Goodyear Airdock: The Building That Held the Sky
Near Akron, Ohio
The structure east of downtown Akron that most people drive past without quite registering is one of the more extraordinary buildings in the United States. The Goodyear Airdock is one thousand one hundred seventy-five feet long, three hundred twenty-five feet wide, and two hundred eleven feet tall. When it was completed in nineteen twenty-nine, it was the largest building in the world without interior support columns. The roof arches across the entire span without a single pillar breaking the floor, because the objects it was built to house were too large to permit them.
Those objects were the USS Akron and the USS Macon, the two largest flying machines America has ever built. Each was seven hundred eighty-five feet long, longer than two and a half football fields, and they were rigid airships, helium-filled, capable of transporting fighter biplanes inside their hulls and launching them in flight through a trapeze mechanism mounted in the belly of the ship. The Navy envisioned them as flying aircraft carriers that could project air power far out over the ocean.
The USS Akron launched from this building in August of nineteen thirty-one. On April fourth, nineteen thirty-three, during a routine mission along the Atlantic coast, it flew into a severe storm off the coast of New Jersey. The ship's lower tail fin struck the water, and the Akron went down. Seventy-three of the seventy-six men aboard were killed. No life jackets, no life rafts. It remains the single deadliest airship disaster in history and one of the deadliest aviation accidents of any kind before World War Two.
The USS Macon launched the following year. Equipped after the Akron's loss with life jackets and rafts, it crashed off the California coast in February of nineteen thirty-five. Only two of its eighty-three crew were lost. But the crash ended the American rigid airship program entirely.
The Airdock still stands. Goodyear used it for decades to build blimps, the small non-rigid advertising airships that carried the company's name across televised sporting events. The building is so large that on humid days, clouds reportedly form near the ceiling.
