Lakehurst Naval Air Station Hangar 1, New Jersey

The Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, in the middle of New Jersey, was the historic center for lighter-than-air aircraft activity in the USA. It is now part of a combined Navy, Army, and Air Force base called Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, and is still a major testing and training center for aircraft carrier flight operations, such as catapult launching and landing arresting systems. The Lakehurst portion, now a Naval Air Warfare Center, has six blimp hangars, the largest collection in the nation. The largest, Hangar 1, was the first large blimp hangar in the USA. It was built to construct the USS Shenandoah, the largest American-made airship at the time. The 680 foot long rigid airship made its maiden flight in 1923, and was destroyed in a crash in Ohio two years later. The hangar is a steel framed structure 966 feet long, 350 feet wide, and 224 feet tall, and was by far the largest single-room, clear-spanned structure in the country when it was built in 1921. Hangar 1 could hold two long rigid airships side by side. Other rigid airships that used it included the 685-foot-long USS Los Angeles, a German airship built by the Zeppelin Company in 1924 for the US Navy. The USS Los Angeles was based out of this hangar until 1939, when it was scrapped; it was the only one of the four US-based large rigid aircraft that was not destroyed in an accident. Two German rigid airships used Lakehurst’s Hangar 1 occasionally, too, the Graf Zeppelin, built in Germany in 1928, and the Hindenburg, which crashed in the open space a few hundred yards west of the hangar in 1937. Inside the hangar today is a mock aircraft carrier flight deck, once used for training naval personnel. Now it is used by the East Coast Indoor Modelers club, a recreational model aircraft club that has been using the calm air inside the hangar for decades. The flight deck includes the catapult systems, with all the functional compression mechanisms still operational below the deck. Also below deck, in the converted Ready Room, are the offices and exhibits of the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. Inside are lots of displays about Navy history, including aircraft and airship models, uniforms, photographs, and artifacts.