by John McPhee
All that was still ten months away, though, when the Hindenburg flew east with Dollfus, Schmeling, and Professor Labatut. The worst thing that happened to Labatut was that he ran out of film. Looking down at the ocean the second noon, he saw a phenomenon he had never seen (but one that was apparently common in airship travel): two concentric rainbows, complete and perfect circles, were moving with, and framing, the Hindenburg’s shadow. The nose of the airship seemed to nudge the inner rainbow. Labatut would have given almost anything for twenty feet of film. Instead, sipping Rhine wine, he rapidly sketched in charcoal and pastels the rainbows, the shadow, a freighter on the sea, and, in the foreground, on the windowsill, the glass that held his wine. (The picture still hangs in his living room in Princeton. ) Cattle on the Isle of Man backed up before the big, low-flying airship, and kept walking backward, eyes agog, and Labatut said to Dollfus and Eckener, “Do you know what they are saying? They are saying, ‘What a bull!’” A bicyclist on the Isle of Man looked up at the airship as he pedalled along, and kept looking up, and dived into a hedge. R.A.F. planes rose and snapped pictures of the Hindenburg while the Hindenburg made pictures of Manchester and Leeds. Across the Channel, Utrecht was celebrating some sort of centennial, and people ran through the streets waving orange pennons at the Hindenburg. In the slanting afternoon light, the Dutch canals appeared as dark as obsidian. The reflection of the airship in the canals was silver. The Hindenburg was so big that segments of it shone from several canals at once, and its reflection moved from canal to parallel canal like a shuttle through a loom. The Rhine, its improbable turrets reaching up to the improbable Hindenburg, formed the airship’s final glide path. Turning left at the confluence of the Main, the Hindenburg dropped mooring ropes over the Rhine-Main World Airport, Frankfurt, at four in the afternoon, June 26, 1936. That voyage, to Labatut, was the sum of the art of flying, expressed in its mild speed, its aerostatic firmness, and its proximity to the earth. The airships, however briefly, had brought into the milieu of commercial transportation what was otherwise possible only in a free balloon. The explosion at Lakehurst ten months later gave Professor Labatut no second thoughts. “I have never regretted for one moment to have had the chance to cross the ocean in the dirigible.”
AS LONG AS PEOPLE WERE ALIVE who had known the rigid airships, the wish would continue that one day they would return. Mercer County Airport may have seemed an unlikely site for the revival, but New Jersey was where the rigids had been; and just as German airship men were living it out in places like Friedrichshafen, Frankfurt, and Zeppelinheim, American airship men were growing old with the wallpapers of, among other places, Trenton. There was in New Jersey a climate of support. Headlong zeal for airships was understood there. One day in the middle nineteen-sixties, William Miller walked into an investment-brokerage firm on Nassau Street, in Princeton. Miller was minding his own securities, which were then voluminous and diverse. As it happened, he was in the midst of a troubled and ambiguous era in his life. He was thirty-nine. His highly developed sense of mission was seeking, and not satisfactorily finding, a sense of direction. Princeton Theological Seminary had recently conferred on him the degree of Master of Theology, and he was engaged in various kinds of church work, but he was not sure he wanted to undertake a formal ministry. Lonely, self-sufficient less by choice than by force of habit, Presbyterian, he felt compelled to serve God and man but could not say to himself how best to do it. He watched the pari-mutuel for a while, the slide show from the New York Stock Exchange, numbers, letters. In that yeasty market, his portfolio swelled before his eyes. His interest in it was less than consuming, though. He literally did not know what to do with his money or with himself. His glance fell on a picture that was on a broker’s desk—a romantic sketch, photographically reproduced, of a triple-hulled dirigible soaring into a mottled, darkling sky. On the side of the dirigible was the word “AEREON.”
“What on earth is that?” Miller asked the broker.
“That? Oh, that’s Monroe Drew’s airship.” Drew, whose circles of contact were widening, had spoken at a luncheon of the Nassau Club and afterward had distributed the sketches to rich Princetonians. The broker explained that it was Drew’s apparent intention to take up where the zeppelins had left off, with the emphasis this time on air-freight. As soon as it could be arranged, Miller and the broker went to Mercer County Airport. Miller saw the airship, admired its three cylindroid silver hulls, and met the Reverend Mr. Drew. God had not insisted that only trained Presbyterian clergymen or their sons could be the custodians of the Aereons. Coincidence merely made things appear that way. Miller at once felt the excitement and saw the potentialities in revival of rigid airships. Before very long, he would be describing Drew as “a leech, a seducer, elusive and slippery, a dexterous man, who bewitches people with half a shadow of reality and is able to weave fact and insinuation in such a way that if things come out badly it was you who misinterpreted but if they come out well it was he who guided you.” Miller began their relationship, however, by providing Drew with money to advance his dream.
