Worst airship disaster

The worst single airship disaster was the loss of the USS Akron (ZRS-4), which broke up in bad weather off the coast of New Jersey, USA, at around 1 a.m. on 4 April 1933. Of the 76 crew, 73 died.

The first ship on the scene of the crash was SS Phoebus, a German merchant ship. Captain Karl Dalldorf had seen the lights of the Akron descending towards the ocean, and had altered course to investigate. The crew of the Phoebus arrived at around 2 a.m. and pulled four men unconscious from the water – Lieutenant Commander Herbert Wiley, Chief Radioman Robert Copeland, Boatswain's Mate Richard Deal and mechanic Moody Erwin. Other vessels soon joined the rescue effort, including another Navy airship, the blimp J-3. No further survivors were found, and the search was further complicated when the J-3 also broke up in the storm, with the loss of two of its seven-man crew. Radioman Copeland died onboard the Pheobus without ever regaining consciousness.

During the 1920s and 1930s, several governments constructed very large rigid airships to assess their effectiveness in military and civilian use. The most famous were the British R100 and R101; the American Akron and Macon; and the German Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin II. The two German ships remain the largest airships (and largest aircraft by volume), but the American pair were the largest helium-filled ships (as opposed to hydrogen).

Of these six ships, four were destroyed in accidents (with a total loss of 111 lives) while the remaining two (Graf Zeppelin II and R100) were scrapped shortly after completion. Rigid airships were generally fairly accident-prone, but the inherent drawbacks in their design grew more problematic the larger they became. The Akron, as with most large airships, was easily damaged by bad weather and had cumbersome, unwieldy controls.