Golden Journal No. 55 Flying Carriers
The ZRCV
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
June 2026

Note: Golden Journal No. 55: Flying Carriers brings both American and Japanese projects for aircraft-carrying airships to Second World War at Sea (plus some airships that actually existed).

Despite the loss of Shenandoah, the U.S. Navy saw a future for airship scouting. The evolving War Plan Orange, the Navy’s study of future conflict with Japan, depended on early warning of Japanese fleet movements. Congress authorized a pair of new airships in 1926, but provided no money until the next year. Construction began in 1929.

These new ships, christened Akron and Macon, represent the high point of the military airship. They had much larger and stronger frames than Shenandoah, large enough to allow many more catwalks inside for easy access. Unlike any other airship, they carried their engines inside the frame, saving the engineers from dangerous walks outside the hull and allowing the propellors to swivel. The ship's engines could thus be used to provide upward thrust on takeoff, or even to drive the ship in reverse. And with internal engine rooms, heat could be pumped into the crew quarters, an unheard-of luxury. Since Akron and Macon used inert helium rather than explosive hydrogen for their lifting gas, the engines posed no additional danger in this mounting. American airship crews could also smoke cigarettes, a very important consideration in the nicotine-addicted 1930’s.

A 1930’s vision of a flying aircraft carrier.

But the two airships are best remembered for their unique feature: a hangar deck for launching and recovering airplanes. Once a radio-homing system had been developed, the airships’ air groups could search for enemy ships across a very broad front, making the flying carriers into valuable recon platforms.

American planners appreciated the aircraft-carrying airship's scouting abilities, but longed to give it more offensive punch. American aircraft carrier doctrine in the "wet navy" gave scouts a bombing capability so that they could attack targets they found while opportunity existed. The pilots assigned to Akron and Macon longed for the same chance.

After the loss of Akron in April 1933, the new chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, Rear Admiral Ernest J. King (the future wartime Chief of Naval Operations), sought an enlarged version to replace her. The loss of Macon less than two years later threw King into an energetic response; the aftermath of the wreck would be, he knew very well, the last, slim chance to preserve rigid flight in the U.S. Navy.

And so King pressured the Navy and civilian experts conducting the post-mortem report on the loss of Macon to produce their results as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. They were to delve into not just why the airship had been lost (likely due to structural damage suffered over Texas in April 1934 and never properly reinforced), but to place emphasis on how these problems would be avoided in the next rigid airships.

The Goodyear-Zeppelin proposal for a new flying carrier.

The report addressed other improvements as well, few of them having anything to do with the loss of Macon: the “dead space” within the hull should be filled with lifting gas. The engines should be returned to the usual positions outside the hull. Girders should be stronger, and the ship should have a single, stronger keel. She should also be equipped with dipping sonar, which the authors of the report believed did not yet exist (it had been developed and tested in 1919 using a blimp, but then given such strict classification that it appears no one knew about it any more).

King’s gambit predictably failed. The loss of Akron had been the worst air disaster in American history, and even though only two men had been lost with Macon (both due to their own foolish behavior), Congress and the president were in no mood to build more flying carriers.

The post-Macon airship would have been slightly longer than Macon (the report found Macon’s hull and shape satisfactory), with more gas cells, a larger hangar, and more planes. But the Navy’s failure to obtain funding for the new airships did not end planning for even larger, more capable flying carriers. The squadrons assigned to Akron and Macon operated only very small fighters; the new flying carrier would have an offensive capability to attack an enemy found unaware and unprepared.

The U.S. Army had studied the concept in the early 1930’s, drafting plans for a gigantic rigid airship to carry nine twin-engine Boeing B-9 bombers, an all-metal monoplane considered revolutionary when first flown in 1932. The airship would have a gas volume of 368,000 cubic meters, just over twice that of Akron and Macon. This proposal went far beyond a recon platform; the Army’s flying carrier would have been a strategic weapon. The Army formally abandoned all airship projects on 30 June 1937 and turned over all their materials, including the drafts of their flying carrier, to the Navy.

Goodyear President Paul Litchfield (on the left with his back to the camera) pitches the ZRCV to Rear Admiral Charles Rosendalh (seated), chief of the Naval Airship Training Command and former skipper of the airship Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics had their own design under way. C.P. Burgess had literally written the textbook used by all other American airship designers. His draft of the next-generation rigid airship, which he called the ZRCV (“rigid airship aircraft carrier,” in Navy parlance), presented a new design from the keel up rather than a modified Akron. He took inspiration from the Macon report, and from the then-new German passenger zeppelin Hindenburg. As recommended, the ship would have more helium cells, a new internal structure, external engine pods, and a single, strong keel.

Initial drafts included both a hangar to hold five fighter planes, and a series of nine trapeze mounts along that strong lower keel, which would have recesses for the planes to spare them from the full force of the wind. While this offered less protection than the hangar, it allowed for all nine planes to be launched at once. Burgess eventually did away with the internal hangar, to save weight and make the ship more structurally sound. The plane initially chosen for the ZRCV would be the Douglas BT-1 scout bomber, that would soon be developed into the SBD Dauntless dive bomber.

The Navy now had no operational rigid airships, but training continued with the grounded Los Angeles at Lakehurst, while Navy officers still flew and observed aboard the German commercial ships. Extensive infrastructure had been erected at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and Sunnyvale, California, with less complex facilities at Opa-Locka in southern Florida. While the odds seemed stacked against new construction, the airshipmen had not been disbanded and had not abandoned hope.

King had rotated out of the bureau by the time Burgess presented his draft in 1936, but his successor, Rear Admiral A.B. Cook, passed it to the Navy’s General Board. As to whether the flying carrier had a future, Cook deferred to the upcoming judgement of the blue-ribbon commission established by King and led by Stanford Professor of Mechanical Engineering William Durand. The Durand Commission delivered their report in five parts over the spring of 1937. They endorsed the concept, noting that in wartime no ship, plane or airship could truly be declared “safe,” but the recommendations in the Macon post-mortem would remove unnecessary risks.

A line drawing from the 1944 pitch for a ZRCV.

The General Board approved of the Burgess design, but Congress did not include it in the 1937 naval budget. At that point the ZRCV became a paper project. Goodyear, which likely would have built the new flying carrier, tried to revive the project in 1943, proposing an even larger ship than the ZRCV (but still smaller than the Army’s 1932 flying carrier) and an additional mission, that of aircraft ferry. The big new flying carrier could deliver a squadron of fighters, their pilots, ground crew and equipment to almost anywhere in the world in days, where transport ships would need weeks.

Just the passage of seven years since the Burgess design had presented the Goodyear team with an unsolvable problem. Aircraft had become ever larger and heavier, and the flying carriers would have been limited to much lighter planes. The “helium penalty,” as Burgess called it, meant that an American ship had much less useful lift than a German zeppelin of the same dimensions filled with hydrogen. The Goodyear project went no further than a lobbying campaign. There would be no successors to Akron and Macon.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children.

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