Other people were journeying to Mercer County Airport, too, and from places a great deal more distant than Princeton. A cattle rancher in upland Peru somehow heard of Aereon and made a trip to Trenton to see if the company could solve his problem. On the way to Lima, his cattle were dying in the Andes, in a certain impassable pass, at twelve thousand feet. Could Aereons carry the cattle? Sí, hombre. ¿Por qué no? Production would begin soon—as soon as possible after the first flight test. Connellan Airways, of Alice Springs, Australia, approached Aereon. Huge cargo carriers, able to land on patches of grass, seemed appropriate for the development of the Australian bush. Right you are, mate; queue here. These were light-headed days. “Envision the most luxurious cruise liner, and we’ll match it,” Drew liked to tell people. Aereons could go anywhere. They could hover over cities as flying night clubs with dancing under the stars. They could lower tourists into the streets of Benares and reel them in again at dusk for defrosted American dinners in air-conditioned comfort. “Primarily, though, this can be the workhorse of the world, literally the workhorse of the world,” Drew would say. “Undeveloped civilizations can leapfrog from the donkey trail to the Aereon city.”
The Wall Street Journal sent Robert E. Dallos, staff reporter, to Trenton, and the result was a front-page story on September 20, 1965:
FIRM OF EX-NAVY MEN BUILDS
CARGO-HAULERS OF FUTURE:
DIRIGIBLES
SHIP WILL CARRY
100-TON LOADS, THEY CLAIM;
SKEPTICS SAY PLAN’S FUTURE
COULD BE DIM
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a super-dirigible! A group of Navy veterans plans to make huge, three-sectioned dirigibles for use as cargo carriers, bringing what they call “some startling changes” in the air-freight industry. The craft, each of which will be able to carry up to 100 tons and travel 150 miles an hour, will be able to haul containerized freight, huge missile components, prefabricated bridges, communications towers, buildings and oil rigs, the developers claim.
The initial launch of the experimental model is scheduled in six weeks, and, if all goes well, full-scale production will begin shortly thereafter with commercial use beginning in 1967, say the owners of Aereon Corp., the company they formed to build the dirigibles.
IN LOVE WITH A LOST CAUSE?
Success, however, is not assured, and skeptics abound. “I admire these men,” says an official of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, at Huntsville, Alabama. But he adds: “Once a man is involved with L.T.A. (lighter-than-air) transportation, he stays with it. But he may be in love with a lost cause.” Nevertheless, “if Aereon demonstrates its proven capability NASA would really be interested. It has potential,” the official says.
Edward MacCutcheon, head of the office of research and development of the Maritime Administration, says Aereon “is developing some fascinating concepts. This could be a versatile aircraft.” He says the “pr
edicted performance capabilities and the economies promised by Aereon’s venture are of interest to us as an adjunct to merchant shipping.” Aereon sees its dirigibles loading and unloading merchant vessels at sea, saving time and cutting port fees and manpower costs.
Aereon also maintains its dirigibles will be able to haul freight across the country faster than trucks and at competitive rates. And it says its craft will be able to handle heavier loads for less money than existing jet freighters while landing at airports inaccessible to jets.
FEARS FROM THE PAST
If dirigibles are such wonder transports, why hasn’t someone thought of using them before? Well, for one thing, the mention of dirigibles still instills fright in many people who remember a series of tragedies in the 1930s, notably the explosion of the airship Hindenburg May 6, 1937. The accident killed 36 persons and all but ended commercial use of …
All kinds of people were suddenly interested in Aereon. A Canadian holding corporation wanted a vehicle that could land many tons on the tundra. The Kennecott Copper Corporation had found copper at drill sites beyond the Arctic Circle. Could Aereon bring out the ore? A garbage contractor who regularly dumped bargefuls of garbage in the sea off New Jersey wanted to ease his work with a flying garbage scow. A man travelled to Trenton from western Ireland to ask Aereon to come carry his mutton to market. Drew told the Irishman that his request was somewhat premature. The prototype had not yet flown. The Irishman was broke. Aereon contributed to his return fare, on Aer Lingus.
