Don Morris, Ed.D. ’68
Don Morris, Ed.D. ’68, was featured in the March issue of Rotary Magazine, in which he discussed what it's like to pilot a Cold War dirigible.
Some excerpts from the article, which was in Morris' voice, as told to Steve Almond:
These days people know airships as giant dirigibles used for advertising, like the Goodyear blimp. But this was during the Cold War, and the Navy was using airships to look for Russian subs off the coasts of the United States.
You can't really imagine how huge these vessels are. The ones in our squadron were six or seven stories tall and about the length of a football field...Of course we all knew about the Hindenburg disaster, because that had happened at Lakehurst [where I was stationed]...But the truth is, we felt pretty safe in the airships. They were filled with helium, not hydrogen, so they couldn't explode.
To be honest, I never spotted an enemy sub, although we probably scared a few with the sonar we had pinging on them. Another airship in our squadron did catch up to one, but the sub suddenly turned into the wind and it must have gone to full power, because the airship couldn't keep up with it.
Because of the size of the vessels, it was genuinely terrifying to have the overhead. There were chicken farms near the base, and the chickens would panic and stampede when we flew over. It got bad enough that the farmers were shooting at us.
A few years after I stopped flying, a crash killed several crew members and the Navy discontinued the airship program. Airships had seemed like a good fit for surveillance because they could stay out over the water much longer than a plane and cover more ground than a destroyer. But they just weren't very effective in the modern world.
Read Morris' Bruin Story.
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