Might enjoy seeing this You Tube video I just found.
In the spirit of New Year’s Eve, I’m refusing to think about the future, and instead am looking for newreel footage from the interwar years aviation pioneers. Being in the morbid mood I’m usually in, I was looking for some of the striking, and heartbreaking, footage from when the USS Shenandoah slipped her moorings, while handlers tried to keep her on the ground, during high gusting winds. Six or seven of the handlers managed to hold onto their lines, even as the airship pulled them hundreds and even thousands of feet into the air. IIRC of the those who left the ground, only one survived, he managed to hold on, while the stranded crew in the airship rigged a way to pull him up via the mooring line. All the others were killed when they couldn’t keep holding on. ISTR having seen at least one sequence of film, showing one of the handlers falling, from the viewpoint of the control cabin.
Well, I didn’t find that.
Instead, I found this . It’s a newsreel footage for one of Dornier’s flying boats: the Superwal. From the card at the beginning of the film:
Looking at it, I realized here is the direct model that Hayao Miyazaki used for the flying boat of the pirate gang “Mamma Aiuto” in his film Porco Rosso. (By the way, if you’re an aviation fan, you’re missing something by not seeing this film. It’s charming in its own right, but anyone who has read anything about the Schneider Trophy owes it to themselves to see some truly stunning air sequences with all manner of flying boats. Including an armed version of Curtis’ two-time winner.)
Absolutely pointless post, I know. But it’s kinda fun stumbling over the attention to detail I’d already noticed in this animated film when I can think of many live-action films that don’t pay near the attention to accuracy. (Michael Bay, I’m looking at you. Among others!)
I’ve seen parts of Porco Rosso, but not all of it. It’s in my Netflix queue. Flying boats were a great era; romantic, adventurous, cold and slow. If I remember correctly, there was service across the Pacific before the Atlantic.
I did an internship at a company that builds aircraft floats and other conversions, so I’ve been around seaplanes a bit. Always thought it was interesting that in the 20’s and 30’s the fastest planes in the world were on floats. (Then I read the reasons for that, and it made perfect sense.) My favorite gallery at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum has the Thompson and Bendix trophies; I’ll have to go to England someday and see the Schneider Trophy, too.
Nope, actually - I was just skimming around You Tube, and for some reason, started by trying to see the animated opening for *Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines…**, and stumbled across newsreel reports on the USS Macon’s maiden flight, and the loss of the USS Akron. From there I started looking for other dirigible films, and thought about Shenandoah’s little mishap. (Her big mishap was when she broke up in midair, during a Midwestern microburst storm.)
*An absolutely ridiculous thing for me to try to find on You Tube - not twenty feet from me is my LD collection with this film.
I like flying boats, too, but I especially like fanciful and primitive worlds based around odd aircraft. It’s one of the reasons I liked Porco Rosso and Tail Spin.
You mean you never noticed Miyazaki’s attention to detail before? I love his films, but you almost have to look out for his rabid environmentalism; it’s most evident in Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind and Princess Mononoke, but rears its ugly head in Spirited Away, too.
They’re not his characters, but Lupin III and the Castle of Cagliostro is the finest animated film ever made.
I bust a gut laughing to see a character “Curtis” flying what was recognizably Curtis’ Schneider Trophy winner. I just hadn’t had the background in flying boats to recognize all of the detail that had to have been very carefully researched. The Mamma Aiuto flying boat, in particular, bears a strong similarity to many of the planes that exist only in the minds of deranged writers, artists, or animators. A certain similarity is to be expected, simply because of the styling of the era, the constraints of the designs, and the airspeeds involved. But while a stylistic copy is very easy to produce with only a rudimentary study - it won’t get an exact copy, which I was surprised to encounter, here.
BTW, after a little Googling of my own it seems like the incident you’re thinking of (members of the ground crew being carried away on mooring lines) happened to the Akron, not the Shenandoah.
Reading about these early airships it’s amazing that virtually all of them came to grief. They look so beautiful, but they were all clearly tragedies waiting to happen.
That may be the first commandment, but I imagine for a lot of people it’s hard to remember.
I know, for example, that the first commandment of rescue work is to stop and evaluate the scene to determine whether the would-be rescuer can enter the scene safely. (Or at least how to minimize the risk.) Surprisingly, it’s not an easy lesson to learn, and some people who end up in rescue work cannot learn it. I couldn’t.
Letting go of that rope, at best, is going to make a completely uncontrolled airship/balloon much more likely. At worst, you may be stuck watching other people going airborne, to uncertain fates. And the natural tendency is to castigate oneself: “If I’d just held on, there would have been enough ballast…”
People don’t often think in that kind of developing situation. And the instincts that we have to care for the group, normally a good thing, can lead to tragedy when you’ve got six or seven guys who’ve tried to hold on for that extra instant to try to save a rapidly worsening situation.
Nope, actually - I was just skimming around You Tube, and for some reason, started by trying to see the animated opening for *Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines…**, and stumbled across newsreel reports on the USS Macon’s maiden flight, and the loss of the USS Akron. From there I started looking for other dirigible films, and thought about Shenandoah’s little mishap. (Her big mishap was when she broke up in midair, during a Midwestern microburst storm.)