1978: NOAA announces gender-neutral hurricane naming system
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The USS Shenandoah, the first of four Navy rigid airships, officially took flight on this day in 1923. It was constructed during 1922–1923 at Lakehurst Naval Air Station and was destroyed on its 57th flight in a squall line over Ohio two years later. The airship was intended for fleet reconnaissance work of the type carried out by German naval airships in World War I. USS Shenandoah was 680 feet long, weighed 36 tons, encompassed 2,100,000 cubic feet, had a range of 5,000 miles and could reach speeds of 70 mph. The design was based on the Zeppelin bomber L-49, but Shenandoah was the first rigid airship to use helium instead of hydrogen, thus giving it an edge in safety. Helium was relatively scarce at the time, and the airship used much of the world’s reserves just to fill it. It was named by Mrs. Edwin Denby, wife of the secretary of the Navy, after her home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and on Oct. 27, 1923, it marked Navy Day with a flight down the Valley, returning to Lakehurst by way of Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.
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