It was like nothing anyone in America had ever seen, the sunlight flashing off the bare metal skin of the rigid airship, her gargantuan oblong shape casting an imposing shadow on the ground as she took to the air over the New Jersey countryside. For months a maze of girders had taken shape in the mammoth blimp hangar at Naval Air Station (NAS) Lakehurst, New Jersey, the result being a rigid airship that stretched to a length of 680 feet, longer than two football fields, with a diameter of 79 feet. Nacelles housing a bridge for control and the six 300-horsepower Packard engines that powered her hung beneath her envelope, the 2,115,000 cubic feet envelope containing cells inflated with helium. All had come together on this day, 4 September 1923, when the first American-designed and built rigid airship made her maiden flight.
The road to this point had not been a smooth one. Convinced of the utility of large airships by the success of German Zeppelins in long-range bombing raids over England and France during World War I, the U.S. Navy began design work on its first dirigible in 1916, the year before America entered the Great War. Primitive in that its structure was to be made of wood, this first effort never got past the drawing board, resulting in a Navy decision to purchase a dirigible already under construction in Great Britain as the quickest way to jumpstart its fledgling rigid airship program. This craft, designated the R.38, never became operational, crashing during a test flight over England on 24 August 1921, before it could even be delivered to the U.S. Navy. Among those killed was Lieutenant Commander Lewis Hancock, whose wife Joy Bright Hancock would become a leader of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) during World War II.
Thus, it fell to the new airship to achieve the vision of a successful rigid airship program, one that was championed by naval aviation’s highest-ranking officer, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics Rear Admiral William A. Moffett. Though her first flight would cover less than fifty miles and take barely over an hour to complete, subsequent ones took her increasingly farther away from her base. Later in September she flew over the skyscrapers of New York City and the dome of the Capitol in Washington D.C., the latter giving legislators a firsthand look at the result of their appropriations, and an October flight to St. Louis involved traversing rough air over the Allegheny Mountains. The airworthiness of the airship proven, she was deemed suitable for commissioning for all of the rigid airships were deemed commissioned vessels just like those that steamed atop and below the sea. On 23 October 1923, Mrs. Edwin Denby, wife of the Secretary of the Navy, christened the airship Shenandoah (ZR 1), or in Native American language, “Daughter of the Stars."
Over the course of the ensuing months, Shenandoah operated for a time as the Navy’s only rigid airship before the commissioning of Los Angeles (ZR 3), living up to her name by becoming a star in an aviation-crazed era. Each flight seemingly explored new arenas of operations and stretched her bounds. Mooring at a mast erected on the stern of the oiler Patoka (AO 9) demonstrated the dirigibles ability to operate at sea, her potential as a long-range scout evaluated during naval exercises with surface ships. Her most epic journey occurred in the fall of 1924, when she completed a record 9,000-mile flight during which she twice crossed the United States. On board was a writer Junius B. Wood, documenting the flight for National Geographic magazine. His piece, which appeared in the magazine’s January 1925 issue provided an insider’s perspective, illuminating the personality of the airship’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Zachary Landsdowne, vividly describing the scenery below, and detailing the unique operational aspects that came with flying a rigid airship. “The cruise of the Shenandoah was over an uncharted world,” he concluded. “Beacons by sea and signs by land have been built through the ages for those who voyage on the surface. A new era of transportation is coming nearer, in which the airship will have a place as a conveyance of peace as well as an instrument of war.” Wood also alluded to Landsdowne’s vision for Shenandoah to make a flight to the North Pole in the spring, a proposal that in the end was never realized.
Instead, approaching the second anniversary of her first flight, Shenandoah prepared for a tour of the American heartland during the height of the fair season as summer began to give way to fall. On 2 September 1925, the scores of handlers on the ground began the process of launching the leviathan, which set course west away from NAS Lakehurst. By early morning of the following day, she had reached Ohio, and was cruising at an altitude of 1,800 feet when first one air current and then another pushed her upwards, the airship losing her buoyancy. In addition, the stress placed on her triggered structural breakdowns, the first signs being the snapping of wires in the hull as the crew was tossed around the pitching and rolling aircraft. Shenandoah began a rapid descent before another updraft hit her, which sent her into violent maneuvers and caused her to break apart, the pieces falling to the ground in the countryside near Ava, Ohio. The crash claimed the lives of fourteen members of her crew, including Lieutenant Commander Landsdowne.
Thus, Shenandoah’s life began and ended in September, the deadly accident unfortunately foreshadowing the fates of subsequent rigid airships operated by the Navy. When the program ended in the mid-1930s, Shenandoah’s successors, Akron (ZRS 4) and Macon (ZRS 5) had ended their operational careers with accidents as well. Only Los Angeles, built in Germany, avoided the fate of her sisters.