this track was constructed sometime in the 1930s to accommodate a heavily weighted vehicle to serve as additional mooring connection for airships even bigger than the Shenandoah, though no other airship ever did visit.

LiDAR image found in a public database by Lee Corbin reveals landscape alterations made for the airship track at what’s now JBLM in the 1930s. The huge circular track was created for a heavy car – which would be connected to the stern of the airship via a mooring line. The track was never used. (Courtesy of Lee Corbin)

“The mooring mast was only used once” for the one-day visit of Shenandoah in October 1924, Corbin said.

In Corbin’s research, he also discovered that a man from Seattle named Roland G. Mayer served as an officer on the Shenandoah. Mayer survived the 1925 crash, and is credited with helping others also make it through alive.

Roland G. Mayer (first row, second from right) was First Lieutenant aboard the airship LOS ANGELES in 1928. (Photo courtesy National Air and Space Museum)

Mayer went on to serve aboard the Navy airship Los Angeles, and also flew aboard the Navy’s other two lighter-than-air giants the Akron and the Macon. Mayer was at Lakehurst, New Jersey the day after the Hindenburg disaster in May 1937, and took part in the Navy’s initial investigation into the crash.

“He also was a glider pilot . . . [and he had a] glider license, actually, that was signed by Orville Wright,” said Mayer’s grandson Kevin Vogel. “So that will give you an idea of how long ago he was involved in all of this.”

Vogel says America’s “lighter-than-air” aviators have been mostly forgotten by history, as has the original military purposes of airships – to patrol the oceans for enemy ships and serve as skyborne aircraft carriers. This eventually proved impractical, dangerous and often deadly.

“Basically, he was a keel officer of the Shenandoah and he was responsible for the engineering aspects of the ship,” Vogel said. “Anything that happened to that ship, if there was a motor that went out or something like that, he was responsible for getting the guys together to get it working again. That’s what he did.”

Lee Corbin says that Mayer graduated from the University of Washington in 1917 with an engineering degree. This led directly to a job for Mayer and two classmates. Their employer was the airplane company that had been launched just one year earlier by Bill Boeing.

The job with Boeing didn’t last for Mayer, but it turns out he was in pretty good company with the other two classmates who did stick around.

“What’s interesting is the three names” of the UW graduates who went to work for Boeing in 1917, Corbin said. “Mayer was one of them, Claire Egtvedt was the other, and [the other one was] named Phillip G. Johnson.”

Incredibly, Egtvedt and Johnson would each go on to high-level leadership positions at Boeing.

“So there’s no telling what Mayer would’ve done” if he’d stayed with what became an aerospace giant, Corbin said.

But Mayer had other plans. Corbin says Roland Mayer worked at Boeing only for a few weeks before heading east to work as an engineer for the Navy in Philadelphia and to help design and build the Shenandoah.

Ultimately, airships did not prove to be a safe and reliable form of travel. It was less than a year after the Shenandoah visited Camp Lewis when the ship met its untimely end in a thunderstorm over the Buckeye State.

For the six crew members in the front section – the section where Roland Mayer also found himself – it was a little more complicated.

“I personally believe very strongly that [Roland Mayer] played a vital role in the survival of that front section,” author Ian Ross said.

When the ship broke apart, the front section floated free and gained altitude, and the men aboard had to pilot it as if it were, essentially, a rudderless balloon.

Rigid airships were ultimately made obsolete by advances in fixed-wing, heavier-than-air aviation, and the loss of the Shenandoah – along with several other high-profile deadly disasters – didn’t do much to promote their viability.

Along with the Hindenburg crash in May 1937, two additional Navy airships were destroyed in storm-related crashes in the 1930s. The Akron crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 1933 killing 73, and then the Macon crashed off the coast of California in 1935 killing two. Still, during World War II, the U.S. Navy used dozens of smaller, non-rigid inflatable blimps for patrol and reconnaissance.

In the aftermath of the HINDENBURG disaster in May 1937, Seattleite Roland G. Mayer (CENTER) served on a panel that conducted a brief investigation of the tragedy at Lakehurst, New Jersey. (Courtesy Dan Grossman)

Though his airship days were over by the late 1930s, Roland Mayer spent several more years in aviation, eventually running Convair’s plant in Fort Worth, Texas where B-24 Liberator bombers were manufactured during World War II.

After the war, Mayer retired, and he and his wife bought a ranch north of Fort Worth. Grandson Kevin Vogel says that Mayer didn’t dwell on his airship exploits.

“It’s not like he had mementos all around the house of his Navy days, not at all,” Vogel said. “It was like he had moved on.”

Though he was an early Boeing employee, aviation pioneer, Navy veteran, hero of the American airship era, and builder of World War II bombers, Roland G. Mayer left all that behind for pursuits much closer to the ground.

“He would’ve been perfectly happy if he had died on his tractor, out in the field tilling the soil,” Vogel said.

The airship mooring mast and maintenance building are long-gone from JBLM, but concrete chunks of footings and foundations of the forgotten structures remain. (Courtesy Lee Corbin)