Pretty Darn Cool

Have you ever learned something and been genuinely surprised?  As in, "I didn't know they ever did that!" kind of surprised?  I had one of those moments the other day about something I learned.  In the grand scheme of things, it isn't all that important, but I was certainly surprised.

Back in the late 1920's and early 1930's, the U.S. Navy had a small number of airships.  I won't go into all the details about them, but the two largest were the U.S.S Macon and the U.S.S. Akron.  I had heard of these ships before, but didn't really know much about them.  They both had a surprisingly large crew, and the ships themselves were pretty big.  Unfortunately, both were lost in accidents in the mid-30's (the Akron with significant loss of life).  Here's a picture of the Macon flying over New York City:

Now for the really interesting part (as if the Navy having large airships isn't interesting enough).  Last weekend, I was at my favorite local hobby store perusing the shelves, when I saw a model kit for the Curtiss F9C Sparrowhawk fighter, a biplane fighter that was used by the Navy during the same time frame:

The box art for the model showed an airship in the background.  So when I got home, I did a little research, and learned that the Sparrowhawk was actually launched and recovered from the airships while they were in flight!!  In the picture above, you can see the hook assembly over the upper wing; this is what was used to "land" the aircraft on the airship.  Here's a video I found on YouTube that shows how it was done:

The contraption (for lack of a better word) that the Sparrowhawks would latch on to was called a "trapeze"; I guess, once the aircraft was secure, the trapeze was pulled up into the hangar bay inside the airship, and the plane was parked.

I don't know how many planes each airship carried, but there were several.  The airships never really got past the test phase before their accidents, but I believe they were going to be used for long-range reconnaissance.  After the Macon was lost in a storm off Point Sur, California, the Navy abandoned the airship program.  The only surviving Sparrowhawk fighter is at the Udvar-Hazy branch of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, near Dulles International Airport in Virginia.

I've probably walked by this plane a hundred times at that museum, and never knew the history behind it.

So...that was my "aha" moment.  I never knew that anyone, let alone the U.S. Navy, had ever successfully built and flown airships that served as aircraft carriers!  It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel.  We're all accustomed to sea-borne aircraft carriers; those have been around for about 70 years.  But an airborne aircraft carrier?  That, my friends, is Pretty Darn Cool!