HOME | DD
FCARVALLO — Painting: USS Macon over US fleet
Published: 2013-04-01 01:48:56 +0000 UTC; Views: 4811; Favourites: 56; Downloads: 73
Redirect to original
Description
Gorgeous paitning depicting USS Macon over US fleet. The carrier might be the Lexington(?)(It's the USS Langley, Thanks Turdy1!) The Macon was the largest ship of the navy at the time. Aircraft carriers were 400-450 feet long at the time and battleships were 500-600 feet long! The USS Macon was 785 feet long and 144 feet wide (with the fins!) The more "colorful" airplanes in the picture with the funny looking hooks and no landing gear (fuel tanks having substituted for landing gear) were the Macon's sparrowhawks..the Macon would drop them/pick them up using its trapeze and the planes would hook on for drop off and retrieval. The Macon is in the act of dropping a sparrowhawk in the picture.Related content
Comments: 27
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
if i saw a zeppelin like the Akron or the Macon and it could send out scout or fighter aircraft from it's belly, i would say out loud "OH MAJESTIC".
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
It would be awesome!!! Most people (that aree still alive!) when they saw either ship, still remember it to this day!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Nice post. Finally, something I can show my grandkids on Deviant Art. Most of the time I am afraid to let them view this site. Check out my oroginal photos of the Graf Zeppelin taken at Mines Field (aka LAX) during its "Round the World" flight. Photos taken by a friend of my father.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Thank You so much! I will most certainly check out the Graf photos!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Looks like the carrier in the foreground is the Langley. you can see the bridge under the flight deck. The one in the back is the Saratoga. It's barely visible, but there's a stripe running down the funnel. They used a stripe to identify her, leading to the nickname "Stripe-stack Sara."
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Airships proved to be far too fragile for combat. Think how easy it would have been to shoot those oversized balloons down, especially if they used hydrogen for lift (at the time, only the US had helium). Hindenburg, anyone?
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Actually, not an easy thing to do, it took hundreds of bullets in a general area to make hydrogen explode in the German Zeps as this film will show: video.pbs.org/video/2365154711… To bring down the USS Macon/Akron it would have taken all the bullets from pretty much all of the planes that the aircraft carriers of the time had...the only practical way they had to bring them down was to do diving runs with bombs against them, and even then it wasn't easy hitting them, most runs missed, which makes sense when you have something running 87 MPH avoiding you. Helium puts out fires..BTW the extremely low PSI on which the giant gas bags (all 12 of them in the Macon/Akron) had a 0.0064 PSI, which means that unless you made huge gaping holes ATOP the gas bags, the helium leakage would be so minimal that a plane trying to shoot an airship of that size would be akin to a mosquito trying to kill you by "sucking" your blood out..so, yes they were vulnerable, but so were aircraft carriers of the seafaring type.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I seem to remember a documentary showing that both the Germans and Americans had nothing but one disaster after another with these things, including one instance where one American zeppelin got away from its handlers and killed two of them (the third hung on to the rope for several hours until it came down on its own).
Pilots in WWI had little trouble shooting down enemy observation balloons, so I wouldn't think airships would be much different. They are extremely large and relatively slow targets after all, and most attacks would come from above. But you obviously know much more about these aircraft than I do, so I defer to your judgment.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
The main reasons the airships had so many disasters is that the airship men deferred their judgment to idiot politicians..i.e: Shenandoah flying in storm season over Ohio, USS Akron taking off in weather that grounded all airplanes, USS Macon was brought down due to not strengthening the frame in it's tail, but unlike the "legends" of the weak tail, the ship endured many practice runs with airplanes trying to bomb it and it did extremely violent evasive maneuvers..indeed in one occasion the Macon flew over Texas with weather so violent that they needed two men to take control of the elevator wheels to control it, and they had to be relieved every 10 minutes due to exhaustion! The airships were easy targets, but so where the aircraft carriers that were pretty much sitting ducks to bombers and Kamikaze planes..luckily they were made of steel and not aluminum and cotton! The thing with shooting down airships is that a balloon is just a tiny 1 celled container..rigid airships had between 12-16 gigantic gasbags inside, they would take tens of thousands of bullets to damage enough to bring a ship down, this planes did bomb drops of them in order to bring them down. Thanks for the discussion!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
There is apparently much more to these craft than I thought. Thanks for the info, it was very educational.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
The main reason it takes so many bullets to shoot down a rigid airship, but not so may to shoot down a basic blimp is that the gas in the rigid airships is basically at atmospheric pressure, whereas blimps are specially shaped balloons and so the gas inside them is higher than atmospheric. If you shoot through a rigid airship's gas bags the lifting gas will slowly seep out, but in a blimp the gas will be forced out of the holes at speed and the whole thing will deflate.
I am sceptical of the military use of airship, especially with incendiary weapons being a huge threat to them, but I am still hopeful they will one day return for commercial purposes. However, it is said that we might run out of helium in the next 30 years, so to lose even a single helium filled airship would be a terrible loss.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Fleets like these are just way too epic to see in action 
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Thanks!! They had a plan to have the Macon do exercises later that spring which would have followed the USS Saratoga till night time and then launch it's sparrowhawks to simulate diving bombs on the aircraft carrier by pelting it with toilet paper rolls! The Saratoga would have been humiliated, and the history of the US Navy airship would have radically changed! Alas, it never came to pass..thanks for your comment~
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Which carrier are you referring to? The one below the USS Macon might be either the USS Lexington or her sisterhip, the USS Saratoga, it's impossible to tell from that distance. The other carrier on the front is definitely the USS Langley.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Thanks!! I'm no expert when it comes to the early US aircraft carriers! You're right, the Langley being the first US carrier, is in the forefront!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Your painting? I hear that the recovery of the Sparrowhawks was quite a feat for the pilots. Maneuvering at minimum airspeed and trying to catch that trapeze.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Oh, I wish it was mine!! I believe it's in a Los Angeles museum..I got it from one of the users of Flickr!! The sparrowhawks "sputtered" at 64 mph..so preferably the Macon would go to top speed for ease of "drop off/pick up", specially during rough weather, to make it easier for the pilots.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I read that it was never an easy chore.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
It wasn't hard, according to all of the accounts given by the pilots, since the ship and planes were moving in the same medium, and the Macon could come down to pick up the planes they were having trouble..of all of the "hook-on landings, they only had one near accident in 1934, but none of the pilots/planes were injured/damaged badly by landing on the "flying trapeze", no surface ship could say that!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Interesting. Everything I have read says that it was doable, but wasn't as easy as they thought.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I have heard and read that it was just a bit "strange" to get used to landing "upside down", but once they perfected the approach to the airship from the side, instead of behind (which would make them get buffeted by the double-quadruple engine turbulence, akin to landing in a hurricane!) They would just pull under the trapeze and stall the plane and then the trapeze would just take you, and they mechanics would reel you up into the ship's hangar, and voila!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I guess when they tried it again with the B-36 and the Goblin fighter it did not work so well and advancements in design rendered that mode obsolete.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Yup, nothing beats a 2 3/4 football field long, stable floating platform for picking up planes...(>;
👍: 0 ⏩: 0