Favor

Last week the Navy's sole surviving dirigible was walked out of her Lakehurst hangar, moored securely to her mobile mast.* Her tail was buckled to a flatcar mounted on a huge circular track, left there to swing with the wind. Decommissioned nearly three years ago, partly dismantled and condemned as unfit for further avigation, the 11-year-old Los Angeles had bein reconditioned not to fly but to determine how she might weather a year's uninterrupted exposure to the elements.

Three days after she was moored outside, a 42-knot wind picked up the Los Angeles' stern, wrenched off part of the flatcar, left it dangling 30 ft. high, ripped up rails like so much spaghetti. Trundled back into her hangar by an emergency ground crew, the old "L. A." was found to be suffering from a dented gondola, broken struts, torn fabric. Newshawks found Lieut.-Commander Charles Emery Rosendahl far from sad. "The wind did the Navy a favor," he explained. "This is one of the very things we are studying. . . . The L. A. can take it."

* Also at Lakehurst are two blimps (one metal-clad). Last week Secretary Swanson ordered the Navy's lighter-than-air base at Sunnyvale, Calif.--home port of the late Macon--converted for heavier-than-air training, planned to concentrate all future lighter-than-air activities at Lakehurst. A third Navy blimp, still at Sunnyvale, will be transferred to Lakehurst.

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