TDIH: Rigid Airship USS Macon

On this day in 1935, the rigid airship USS Macon crashes in the Pacific. The incident came just two years after Macon’s sister ship, USS Akron, was lost in an Atlantic storm—and just two years before the more famous Hindenburg tragedy.

Macon was the pride of the Navy during her day.

At 785 feet long, she was longer than two football fields. Her top speed was 80 mph, and she was held aloft by helium in 12 large cells. The remaining interior of the airship was covered in catwalks that allowed the crew to roam the ship.

But that wasn’t all.

The ship boasted an internal hangar, capable of holding five Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk biplanes. Those planes could be lowered through a door, then released at full speed. The planes were retrieved and brought back into Macon’s hangar with a hook that caught them in the air.

The Navy used these Curtiss planes for scouting purposes. Would the attack on Pearl Harbor have been thwarted if Macon had still been scouting the Pacific in 1941? Some wonder, but obviously we’ll never know.

Instead, the events of February 12, 1935, proved determinative.

Macon had been traveling over the Pacific near Point Sur, California, when a storm hit. “[A] short jar was felt,” Macon’s commanding officer, Herbert V. Wiley, later explained, “and upon inquiry of the elevator man I was informed that the wheel had slipped out of his hands. The ship began to take a bow-up inclination and rose.”

USS Macon flies over New York City.

Lt. Cmdr. George Mills similarly remembered that “the ship lurched out of control, rolled over on one side, and refused to respond to the steering apparatus.”

Wiley leapt into action, ordering ballast dropped, along with emergency fuel tanks. The airship began to rise, reaching almost 5,000 feet. But Macon was leaking helium, so that didn’t last long. She began to descend again, even as Wiley dumped more ballast—and even the airplanes—out of the dirigible.

At 1,000 feet, he readied the crew to abandon ship.

“It was obvious the crew wasn’t going to save the ship,” Curtiss pilot Harold Miller remembered. “At about 500 feet we could begin to see the water . . . . We landed in a horizontal position. Those with any sense lowered themselves into the life rafts, and some didn’t even get wet.”

“There was no panic,” Mills agreed. “Order and coolness prevailed. The men slid down lines or leaped into the water a few at a time and were picked up by lifeboats.”

The crew watched as the airship slid into the ocean, tail first.

“There was a whoosh of some currents of air or gases coming from the ship,” Miller explained. “I had always heard that helium can make your vocal cords inactive. I practically lost my voice at that time.”

The crew believed that the radio operator was sending distress signals until the last minute. He was one of two men killed, and the crew credited him with staying at his post “like a sailor.” But it’s unclear what actually happened to him.

Eighty-one men were rescued from the water.

An investigation determined that the crash likely stemmed from damage previously sustained to the dirigible’s internal frame. The Navy had intended to repair it eventually but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. That damaged section proved unable to withstand the storm.

Nevertheless, Rear Admiral Thomas Senn was proud of his men, noting that the rescue “of the survivors of the USS Macon will probably go down in the annals of the Navy as one of the greatest feats . . . . [E]ven in the face of such danger [Wiley] had the lives of his men in mind and landed in such a manner that the fleet was able to rescue most of the survivors.”

Still, it would be decades before anyone could locate Macon’s wreckage.

Naturally, that is a story for another day.

Primary Sources:

• A. Denis Clift, On board the USS Macon Going Down (U.S. Naval Institute; December 2017)

• Admiral Senn Lauds Men of Fleet on Rescue Job (Honolulu Star-Advertiser; Feb. 13, 1935) (p. 7)

• Dan Haifley, Blog: “The USS Macon’s Watery Grave” (Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Foundation; July 28, 2020)

• Lieutenant J. Gordon Vaeth, The Macon: Last Queen of the Skies (Naval History Mag. March 1992) (reprinted HERE)

• Macon (Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary)

• ‘Macon’s’ Men Sing as they Reach Port (Hartford Courant; Feb. 14, 1935) (p. 1)

• Megan Eckstein, Exploring the Wreck of USS Macon, The Navy’s Last Flying Aircraft Carrier (U.S. Naval Institute News; August 19, 2015)

• Sarah Holzmann, A 785-Foot Airship Crashed on This Day in 1935. The Location of the Wreck Site Remained a Mystery for More Than 70 Years (Smithsonian Mag., February 12, 2025)

• The Last Great Airship (National Marine Sanctuaries)

• Tuesday 12 February 1935 (Aviation Safety Network)

• USS Macon (ZRS-5) (Naval History and Heritage Command: National Museum of the U.S. Navy)

• Wiley Relates Futile Efforts as ‘Macon’ Fell (Hartford Courant; Feb. 14, 1935) (p. 1)