Belly-Bumping

Belly-Bumping

White-headed Rear Admiral William Adger Moffett spent a night last week aboard the U. S. S. Akron while she cruised over the sea. In the morning, off Barnegat, N. J. he decided it was time for him to start for his office in Washington. Up from the control car he climbed into the envelope, then walked aft along the starboard catwalk through the wardroom to the galley. A turn to the right and he was stepping perilously above the Akron's cavernous plane hangar where hung a spidery little plane on a flat hook atop the centre of its wing, threaded through the bottom rung of a metal trapeze. The plane's propeller was already turning.

Trapdoors in the floor of the airship were slid forward and athwartships, exposing grey space through a T-shaped aperture slightly larger than the dimensions of the plane. From the rear cockpit Lieut. Daniel Ward Harrigan signalled with his hand. An electric winch began turning. Slowly the trapeze descended, lowering the plane through the T into the rushing airstream below the Akron's belly. Then 63-year-old Admiral Moffett, a parachute strapped to his stern, crawled down the trapeze into space, clambered over the airplane's wing and into the forward cockpit. Pilot Harrigan reached up, jerked a lever, disengaged his plane-hook from the trapeze bar. At the same instant he gunned his motor, nosed his plane down in a power dive to clear the airship before an upward gust could possibly cause a foul. Then he headed for Lakehurst where another plane waited to fly Admiral Moffett to Washington.

Few days earlier the staff of six airplane pilots assigned to the Akron had begun regular duty. Commanded by Lieut. Harrigan they put in a day of "belly-bumping," making 104 take-offs and hook-ons in three hours, more than had been made in three years of experiments. Stationed aboard a lighter-than-air craft, among a lighter-than-air personnel, the "belly-bumpers" are extremely proud of their identity as a heavier-than-air detachment.

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