The USS Akron: America’s Flying Aircraft Carrier

By Kyle Mizokami, The National Interest

Nearly a hundred years ago the U.S. Navy asked a question: if airplanes can fly through the air, why couldn’t a vessel carrying them fly through the air as well? The result was the Akron-class airships, the only flying aircraft carriers put into service in any country. Although promising, a pair of accidents—prompted by the airship’s limitations—destroyed the flying carrier fleet and ended development of the entire concept.

The Akron-class airships were designed and built in the late 1920s. The ships were designed, like conventional seagoing aircraft carriers, to reconnoiter the seas and search for the enemy main battle fleet. Once the enemy fleet was located, the U.S. Navy’s battleships would close with the enemy and defeat them. This was a primitive and limiting use of the aircraft carrier, which had not yet evolved into the centerpiece of U.S. naval striking power.

The airships of the Akron class, Akron and Macon, were ordered in 1926 before the Great Depression. The two ships were commissioned into U.S. Navy service in 1931 and 1933, respectively. The Akron class was a classic pill-shaped interwar airship design, with a rigid skin made of cloth and aluminum and filled with helium. The air vessel was powered by eight Maybach twelve-cylinder engines developing a total 6,700 horsepower. At 785 feet each was longer than a Tennessee-class battleship [3], had a crew of just sixty each, and could cruise at fifty-five knots. The airships were lightly armed, with just eight .30 caliber machine guns.

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Unique among airships, the Akron class carried fixed-wing aircraft and could launch and recover them in flight. Each airship carried up to five Curtiss F9C Sparrowhawk fighters [7], lightweight biplanes with a crew of one and armed with two .30 caliber Browning machine guns. The airships each concealed a hangar within their enormous airframe and launched and recovered [8] the Sparrowhawks through a hook system that lowered them into the airstream, whereupon they would detach and fly off. The system worked in reverse to recover the tiny fighters.