U.S.S. Macon

[engineer]

I have the search pattern numbers for the Macon's at home in the library.  Figure she lifted off at dusk, traveled out overnight, ran a patrol zone race track of 360x360 miles, 600 miles out in daylight.  You would need about 10 airships to cover the total perimeter, but you could skip the eastern part of the perimeter.  Then figure 2 days on patrol and 2 days off, Pearl has at least a one day warning with at least a dozen airships on station so you could have half the squadron on and half the squadron off pulling maintenance.  You probably need a third six ship squadron for training and long term maintenace.  That's cheap compared to the equivalent scouting in light cruisers.   The blimps didn't have the endurance to go out and stay out that far, but they would be been reasonably likely to pick up the sub activity off Oahu.   Airships vs. PBY's?  I'd rather have the budget for a dozen airships in PBY's.  In 1931, the technology was totally different and a dozen airships would have been the hands down choice over equivalent contemporary Curtiss flying boats.

Edit: This is conservative with the Sparrowhawks you might be able to get by with a few less airships.

Playing with the possibilities, figure that the airship team traded range for structural strength so the Macon and Akron weren't lost. The Navy pushes ahead in the depression for more airships (we're talking mid-1930s before the PBY success is widely acknoweldged). Where's the money going to come from? Either they will retire some Omaha's early or skip building some of the treaty cruisers. Later on, the scouting capability would be used against PBY acquisition. Come December 8th would you have rather had some fragile long range scouts or cruisers and PBY's?

[pasternakski]

ORIGINAL: AW1Steve
now one ever envisegined Blimps or Airships for fron line combat.

Steve, why jump in the balloon basket when the ruby slippers are available?

There are so many arguments against the utility of airships in WWII (I note that blimps had their uses - however limited).

Let's mention one - tactical flexibility. You send your Macon out at sunset so that she can begin searching the extreme end of her patrol arc in the morning. About 3 a.m., a submarine reports contact with enemy warships of unknown type headed toward the base at high speed.

So, you radio Macon and order her to alter her search pattern to disclose the facts about the new threat. The response? "Sir, I am changing course and moving at full speed. I should be over the reported enemy position about Michaelmas."

Then, there are the "cloud gondolas." I sure don't want the success of my recon to depend on a big gasbag finding a convenient cloud to duck into at just the right altitude and at just the right place where I can lower Ensign Parker in an amusement-park-ride rocketship-on-a-string to report on the composition of the enemy fleet below.

Now, you don't want your helium hindenbergs committed to front-line combat, I know.

So suppose Chuckie sends up, "It's Kido Butai! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

Then, the sky clears. Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

PBYs, with all their fragility and limitations, got the job done. Airships?

I dunno.

[BrucePowers]

I think they did well in ASW roll off of a friendly coast.

[wdolson]

If the USN had wanted to employ blimps with hangers in the ASW role, they would have worked better deploying ASW aircraft from the hangers.  The blimp could do the spotting and then the parasite aircraft make the attack.

Blimps require special ground support and giant hangers for maintenance.  Ultimately lots of aircraft in the ASW role were cheaper to keep in the field and the roles they could do were more flexible.

With the advancements in aircraft technology in the 30s, blimps were obsolete for any kind of front line mission where they ran a risk of encountering enemy aircraft.  Nobody ever shot up a blimp with a 20mm cannon that I know of, but a plane armed with a 20mm would make short work of a blimp.  A few exploding hits in the gas bags and the ship is going down.  Today kevlar could be used to protect the gas bags, but that technology was 50 years in the future.  The only protection available would have been too heavy.

Blimps are interesting, but they are more of a curiousity like the autogyro rather than a viable military technology.  They had some limited rear area use in WW II, but that was about it.  For the cost of maintaining a squadron of slow, fragile blimps, a few squadrons of PBY or PBM could be used.  A PBY or PBM could hold their own against enemy patrol aircraft.  There were long range aircraft gun duels over the Atlantic and the Pacific and the American patrol planes held their own against that level of threat.  I doubt a US Navy blimp would have stood up to a Fw-200 or an Emily.

Bill

[pasternakski]

ORIGINAL: BrucePowers

I think they did well in ASW roll off of a friendly coast.

Bruce, I was talking about airships, not blimps.

[pasternakski]

ORIGINAL: wdolson

If the USN had wanted to employ blimps with hangers in the ASW role, they would have worked better deploying ASW aircraft from the hangers.  The blimp could do the spotting and then the parasite aircraft make the attack.

Bill, how would you ever base fixed-wing aircraft on a blimp, which is nothing but a gasbag with a crew gondola under it?

I agree with the idea of blimp spotting, but radio direction of attack aircraft would have been the way to go.

[Feinder]

I kinda side with the nay-sayers on blimps/dirigibles/airships...  the lot of them.

This thread sounds like boys at the horse-n-buggy factory trying to convince their stock-holders that they can continue to compete with the new automobiles because the horses use less gas.

