Application of this principle to military airships of the rigid type might be still more significant. The chief use for the rigid airship in war would seem to be as a high speed airplane carrier, whose planes would increase many fold its own reconnaissance range, and would be expected also to do the major part of what fighting became necessary in case of enemy contact. The airship itself in that situation would put more dependence on its speed of retreat and its ability to seek cover in clouds as the submarine does beneath the surface, than on its own machine guns and cannons. One thing brought urgently home to us in the first weeks of the present war is that oceans are wide, and that the movements of even a huge enemy fleet are difficult to discover in those endless expanses of water. Large military airships of five or ten million cubic feet helium capacity might prove exceedingly useful, if they were able to operate away from their base for weeks or even months at a time, and they might be able to do this by utilizing devices similar to those developed for smaller non-rigids, resting on the sea in calm waters, mooring to anchored masts they could lower into the water, picking up fuel from tankers, getting supplies from neighboring ships—in addition to what was carried to them from the fleet by their own planes. CHAPTER VII Adventures of the Goodyear Fleet [Illustration: Airships flying in formation] One of the lesser romances at least of aeronautics is the story of the Goodyear airship fleet. There is thrill and adventure in the narrative, daring and resourcefulness, hazards faced by men who believed in their craft—chances which were usually won. So this chapter might well be dedicated to Airship Captain Charles Brannigan and Balloon Pilot Walter Morton. Morton was an old timer, who had flown balloons with Tom Baldwin, in the far corners of the country. Between times he worked in the Goodyear balloon room, a practical mechanic who could always make things work, the salt-of-the-earth workman whom every foreman swore by, the aide every pilot wanted alongside. Steady, self-effacing, courageous, with an instinct for the right thing to do in emergency, Morton feared but one thing. That was lightning. He had flown many times through lightning storms prior to the helium era, beneath a bag filled with inflammable gas, but he didn’t like it. He knew its swift striking power. “I could almost see the Old Fellow standing there throwing those darts at us,” said Morton one afternoon in 1928, as he scanned the skies before taking off in a balloon race out of Pittsburgh. “One would flash past and miss, and he would say ‘I’ll get you next time,’ and there would come another. And you can’t dodge in a balloon.”