When the Goodyear Airdock opened at Akron Fulton in 1929, it was the largest enclosed space on Earth without an internal support column. The U.S. Navy built two flying aircraft carriers inside it. Both crashed.
A Pirep featured story · KAKR Akron Fulton International, Akron, OH
In 1928 the United States Navy signed a contract with the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation — a joint venture of the Akron rubber company and the German Zeppelin firm — to build two enormous rigid airships. They would carry five biplane fighters each, launched and recovered through a trapeze in the belly of the ship in flight. They would be the largest aircraft of any kind ever built in America.
Before they could be built, a building had to exist to build them in. Goodyear needed a hangar with no interior supports, because any column would prevent the assembled airship from being moved out. From April through November 1929, the company built one. The Goodyear Airdock, designed by Karl Arnstein, rose on sixty acres set aside by the city of Akron. It was 1,196 feet long, 325 feet wide, and 211 feet high — roughly a 22-story building laid on its side. Eleven steel parabolic arches held up an 8.5-acre roof with no support inside. When it was finished, the Airdock was the largest enclosed space on Earth without an internal column.
Construction of the USS Akron began inside the Airdock in October 1929. First Lady Lou Hoover christened her on August 8, 1931, at 785 feet long. Her first flight was September 23. On the night of April 4, 1933 — eighteen months later — the Akron flew into a thunderstorm off the New Jersey coast and was driven down into the Atlantic. Seventy-three of her seventy-six crew drowned. It remains the deadliest airship disaster in history, twice as deadly as the Hindenburg fire four years later.
The Airdock was already building the Akron's sister ship, USS Macon, when the news came. Macon went into service in June 1933 and made it to February 1935, when she lost her upper tail fin in a storm off California and broke up over the Pacific. Only two of her crew died.
After Macon, the United States never built another rigid airship. During World War II the Airdock built 104 smaller non-rigid blimps for Navy convoy escort and submarine patrol. Today the Airdock still stands at the edge of Akron Fulton International Airport — visible from the runway, miles away. Goodyear's smaller, modern blimps still operate out of Wingfoot Lake a few miles east, simpler descendants of the two giants that came out of the largest enclosed space in the world.