Even if we say that the one thing that blimps/airships/whatever -were- good at was ASW.  Fine. 
However, one could also pose the question, "How many enemy subs were sunk by airships?"  Spotting is one thing.  But what was the ability of an airship to seriously PROSECUTE a contact anyway?  "Diving out of the sun and dropping a stick of DCs on a U-boat", is not an image that comes to mind when considering airships.  PBYs on the hand, actually can jump onto the enemy submarine in the 90 seconds (or whatever) that it takes to dive.

Futhermore, if you do say that airships were better at ASW than say the PBYs and Sunderlands (I'd disagree, but we'll give credit to airships for -something-).  The PBY/Sunderlands were certailny adaquate (and in fact better than adaquate) at ASW, and were superior at pretty much everything else.  So why bother with airships...?

-F-


(* well I feel silly for not reading the entire thread. pretty much everything I said, including exact examples, were already used. Oh well. *)

[rtrapasso]

Blimps were not totally useless. No ship protected by blimps was ever lost.

Oft quoted, not sure it is true... Clay Blair describes in one of his three U-boat books a successful attack of a U-boat on a convoy being protected by a blimp...

[BrucePowers]

ORIGINAL: Feinder

I kinda side with the nay-sayers on blimps/dirigibles/airships...  the lot of them.

This thread sounds like boys at the horse-n-buggy factory trying to convince their stock-holders that they can continue to compete with the new automobiles because the horses use less gas.

Even if we say that the one thing that blimps/airships/whatever -were- good at was ASW.  Fine. 
However, one could also pose the question, "How many enemy subs were sunk by airships?"  Spotting is one thing.  But what was the ability of an airship to seriously PROSECUTE a contact anyway?  "Diving out of the sun and dropping a stick of DCs on a U-boat", is not an image that comes to mind when considering airships.  PBYs on the hand, actually can jump onto the enemy submarine in the 90 seconds (or whatever) that it takes to dive.

Futhermore, if you do say that airships were better at ASW than say the PBYs and Sunderlands (I'd disagree, but we'll give credit to airships for -something-).  The PBY/Sunderlands were certailny adaquate (and in fact better than adaquate) at ASW, and were superior at pretty much everything else.  So why bother with airships...?

-F-


(* well I feel silly for not reading the entire thread. pretty much everything I said, including exact examples, were already used. Oh well. *)

I don't think you have to successfully prosecute the attack on the U-boat to be a successful ASW asset. You can be successful by keeping the boat down and forcing it to run slower and use up it's battery charge. Also if you spot the u-boat the theatre commander or convoy commander can then route the convoy away from the threat.

[msieving1]

ORIGINAL: AW1Steve


1st . the wildcat started as a biplane. Besides that , you don't feel that removing landing gear and arresting hook would lighten in enough?

The Wildcat had a loaded weight of around 7000 lbs. The F9C had a loaded weight of about 2800 lbs. I don't think removing the landing gear and arresting hook would make up the difference.

[Knavey]

ORIGINAL: Feinder

Gawd, I can still rattle off  a short bio of Capt. Dale Mabry (he was killed when the Roma crashed).  He was/is the namesake of the Arnold Air Society squadron at the University of Florida (and it was part of our material when we pledged).  Dale Mabry Hwy, a major parking lot (*ahem* thoroughfare) in Tampa is also named for him: altho you can probably count the number of Tampa residents who actually know that, on one hand.

-F-

I know that...that is ONE.

[BrucePowers]

I know that Dale Mabry can be a parking lot[:D]

[engineer]

A few more points but, in summary my take is that rigid airships were clearly not cost-effective by 1941. The case for blimps as ASW assets was better than airships.  I think blimps versus conventional aircraft may actually turn on higher order effects.

1)  The original search plan for the Macon's involved the airship advancing at 50 knots while two scout planes paralleled the airship's course flying at 100 knots 60 degrees off the main course, timing their flight so they would turn back to airship and then repeating the zig zag after spotting the mother ship until they were recovered when fuel ran low.  Then a fresh pair of scout planes would relieve the first two.  Under clear weather and flawless execution, the Macons would sweep a swatch of ocean 240 (not 120 - my bad) miles wide (all this presumes 40 mile visibility and a search altitude of roughly 5000 feet.  So under optimum conditions, a Macon could search nearly 160,000 (not 80,000 my bad) square miles of ocean per day.  The obvious rejoinders apply that weather won't cooperate, mechanical casualties may disable aircraft and recovery systems, etc.  Persistance was key asset since the airship could remain aloft for several days at a time and would not have to return to base after a short time in the patrol zone. 

2)  A PBY had a search radius of about 800 miles and a cruise speed around 140 knots.  http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/hist-ac/pby-6a.pdf  For argument's sake let's concede that the area of interest is the outer half of that patrol.  So each PBY would cover 40 miles x 800 miles (400 out and 400 back) in it's loop, 32,000 square miles.  Our squadron of 12 PBY's would be able to cover 12x32k or 384,000 square miles.  It would be subject to the same weather caveats as the Macon, but by distributing the search over 12 independent platforms instead of one primary and up to 5 dependent platforms, the PBY squadron is more robust in terms of being more resistant to a single point of failure that would disable the squadrons search ability. 

