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The Aircraft Development Corporation ZMC-2 was the only successfully-operated metal-skinned airship ever built.
Development
The ZMC-2 was built in Grosse Ile, Michigan by the Aircraft Development Corporation, a division of Detroit Aircraft Corporation. It was based in a hangar built and funded by Edsel and Henry Ford at Ford Airport.
The ZMC-2 was nicknamed the "Tin Bubble" and was also sometimes called a "tinship". The skin was not tin but Alclad. The airship was roughly teardrop shaped and had eight small stabilizer fins, four of which had rudders. It was held together with over 3.5 million rivets. The ZMC-2 was susceptible to heating and cooling affects of the sun causing it to pop and buckle in the evenings if pressure from blowers was not applied.
Operations
The airship was first flown on August 19, 1929, and transferred to Lakehurst, New Jersey in October 1929. The airship was nicknamed "the Tin Blimp". As a sub-scale test vehicle, it was considered to be very successful, but the company that built it did not weather the Great Depression well, and by the time a successor might have been built, there was little interest in pursuing it. In the year before the Depression, the US Army was seeking funding for a lighter than air based on the ZMC-2, that would have been larger than the German Graf Zeppelin, and powered by eight engines of 600 hp to 800 hp. The US Army was planning to use it as a tender for air launched aircraft similar to plans the US Navy had for its future dirigibles. The $4.5 million dollars need for construction was never approved by Congress.
The ZMC-2 was operated with a zero internal pressure at speeds up to 20 mph, sufficient for it to be considered a 'rigid' airship. With its low fineness ratio of 2.83, the ZMC-2 was difficult to fly. By 1936 the airship had traveled over 80,000 miles with little signs of corrosion. In its lifetime the ZMC-2 logged 752 flights and 2265 hours of flight time. In its final years its use had dropped significantly. Between December 1938 and April 1941 it only logged 5 hours flight time.
It was scrapped in 1941, reaching its planned lifetime after more than 10 years of service. Other, more conventional blimps did go on to serve in World War 2.
Operators
Specifications (ZMC-2)
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General characteristics
- Crew: Two
- Volume: 5,667 m³ (200,000 ft³)
- Width: 16.2 m (53 ft)
- Max lifting capacity: 5,837 kg (12,841 lb)
Performance
ZMC-2 in Popular Culture
The ZMC-2 plays a key role in the Clive Cussler novel Cyclops (1986) in which it is fictionally saved from scrapping and renamed Prospertier.
See also
Notes
- The 1897 airship of David Schwarz was the first airship that was metal-skinned, although Schwarz's ship had an internal framework rather than a monocoque design.
- George Sullivan. Famous blimps and airships.
- By William F. Althoff. USS Los Angeles the Navy's venerable airship and aviation technology.
- Kevin Pace, Ronald Montgomery, Rick Zitarosa. Naval Air Station, Lakehurst.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - "Metal Covered Airship To Carry Twenty Tons" Popular Mechanics, April 1931
- van Turern, Richard, "Making it Happen: Captain C.V.S. Knox and Aeronautical Evolution," Foundation" Pensacola, Florida, Naval Aviation Museum Foundation, Inc., Spring, 2007, pg. 90, ISSN 1086-7351
- . 1936.
{{cite book}}: Missing or empty|title=(help); Text "United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Naval Affairs" ignored (help) - Joseph Gordon Vaeth. They sailed the skies U.S. Navy balloons and the airship program.
External links
- Lakehurst: International Airport (a picture of the ZMC-2 is near the bottom of the page)
- ZMC-2 in hangar, under the nose of the Hindenburg
- This has a short history of the ZMC-2 along with pictures of construction and flights of the ZMC-2
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