The Goodyear Airdock and the Flying Aircraft Carrier
Near Akron, Ohio
Standing at the southern edge of Akron, visible from the highway for miles in every direction, is one of the strangest and most impressive buildings ever constructed in the United States. The Goodyear Airdock measures eleven hundred seventy-five feet long, three hundred twenty-five feet wide, and two hundred eleven feet high. It has no interior supports. You could stack a fifteen-story building inside it and still have room above. Its volume is fifty-five million cubic feet.
Goodyear built it in nineteen twenty-nine in seven months, at a cost of two point two million dollars, to manufacture rigid airships for the United States Navy. When it was completed, it was the largest building in the world without interior supports.
The first ships to take shape inside it were the USS Akron and the USS Macon, each seven hundred eighty-five feet long and among the largest flying objects ever built. They were designed to be flying aircraft carriers, capable of launching and recovering small fighter planes while cruising at altitude. It was a military idea that sounded implausible and technically worked, at least for a time.
The USS Akron was christened in August of nineteen thirty-one by Lou Henry Hoover, the First Lady. It flew operational missions for less than two years before a thunderstorm off the coast of New Jersey brought it down in April of nineteen thirty-three. Seventy-three of the seventy-six crew members died, one of the worst airship disasters in American history.
The Macon was lost two years later in a Pacific storm.
During World War Two, the airdock shifted to producing smaller surveillance blimps for the Navy. Those blimps escorted eighty-nine thousand vessels across the Atlantic over a two-year stretch without a single ship lost to enemy submarines while under blimp watch.
The airdock still stands. Lockheed Martin uses it today for classified aerospace work. The shape on the horizon is a hundred years of American aviation history compressed into one building.