3)  On the Blimp side, obviously the blimps were far less expensive than the Macon in terms of cost, crew, and ground support. Blimps carried some of the first deployed magnetic anomoly detector (MAD) gear.  I also think that Bruce Powers' point about detection is an asset, too.  At least in WitP, a detected sub has much lower odds of a successful attack than an undetected sub.  The other part of the question gets to the USA way of war in WW2 with massive quantities of everything.  Afterall, the Manhattan Project entailed developing two, indepedent nuclear weapons technologies.  Given the pre-war base of experience in LTA and the uncertainties of how the ASW campaigns would proceed, would allocating resources to develop a large LTA ASW arm be a reasonable risk mitigation so the Allies would have another type of threat against Axis submarines?  The Battle of the Atlantic was a big deal in 1942 and early 1943 so the perceived risk of a redundant ASW weapon was smaller than the risk that the Germans would blockade the Atlantic. 

I think the numbers speak for themselves that patrol planes are a more effective method of naval search.  In hindsight, we might conclude that PBY's were better at killing subs than blimps, but it's hard to quantify the attacks that blimp overwatch prevented.  There's also the redundancy aspect of having more than one type of aerial ASW platform. 

[Canoerebel]

Interesting, well thought out, and persuasive.

[stuman]

Here is my argument for Airships:

The movie The Rocketeer; Jennifer Connely, JENNIFER CONNELY, there was an Airship in that movie. If Jennifer Connely was in a movie with an airship, enough said. Airships must be important.

[engineer]

Rocketeer - And don't forget the Nazi/Mob shoot-out at the Griffith Park Observatory.  Mobsters! - imagine the soft attack factor that all those Tommygun armed Mobster squads would have as a supplemental LCU to defend Honolulu and Los Angeles. [:D]

[stuman]

ORIGINAL: engineer

Rocketeer - And don't forget the Nazi/Mob shoot-out at the Griffith Park Observatory.  Mobsters! - imagine the soft attack factor that all those Tommygun armed Mobster squads would have as a supplemental LCU to defend Honolulu and Los Angeles. [:D]

Good point. Think I should ask the AE team about the Mob Tommy Gun Squads ?

[morganbj]

I can't believe it.  Only on the WITP forum would you see an argument about the comparative ASW efficacies of Airships and PBYs.  Good grief.  Somebody release AE.  Please!  [8|]
 

[Fishbed]

Actually, with so many airship catastrophs happening over their soil (Roma, ZR2, Akron, Macon, Shenandoah, do I forget any military type?!) I am always amazed by the interest the US kept having in designing such machines over and over for decades...

[Fishbed]

ORIGINAL: engineer

I have the search pattern numbers for the Macon's at home in the library.  Figure she lifted off at dusk, traveled out overnight, ran a patrol zone race track of 360x360 miles, 600 miles out in daylight.  You would need about 10 airships to cover the total perimeter, but you could skip the eastern part of the perimeter.  Then figure 2 days on patrol and 2 days off, Pearl has at least a one day warning with at least a dozen airships on station so you could have half the squadron on and half the squadron off pulling maintenance.  You probably need a third six ship squadron for training and long term maintenace.  That's cheap compared to the equivalent scouting in light cruisers.   The blimps didn't have the endurance to go out and stay out that far, but they would be been reasonably likely to pick up the sub activity off Oahu.   Airships vs. PBY's?  I'd rather have the budget for a dozen airships in PBY's.  In 1931, the technology was totally different and a dozen airships would have been the hands down choice over equivalent contemporary Curtiss flying boats.

Edit: This is conservative with the Sparrowhawks you might be able to get by with a few less airships.

Playing with the possibilities, figure that the airship team traded range for structural strength so the Macon and Akron weren't lost. The Navy pushes ahead in the depression for more airships (we're talking mid-1930s before the PBY success is widely acknoweldged). Where's the money going to come from? Either they will retire some Omaha's early or skip building some of the treaty cruisers. Later on, the scouting capability would be used against PBY acquisition. Come December 8th would you have rather had some fragile long range scouts or cruisers and PBY's?

An then everytime you lose an airship you're losing the equivalent of more than a squadron of PBYs. How nice. [:'(]
No, seriously people, it's not like something could be compared here. With such an accident rate (even with safer units, that still would be much more than the average plane), the vulnerable and heavy infrastructures (means having special stations to take care of those beasts, which are so vulnerable on the ground anyway), the inability to defend themselves efficiently in the air against more than a pair of planes, how can you expect the airship option to be more interesting than the equivalent amount of PBYs you could buy for the same price? Even with a giant leap forward, the HQ would never have gone for something they may lose in a storm while costing as much as 16 heavy floatplanes which can do the same job and much more...