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Airship Refueling at Sea
Our missions were usually 30 to 40 hours duration
in the air. Our blimp burned a lot of fuel, especially when operating in exercises.
We experimented with different tactics for getting fuel from the ships up to our blimp.
One
of the things we tried was getting fuel pumped up to our flying blimp from an aircraft carrier deck.
They had a hose laid out on the deck and all we had to do was lower our winch,
hoist the hose up, put it in the tank and say "fill'er up". Right?
Wrong!
This was a dangerous operation because blimps don't do well flying low and
slow near pointed ship masts, while a long heavy gasoline hose is pulling
and swinging on the blimp car. One time the weight of the hose caused our winch
to jam and stop working. We had to cut the cable and drop the hose.
Another time someone came up with the idea of hoisting up
a huge rubber bag filled with gasoline rather than using a hose. All we had
to do was lower the blimp winch, hoist the bag up, and pump the gas out of the
bag. Right? Wrong! We tried that once. We managed to pick the bag of gasoline
up off the carrier deck without much of a problem. But then we slowed down
a little to move the bag back over the end of the carrier deck. Unfortunately,
the sudden additional weight and our slower speed lowered our altitude a
bit. The bag on the long winch cable swung back once, then forward and under
the carrier deck. The swinging bag of gasoline hit a gun mount and burst.
There was a lot of activity on the carrier as we left the scene very rapidly!
We also tried refueling our blimp
from a tanker ship. To me that seemed a little harder because we had to stay off
to the side of the tanker and out of the masts.
The heavy hose had a nasty habit of pulling our slow flying blimp right over and down toward
the masts. The heavy hose also pulled the winch cable sideways and jammed the winch once.
We had to use the cable cutters and drop the hose and part of our blimp winch cable.
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-- Aboard A Blimp Hunting U-Boats; A Day Above The Atlantic Reveals Navy Talk And Navy Ways, Creeping Convoys And Torpedoed Wrecks.
-- Airships: A Popular History of Dirigibles, Zeppelins, Blimps, and Other Lighter-Than-Air Craft
-- Adventures of Buddy The Blimp.
-- The complete book of airships: Dirigibles, blimps & hot air balloons.
-- The Blimp Book.
-- Roo Kickkick and the Big Bad Blimp.
-- The Blimp Boys Go to War:
-- Friendly skies for Fujifilm blimp:
-- Blimps & U-Boats: U.S. Navy Airships in the Battle of the Atlantic.
-- Navy Boats and Blimps:
-- Buy me a Blimp!
-- The Story of Flight: Early Flying Machines, Balloons, Blimps, Gliders, Warplanes, and Jets.
-- Blimps Balloons and Bombs.
-- Blimp RAID: Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment system.
-- The Blimp Crew.
-- Manufacturer finds variety of uses for modern blimps.
-- Navy Airships at War.
-- Famous Blimps.
-- Blimp!
-- Blimps in space.
-- Blimps: Flying Machines.
-- On the Move... Blimps
-- Up, Up, and Away!: All About Balloons, Blimps and Dirigibles.
-- Airships in World War I & II:
-- A practical guide to building small gas blimps.
-- AIRSHIPS, A POPULAR HISTORY OF DIRIGIBLES, ZEPPELINS, BLIMPS AND OTHER LIGHTER THAN AIR CRAFT.
-- Battle Blimps at War.
-- Some technical notes on thermal blimps.
-- Navy Airships and Blimps:
-- Footnote to history: Salvage of the USN Blimp K-14
-- Blimps: Big & Beautiful.
-- Mysteries of the Blimp.
-- Blimps & Such.
-- Airships
-- Airship Technology.
-- Airship Aerodynamics:
-- Zeppelins: German Airships 1900-40
-- Warriors Airships and Blimps:
-- The Zeppelin in Combat: A History of the German Naval Airship Division 1912-1918.
-- From Airships to Airbus:
-- Giants in the sky: A history of the rigid airship.
-- Up Ship!: A History of the U.S. Navy's Rigid Airships 1919-1935.
-- Birth of the Blimp:
-- Lighter Than Air: History of Hot-Air Balloons and Airships.
-- Airship Patents:
-- Golden Age of the Great Airships: Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg.
-- When monsters roamed the skies;: The saga of the dirigible airship.
-- Kite Balloons To Airships: The Navy's Lighter-than-air Experience.
-- The Disaster of the Hindenburg: The Last Flight of the Greatest Airship Ever Built.
-- Balloons, Blimps, and Ballast:
-- The Goodyear Blimp Story.
-- Bring On the Blimps!
© 2007 Larry Rodrigues. All rights reserved.