USS Los Angeles: The Navy's Venerable Airship and Aviation Technology Review

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(More customer reviews)Everyone knows about the Hindenburg and it's famous fire. People interested in airships know about the other failures such as the Macon and Shenandoah. Above them all, however, was the Los Angeles.
Built at the Zeppelin factory after World War I, this ship sailed the Atlantic and became an official Navy ship. In the early days of air craft technology it flew more than 300 flights, over 4,000 hours in the air, almost without incident. It taught us a lot about the design and operation of lighter than air aircraft.
This book is a complete history of the Los Angeles, but perhaps even more important, it fits the Los Angeles into the overall development of aviation during the years between the world wars. Here is a discussion on other lighter than air machines, and also on the developments in heavier than air conventional planes. This was the time when the Langley was built.
This was also the time of the battleship admirals who saw nothing of any value in operating in the air. This attitude would last until a little incident at Pearl Harbor.
The saddest part of the book is the section on the dismantling of the airship. On 24 October 1939 the Los Angeles was stricken from the active Navy ship list. Disassembly began immediately. Cdr. Jesse L. Kenworthy, Jr. was anxious to complete the project, and with on fanfare. He said that he was concerned with "the approaching need for additional hangar space." Selling it as scrap gave the Navy less than $4,000. So was destroyed an important piece of history.

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Aviation historian William Althoff tells the story of the U.S. Navy's airship, USS Los Angeles, the most successful aircraft of its type ever flown. In dramatic detail, Althoff recounts how the U.S. Navy arranged for the famed German Zeppelin Company to build the ship, thwarted schemes by the U.S. Army's Air Service to take control of it, and helped plan its record-breaking, historic four-day flight from Germany to the United States. After years of experiments meant to determine its military and commercial application, the airship ultimately failed to command a consensus in the Navy. 'Relegated to a lower tier," Althoff writes, 'the rigid type receded to marginal relevance until, on the eve of World War Two, it vanished altogether." In this book, the early achievements and unceremonious demise of the Los Angeles after a long career symbolize the airship's unfulfilled promise. Nonetheless, the operational record of this one machine altered American naval aeronautics and greatly influenced transoceanic commercial air transport during a critical period of its development.