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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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© 2007 Larry Rodrigues. All rights reserved.