The company was not only hovering shy of its objective. There had long since developed within the corporate structure schismatic vibrations over what in fact the objective was intended to be. Drew had not named his company Aereon for nothing. He wanted his airships to fly, at least partly, on what he referred to as “G-power”—gravitational power, nature gas, the method of locomotion used by Solomon Andrews for the original Aereons a century earlier. Drew happened to be the editor of the magazine Military Chaplain, and, as such, went to Washington twice a month. There he had made his own patent search, and had found what he was looking for: “S. Andrews, Aerostat, Patented July 5, 1864, No. 43,449. To all whom it may concern, be it known that I, Solomon Andrews, of Perth Amboy, in the County of Middlesex, in the State of New Jersey, have invented a mode by which the air may be navigated, and a new and useful machine by which it may be done, which machine I call an ‘Aereon’; and I do hereby declare that the following is a full, clear, and exact description of the construction and operation of the same … .” Andrews had written a tight and technical document upward of four thousand words long, and with it Drew intended to replace the internal-combustion engine. At the very least, he intended to use gravitational propulsion in supplement to fossil fuels. Drew’s enthusiasm was not fully shared by Aereon’s first engineer. “The Andrews principle proved to be the curse of the project,” John Fitzpatrick said later, speaking ex cathedra from his gas station in Pennsylvania. “Drew had no scientific knowledge. Technology was all a big wonderful world, in his view. He built models out of Prell bottles and talked about ‘G-power,’ a term he coined. This embarrassed me.” Drew had also traced the whereabouts of Solomon Andrews’ direct descendants—among them a stockbroker, an ornithologist, an engineer. He put one of them on his board of directors. He told them he thought their ancestor was “one of the worst-cheated inventors in history.” Members of the clan invested a hundred thousand dollars in Aereon. It signified much to Drew that Andrews had got his idea while in church. “James Watt credited the steam engine to a devotional inspiration,” Drew would point out. “Watt was contemplating the power of God in nature. Solomon Andrews was the son of a Presbyterian minister. He got his idea in a devotional situation—in church, during one of his father’s sermons. He always considered this a direct inspiration. He had mystical drive. He had twenty-four inventions, but he always considered the Aereons to be the purpose of his life, his real destiny. He had solved the mystery of natural flight. I would like to build an Aereon with no engine at all. It would get into the air on hot air or on helium. It would be flown by controlling the center of gravity. John Fitzpatrick’s disinclination to use the Andrews principle is almost laughable, if it were not to me so tragic.”
“I regarded Drew as an annoyance,” Fitzpatrick would eventually reveal. “Gravitational propulsion was one of fifteen or sixteen things I was testing and experimenting with in trying to achieve complete utilization of the potentials of a combination of lighter-than-air and the aerodynamics of a buoyant wing plus the use of the helicopter rotor not for lift but for propulsion and control. Solomon Andrews had no particular influence on what I was doing. He had an imperfect understanding of fluid flow and aerodynamics in general. I thought he should get proper credit for what he had done, that’s all. I wanted to build an aerobody, but the curse of Solomon Andrews was on the corporation. Drew was pitching his money-raising efforts on the mystical qualities of the first Aereon. We built the wrong vehicle, the three-hulled vehicle. We had been trapped by the Solomon Andrews thing.”
“The ship was designed to demonstrate the Andrews effect,” Drew would say. “But because of a slight error on John’s part it could not do so. It weighed three hundred pounds too much.”
While all these pustules were festering, Drew, of course, had his perennial problem of finding money to keep the corporation alive. The search eventually led him to the door of William Sword, an investment banker who also happened to be a ruling elder in the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton. Sword, potentially, was the answer to Drew’s prayers—a figure of loft in the laity of a sister church and, simultaneously, a Wall Street financier, a partner in Morgan Stanley & Co., whereunder the green waters ran extremely deep. Sword greeted Drew cordially and led him into his living room. Sword was an affable man of pebbly chatter. He was scarcely forty, younger than Drew had expected he would be. He and Drew had much in common in addition to their close association with the Presbyterian Church. Sword’s specialty, within his world, was sales. So was Drew’s. Each had put in a long apprenticeship knocking on igloos, and each had become a super-salesman, a megaflack. The two men circled each other verbally—a long theological sniff with commercial undertones. Drew outlined the opportunity: the salvation of the world through big rigid Aereons, formed into a Christian Faith Fleet. Sword excused himself, saying that he was technically unequipped to evaluate this—did Drew mind if Sword called a friend who was an aeronautical engineer? Certainly not. Sword went into his study and called his friend, who said, among other things, “That company is a big joke.” When Sword returned to the living room, his eyes were as friendly as two nickels. Packaging the conversation, he showed Drew to the door. The contact might have ended there—just another rebuff in Drew’s tireless rounds—but Sword took it upon himself to protect the innocents of Princeton from further approaches by the reverend minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Trenton. According to Sword, one reason he felt this responsibility was that Presbyterians kept coming up to him—widows, deacons, threadbare academics—with the light of hidden provender in their eyes and saying, “I understand you know Monroe Drew.” “Slightly,” Sword would say. “And I frankly don’t think he’s got anything more than a kite. He is using the church to get his company financed. He is selling stock to pay off loans. The whole thing disgusts me.” If Drew kept hounding people in Princeton, Sword said, he was heading for trouble with the securities people. At a coffee hour following a Sundaymorning service, Sword talked to Miller and warned him to look out for his investment. All this filtered back to Drew, who eventually decided that Sword was a threat to Aereon and had to be silenced. There was no need to go to secular law. Within the codes of the Presbyterian Church itself there were provisions for handling people like this. Drew called the minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton and told him that if Sword did not at once cease to belittle the Aereon Corporation, Drew was going to arraign Sword before the session of the Princeton church, there to answer charges level
led by Drew himself. There were laws of centuries’ standing within the Church of Scotland applicable here, Drew said, establishing the form of such an ecclesiastical trial. If Sword was found guilty, he would be condemned to the cutty stool, the low stool of penance, on which he would sit facing the congregation on as many successive Sunday mornings as the plenary session might deem appropriate and commensurate to his offense. Sword turned into a plowshare. According to Drew, not one negative syllable was ever again uttered by Sword about Aereon.
