In addition to increasing safety, helium permitted improvements in airship design. The wartime craft had its control cars suspended by cables from finger patches cemented to the outside of the bag. But with helium ships the car could be built into the bag, attached by an internal catenary suspension system to the top of the gas section. Each exposed suspension cable, no matter how small, creates parasitic resistance from the air, so that the removal of yards of steel and rope had the result of increasing the speed of the ship with the same horsepower. The second set of major improvements centers around the mooring mast. The mooring mast idea was not new. The British had built the first ones during the World War for its large rigid ships, found that a ship attached to it would swing easily, like a weather vane, continuing to point into the wind, and that a well streamlined ship would hold securely even in winds of great velocity. When Alfred E. Smith ordered a mooring mast built on top the Empire State building, it was with the assurance from his engineers that even with the tugging of the 150-ton Graf Zeppelin, the strain would be little more than the normal push of the wind against the building itself, that the added stresses would be negligible. The Germans had had little occasion to use mooring masts. Friedrichshafen, where most of the Zeppelins were built, lay in a natural bowl, well protected from the winds, and ships could take off and land, be walked in or out of the hangar with little risk from the weather. Lakehurst, on the other hand, lay in an exposed position, in the path of coast-wise storms, a frequent battle-ground between onshore winds from the ocean and storms breaking over the mountains from the west. A study made later to determine bases for projected American passenger operations showed that of weather conditions prevailing between Boston and the Virginia Cape, those at Lakehurst were almost the most unfavorable. [Illustration: Four stages in the evolution of the mooring mast. At the outset large ground crews held the ship on the ground.] [Illustration: Then a stub mast was placed atop a truck, to hold the ship on the ground, maneuver it in or out of the dock.] [Illustration: A high mast, made in sections, can be erected anywhere, anchored by guy wires, holds the airship securely against winds of gale force.] [Illustration: The little brother of the “Iron Horse”, which will receive the largest of the new Navy blimps, maneuver them on the field.] People knew little about airship operating when the Navy base was moved from Pensacola to Lakehurst on a waste site in the Jersey pine lands which the Army no longer needed after the war as a proving ground for its artillery.